From “setting boundaries” to “protecting my peace,” therapy buzzwords are everywhere online. But when complex mental health terms go viral, are we gaining self-awareness or just new ways to miscommunicate?
These days, you don’t need to sit on a therapist’s couch to know what gaslighting is. Or narcissism. Or trauma bonding. All you need to do is get on TikTok, because these once-clinical terms have now been absorbed into our everyday scroll, dropped into storytimes, and stitched onto breakups.
At first, it felt like progress, because the language of therapy was no longer hidden behind a blanket of stigma. But somewhere between self- diagnosing on Instagram and calling every ex ‘toxic’, something shifted, because these buzzwords aren’t just explanations anymore, they’ve become punchlines.
So what happens when therapy-speak becomes the default dialect of the internet?
Therapy buzzwords weren’t designed to go viral, but they’ve become perfectly engineered for it. Words like “narcissist,” “gaslight,” and “attachment style” are short, emotionally loaded, and instantly recognisable – ideal ingredients for TikToks, tweet threads, and Instagram reels that need to hit fast and hit hard. Because of course, the more serious the label, the more engagement it attracts.
Online, these terms offer a kind of shortcut for complex emotional feelings, because rather than saying “this person repeatedly dismissed my feelings and made me question my memory,” we say “he gaslit me.” Instead of “we had poor communication and mismatched needs,” we get “he was an avoidant with a victim complex.” The more clinical the language sounds, the more valid it feels.
Online, these words aren’t just used to explain feelings, they’re becoming labels. “Setting boundaries” becomes a flex. “Delulu is the solulu” turns detachment into empowerment. But in turning psychological terms into personality traits, something subtle shifts.
The problem isn’t that these words are wrong, it’s that they’re everywhere, applied to everything, often without context. When every bad date is “love bombing,” every disagreement is “gaslighting,” and every difficult ex is a “narcissist,” the language loses its weight. Real psychological concepts get watered down into buzzwords, stripped of the nuance they were meant to hold.
It also becomes easy to treat therapy-speak as a shield rather than a tool, because realistically, ‘setting boundaries’ might just be ghosting, and ‘protecting my peace’ might just be avoiding accountability. It’s a slippery slope of self-justification, where therapy-speak becomes a way to excuse behaviour rather than examine it.
And most importantly, overusing these words risks undermining those who are actually dealing with real abuse, trauma, or mental health issues… experiences that definitely deserve more than a trending term.
But of course with everything, it’s not all bad. There’s something powerful about seeing therapy language become more common, especially in communities where mental health was once a taboo topic. Words like “boundaries” and “trauma” have helped people name what they’ve been through, sometimes for the first time. But awareness isn’t the same as understanding, and in trying to explain everything, we risk understanding nothing.
So the next time you hear someone say ‘gaslighting’ or ‘narcissist’ on your FYP, maybe ask yourself: is it a genuine reaction, or just the most algorithm-friendly way to be heard?
