Since the time last week that my adolescent nephew used the term “trauma” in a phone conversation to describe something that happened to him at Washington Square Park, i haven’t been able to stop reflecting on how fully clinical language is being embedded in the vernacular among developing youth. While the psychologist (and doting aunt) in me had my antenna up when he used the term, I was also relieved to hear that while what he was describing that happened at the park was distressing for him, it was not, in fact, a description of a traumatic event.
Neuro-atypical. Narcissism. Insecure attachments. Panic attacks. Trauma. It seems like in every corner of the culture, clinical language is being used: Scroll through a young user’s social media feed, and there are bound to be influencers whose usernames or handles have accompanying descriptions seeped in clinician speak—recovery, trauma, inner child, addiction—regardless of whether or not they have actually undergone any kind of mental health evaluation and/or intervention for a given disorder or episode.
In my book, Disconnection: The Search for Identity in a Digital Age, I discuss how many young social media users are deriving a sense of self or identity by overly relying on a diagnosis of a mental health issue—often without such a diagnosis ever having been verified by a credentialed mental health professional (Aalai, 2026). Similarly, last month, psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell wrote an essay in The New York Times reflecting on how she started to notice a trend several years ago among young women in particular of announcing a self-diagnosis on social media—and, often, on their first visits to her office (Garfinkle-Crowell, 2026). “The patients of this new wave,” she mused, “were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.”
Given the role that language plays in serving as a cognitive framework with which we understand and process the world around us, I can’t help thinking: What does it mean that so many developing youths right now are appropriating clinical language in non-clinical settings? On the one hand, the notion of silencing as a form of stigma—say, around acknowledging trauma—appears to be a thing of the past. As someone working in higher educational settings, I can attest that students today are not shy about engaging with topics related to mental health. On the other hand, if everything is traumatic, then nothing is traumatic, and the term “trauma” loses all usefulness. Moreover, there is a chasm between using clinical language the way it is being used in our culture right now versus actually describing personal experiences or interactions that meet the diagnostic standard for a mental health disorder—or even a symptom.
In other words, a lot of students may use the term “traumatic” or “narcissism” when they engage with me during a lecture, but what they are describing often doesn’t match up to the clinical weight of such language. For instance, I was sharing an anecdote about someone seeking me out based on my expertise to ask what it means if a person who made a mistake appears unwilling to apologize, and before I even finished the sentence, a student quipped, “Isn’t that narcissism?”
Labels can be comforting. During a time of volatility in so many dimensions of young people’s lives—politically and economically, to name the most obvious—perhaps the illusion of certainty that comes with a diagnosis of a psychological disorder is appealing precisely because, well, it gives the user some semblance of stability.
Fellow PT contributor Mara Whiteside reflected on this very topic last year, identifying the role exposure to mental health content on TikTok is likely playing in increases of self-diagnoses of such conditions (Whiteside, 2025). One major concern is that there are no guardrails on social media platforms, so the same digital spaces that have become the pipeline for information among developing youth are also purveyors of rampant falsehoods and mis/disinformation.
I don’t yet entirely know what this burgeoning clinical-speak our youth are appropriating means, but what it does allude to is something I think we all need to be sensitive to: All is not well with young people right now, and perhaps clinical-speak is the siren song they are using as a means to get more support/attention from the adults in the room.