Mental Health

ability to function as a result of what happened.

Obsessive compulsive disorder doesn’t always present as washing hands 20 times before leaving home every day as many people think. For some people, it can mean perfectionism regarding a task to the point where the job is never good enough — and never completed, making employment challenging. Misusing this term is often a lazy shorthand for a tendency for neatness, not doing something that interferes with work or school and interactions with other people.

“‘My OCD is kicking up’ or ‘my depression is kicking up’ it sounds like an old friend is visiting to explain why you’re doing or not doing things as opposed to ‘I’m a little freakish about things being neat,’” Dubvosky said.

Mental Health Words Matter

By Deborah Jeanne Sergeant

“I just cleaned all my closets — I’m just so OCD.”

“I’m so depressed that I forgot to eat my takeout leftovers — again!”

“Ugh! Rain again?! I’m getting PTSD over the rotten weather lately.”

Posts such as these on social media may seem humorous to the posters, but they all misuse words associated with mental health terms, reducing the meaning of the words.

“A mental health issue is a condition with well-defined set of symptoms, and signs,” said Steven Dubovsky, president of UBMD Psychiatry, professor and chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at University at Buffalo. “A sign is something you observe; a symptom is something the patient experiences. They have a recognized course and outcome and generally a recognized treatment.”

Typical spring cleaning, forgetting about leftovers or experiencing a rainy day are “natural consequences of human experience,” Dubovsky said, but typically do not disrupt activities of daily living for days and weeks and require treatment. Using mental health terms as part of hyperbole can feel dismissive of the genuine struggles of people with these conditions.

In additional to minimization, using mental health diagnoses as shorthand for garden variety preferences and inconveniences also makes it seem as if a diagnosis defines those experiencing it, such as, “He’s a bipolar today.”

Misusing terms also often means defining them in an inaccurate way. Dubovsky used post-traumatic stress disorder as an example.

“It’s defined as either experiencing or being directly exposed to a type of trauma that either threatens your life or physical integrity,” he said. “It has a distinct likelihood of causing your death or bodily harm or witnessing someone else’s life. You hear politicians saying they have PTSD about the Jan. 6 demonstrations in the Capitol even though they were in a building six blocks away.

“Or if your parents took away your cell phone or a teacher was mean to you, that’s not PTSD. PTSD requires a life-threatening or severe trauma directly affecting you or you were there when it happened.”

In examples such as these, the individuals do not experience in-

Bipolar is another example of a mental condition with distinctive signs and symptoms.

“We hear people say, ‘My teenaged son went bipolar because I took away his cell phone,’” Dubovsky said. “No, he wasn’t. He had a temper tantrum. Everybody has mood swings. Bad things happen. People feel bad. Bipolar causes involuntary mood swings that affect the ability to think straight. It often runs in families and requires treatment.”

He thinks that the current-day premium placed on victimhood has exacerbated the problem of language misuse.

“You see a whole swath of the population, particularly those who are in the news a lot or political who are ‘victims’ on the grounds that it gets them elected or gets them out of trouble,” Dubovsky said. “This has promoted the trend of, ‘Of course I’m doing badly; I have clinical depression or panic disorder.’”

Throwing in the term “clinical” is meant to help their audience take them more seriously, which represents a disservice to those who are ill and must find ways to cope and carry on without the abundance of accommodations these public figures expect.

Experiencing a few quirks, traits or unpleasant circumstances does not a diagnosis make. A recent trend in social media is sharing a video revealing a “diagnosis” in what posters hope is a shocking fashion to gain clicks and likes. However, without a provider’s actual diagnosis, it’s just guesswork. Most likely, it is incorrect. Unfortunately, some viewers believe it and form a misguided perspective on mental health issues, believing the most extreme “example” is typical.

Karl Shallowhorn, credentialed alcoholism and substance abuse counselor and director of youth orograms at Mental Health Advocates of Western New York in Buffalo, is involved with the Erie County Anti-stigmatizing Coalition. He believes that flippant use of mental health terms can add to stigma, especially since the most extreme elements or exaggerated symptoms are sometimes represented as typical of that issue. Or as noted before, everyday inconveniences and preferences are treated as mental health issues.

“We’re using a term to describe something denigratingly,” he said. “It’s about perception. We’ve found that stigma impacts relationships and people’s ability to seek help. When stigmatized, people may feel self-conscious and like they don’t want to be labeled for fear of losing their job. I have a friend who is a private businessperson and in long-term recovery and he said he was with a business partner who doesn’t know he’s in recovery. He keeps it a secret because of stigma. That’s a problem we have as a society.”

He believes that the keys to reducing stigma includes talking about mental health and using terms accurately and respectfully — not as insults or to describe non-mental health issues.

Misusing mental health language may also lead people to believe that nothing can help improve their mental health. If “everyone” is depressed, those experiencing real depression may think that there’s no point in seeking help. A person with a diagnosis may also feel like they are failing at recovery since they are not coping as well as the self-diagnosed who have no mental health issues.

“Anyone who has a stressful day may have a headache from stress and that’s a part of mental health,” Shallowhorn said. “When it becomes a problem, those symptoms are persisting longer than a couple weeks. That’s where you need to get some help.”