3 Signs You Think Like an Internet Therapist — The Rise of Therapy Speak

Sign one: maybe you've called an ex a narcissist without a professional in the room. Sign two: maybe you've told a friend, only half-joking, that you're "so ADHD" for losing your keys again. Sign three: maybe you've watched a fifteen-second video and thought, Wait, that's literally me, about a condition you've never actually been evaluated for. If any of that sounds familiar, keep reading. If it doesn't, keep reading anyway. It might sound like someone you know.

Where It Came From

There's a name for this: “therapy speak.” It is the everyday use—or misuse—of words borrowed from psychotherapy and mental health, often spoken with the certainty of a clinical diagnosis. This is not exactly new. Psychologists Mary Alvord and Lynn Bufka, chatting on the American Psychological Association's podcast in 2023, pointed out that this has happened before.

In the '90s, "codependent" jumped out of psychology textbooks and into everyone's vocabulary, seemingly overnight. What's different now is the speed. A phrase that once took about a year to catch on can do it in a night because that's how fast social media moves an idea from one screen to the next. Gaslighting followed the same arc a decade later. Political scandals. Celebrity breakups. A crown from Merriam-Webster in 2022, four years after the American Dialect Society had already called it the most useful new word of 2016.

If we think about the implications, this might seem like progress. Back in the day, mental health used to be something you hid, not something you brought up at dinner. But now we can talk casually about healthy boundaries, being openly burnt out, and even getting therapy without people avoiding you. And that's not nothing.

But talking isn't the same as getting help, and that part hasn't caught up. More than half of people living with mental illness still don't get treatment, often out of fear they'll be treated differently or lose their job over it. So no, the problem was never that people started caring about psychology. Caring is fine. The problem is that most people using these words were never trained to use them.

The Real Cost

Clinical psychologist Isabelle Morley sees this play out in her own office. Clients walk in pre-diagnosed: by themselves, by an influencer, or by a fifteen-question quiz. That produces a false sense of competence, built from throwing around words like narcissist, bipolar, or clinically depressed, until people are leaning on clinical language to explain every mood they've ever had.

A 2025 study in the Journal of Medical Internet Research reviewed a large sample of psychiatric-themed TikTok content and found the same pattern: terms like gaslighting, boundaries, and toxic relationships were used inaccurately often enough to minimize what people who are genuinely affected are actually living through.

A separate study of the platform's most-liked ADHD videos found the same thing: misinformation about the condition and how it's diagnosed can deepen stigma and nudge viewers toward self-diagnosing symptoms that were never actually pathological. Every borrowed diagnosis costs something. It takes credibility away from people who actually have ADHD or who actually survived a relationship built to make them doubt their own memory.

Scroll for five minutes, and you'll see the format yourself. "5 signs you're depressed." "7 signs you're autistic." "3 signs you have OCD." Numbered like a grocery checklist. Sign three is usually something like "you overthink things" or "you like your room a certain way," which is true of roughly everyone who has ever had a brain, and specific to none of the conditions being named.

That's the trick of the format.

It borrows the authority of a diagnostic checklist while quietly dropping everything that made the checklist mean something: the years of training, the differential diagnosis, the part where a clinician rules out ten other explanations before settling on one. A comment section full of "omg this is literally me" isn't evidence of an epidemic of autism or OCD. It's evidence that the symptoms were described in such general terms that almost anyone scrolling at 1 a.m. could identify with them.

The Other Side

But there's a flip side. Narcissists are real. So are gaslighters. In fact, you might really be depressed, autistic, or bipolar. The problem isn't that these conditions exist; it's that people apply the words too broadly.

Psychologist Nick Haslam calls this “concept creep.” In a 2016 paper, he argued that over time, words related to harm and mental health start being used more widely. That can be a good thing when it helps people recognise real problems, but it can also blur the line between everyday experiences and genuine psychological conditions. A moody coworker suddenly becomes "bipolar," and a selfish ex "a narcissist."

There's a meaner version of this, too. And sometimes the misuse is a move.

On social media especially, therapy speak gets used to describe a bad day, a minor disagreement or at its worst, to deflect accountability and turn the label back on the actual victim as a tactic. Every time that happens, the words lose the weight of their meaning. And it makes the next person who says, "I think I might have depression," or "I feel like I'm being gaslighted," a little easier to dismiss.

What Actually Matters

At the end of the day, psychological diagnoses were never supposed to work like a five-item checklist. Gaslighting has a real definition, and it's not "someone disagreed with me." Narcissistic personality disorder, depression, autism, and OCD get diagnosed through hours of assessment, developmental history, and a clinician ruling out everything the symptoms could also be. And none of those can be condensed into a fifteen-second video,

So what do you actually do with this?

Well, nothing dramatic. Curiosity about psychology isn't a problem, but no one should mistake curiosity for credentials. And if something actually does feel off, don't hesitate to get it looked at. Not in a comment section, and not by self-diagnosing off a checklist built for engagement, but by talking to a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, or therapist who can figure out what's really going on. That's not dramatic either. It's just the right next step, and a firm reminder that the only diagnosis worth trusting is the one that took longer than fifteen seconds to make.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (n.d.). Stigma, prejudice and discrimination against people with mental illness. Psychiatry.org. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/stigma-and-discrimination

American Psychological Association. (2023, August 30). The rise of "therapy speak" [Audio podcast episode]. In Speaking of Psychology. https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/therapy-speak

Britannica. (2026, May 22). Gaslighting: Definition, origins, & facts. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/gaslighting

Haslam, N. (2016). Concept creep: Psychology's expanding concepts of harm and pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418 

Hudon, A., Perry, K., Plate, A. S., Doucet, A., Ducharme, L., Djona, O., Testart Aguirre, C., & Evoy, G. (2025). Navigating the maze of social media disinformation on psychiatric illness and charting paths to reliable information for mental health professionals: Observational study of TikTok videos. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, e64225. https://doi.org/10.2196/64225

Morley, I. (2025, October 20). Pop pathology: The modern obsession with diagnosis. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/love-them-or-leave-them/202510/pop-pathology-the-modern-obsession-with-diagnosis

Is TikTok "therapy speak" doing more harm than good? (2026, April 21). AZ Big Media. https://azbigmedia.com/lifestyle/is-tiktok-therapy-speak-doing-more-harm-than-good/

Resilient Foundations. (2026, May 4). TikTok diagnosed you. Now what? A psychotherapist in Canada on self-diagnosis, therapy speak, and what actually helps. https://resilientfoundations.ca/blog/tiktok-self-diagnosis-therapy-speak-canada

Stern, R. (2007). The Gaslight Effect: How to Spot and Survive the Hidden Manipulation Others Use to Control Your Life. Morgan Road Books.

Sieferle, K., Guidi, T., Dorr, F., & Bitzer, E. M. (2025). Quality and perception of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder content on TikTok: Cross-sectional study. JMIR Infodemiology, 5, e75973. https://doi.org/10.2196/75973