Pillar
Myth-busting.
Correcting psychology terms before they lose meaning.
“If everything is X, nothing is.”
Mental-health language is being inflated faster than it can be tested. Words like trauma, narcissism, dysregulation, anxious attachment, and gaslighting started as clinical descriptions and ended up as social-media identity labels. Myth-busting episodes name the term, name what it actually describes, and name what gets lost when the term is used loosely. The job is not pedantry. The job is keeping the words useful for the people who actually need them.
Why mental-health language inflation is the pop-psychology problem of 2026
Most mental-health content in 2026 is not making the wrong claims. It is using the right words in ways that have stopped meaning anything.
Trauma used to describe a category of events that produced a specific pattern: hyperarousal, intrusion, avoidance, mood and cognition shifts, often anchored to identifiable events. Now it describes a bad day. Dysregulated used to mean a clinically observable disruption of affect or arousal. Now it means tired. Anxious attachment used to describe a relationship pattern formed in early caregiving environments. Now it is a TikTok bio identity.
The harm of inflation is not pedantic. It is two specific things. First, the people who actually fit the clinical category get harder to identify and harder to take seriously. When everyone is dysregulated, the people whose lives are organised around real dysregulation become indistinguishable from people who had a rough commute. Second, the clinical word loses its function as a tool. A word that means everything cannot do work. You cannot use it to differentiate, to treat, to research, or to track.
The myth-busting pillar is not an attack on people who borrow clinical language. Most of that borrowing is reasonable. It is an attempt to find more accurate words. The pillar is an attempt to keep the original word doing the work the original word was built to do.
The test for whether a usage is fine or inflated is concrete. Does the term still differentiate the category from adjacent categories? Does it still imply specific patterns and not just a vibe? Could a clinician hearing it identify the same thing the speaker means? If yes to all three: keep the usage. If no: find another word.
There is no shortage of accurate words for difficult experiences. Inflated clinical language is rarely the only option. It is often the lazy option, or the identity-signalling option. The pillar exists because both lazy and identity-signalling are downstream of the same problem: not enough credentialled voices doing the boring work of saying what the words actually mean.
What you’ll hear
- →Gaslighting does not mean someone disagreed with you.
- →Trauma is not the same as a bad day.
- →Dysregulated is doing identity work, not descriptive work.
What this is not
- ×A blanket attack on people who use therapy language
- ×A claim that clinical terms cannot evolve
- ×Personal diagnoses of individuals