Hashtag healing, trauma trending

From calling a boyfriend a narcissist to toxic break-ups, therapy jargon has moved from clinics into cafes, reels, and relationships. As mental health language becomes mainstream, are we gaining emotional clarity or losing nuance? Smitha Murthy examines what happens when labels replace lived experience.

I broke up with him. He was such a narcissist, you know?”

I didn’t know. All I knew was that she had started going out with Narendra just a few months ago. My friend didn’t wait for my response. “Totally self-absorbed. It was getting all so toxic. I had to break up. For my own peace. Setting boundaries is so important, Smitha,” she continued.

Narcissist. Toxic. Setting boundaries. We were in a cafe in Jayanagar, not in a therapy room. Yet, this was the conversation. My mind flew to another conversation two decades ago. Then, too, a friend had confessed to breaking up with his girlfriend. “We didn’t get along,” he shrugged. That was it. Conversation over. We didn’t analyse boundaries and patterns. Perhaps, he may have called her a “bit crazy.” But that was the closest we came to using any kind of mental-health speak.

I work in mental health. I go to therapy. I love talking and writing about mental health. In a country with the highest rate of suicide, it seems we need to speak more, not less. Because every time I say I have a therapist, I can almost see the mental wheels churning. “Oooh, wonder what’s wrong with her?”

That’s just one side, though. Where mental health is still a stigma. Where therapy is a mystery. Where words like “crazies and loonies” are bandied about ever so casually.

The other side of mental health talk

And then there’s the other side, like with my friend at the cafe. In her 20s, she goes to therapy and gets “traumatised” if her pizza delivery comes 10 minutes late. I really don’t know if Narendra was a narcissist, but I do know that the term refers to someone with Narcissistic Personality Disorder — rarely diagnosed — and not someone who is “self-absorbed.”

These days, you might find someone using this word for anyone rude, selfish, or difficult. The minute a relationship ends, we rush to call it toxic. We are flooded with mental health content all the time. Health and wellness influencers are among the fastest-growing creators in India.

Young Indians are more likely to learn about health trends from these influencers rather than traditional experts. Whether or not these influencers have clinical training seems irrelevant. TikTok’s #TherapyTok has around 1.7 billion views, and #MentalHealth on Instagram has about 49 million posts at the time of writing this story. I should be happy that there’s so much talk around mental health. But I am also confused.

Are we diluting the essence of mental health in our attempt to make it more accessible? Therapy-speak, which is the casual use of psychological terms such as gaslighting, trauma dumping, triggers, narcissism, in everyday conversation and, of course, on social media, is all-pervasive.

Benefits outweigh negatives?

Sindhiya Vaithiyanathan, a therapist based in Bengaluru, is someone who isn’t happy with this trend. “When they use such terms casually, it trivialises mental health, and, unfortunately, this trivialisation is now being normalised,” she sighs. But Sindhiya acknowledges that the benefits of therapy-speak outweigh any negatives. “For some, it aids in articulating their concerns, and for others, it hinders deep work as they get stuck with the labels. In my experience, the benefits outweigh the risks in a culture like ours, where mental health is stigmatised.”

For someone like Tanmoy Goswami, who describes himself as a “user-survivor,” we aren’t living in peak therapy culture.

“What is really happening is that an old, rusty tap — call it mental health conversations — has been wrenched open after decades, centuries, of being forcibly shut. You have to be okay with a lot of rusty water gushing out before a clear stream emerges.” Knowing the right language, he avers, is a function of privilege. “I ask myself why somebody else using ‘depression’ or ‘OCD’ wrong is hurting me personally. Why does someone else’s word choice feel like a threat to my lived experience?”

Pizza delivery ain’t trauma

Yet, there are many for whom using a word like OCD to describe their way of arranging the books on their shelves invalidates their own experience.

Misusing terms like trauma or OCD minimises the experiences of people who actually live with PTSD or OCD. If you equate trauma with pizza delivery, then there could be a problem. Such misuse can create ableist, dismissive language. “I feel like my suffering is reduced to a vibe or a trendy hashtag,” says Kanika G, who has lived with OCD for almost a decade.

OCD, of course, is much more than just counting doorknobs or arranging items with precision. It’s repeated intrusive thoughts that can physically, mentally, and emotionally debilitate you. But do we really know that when we equate someone to having OCD because they have a need for cleanliness?

Have words lost meaning?

In a recent feature in The Atlantic, couples therapists reported that their clients were increasingly calling every disagreement ‘gaslighting’ and every conflict ‘abuse.’ Other terms included boundaries, triggers, and trauma bonds. Even attachment styles can be easily identified with an online test. Have words lost their meaning, then? I asked Dr Sharoon Sunny, who specialises in linguistics, the same question. It’s a semantic drift, she states. Those from the Baby Boomers generation scoff at terms like depression and anxiety. “In our times, we just adjusted,” is the common refrain.

That judgment can undermine those who really know what it is to go through depressive hell or debilitating anxiety. You have a word for it now. It doesn’t mean that the symptoms came into existence now. PTSD was a term that only came into being in the late 1970s.

“Trauma now describes everything from catastrophic harm to ordinary disappointment. This isn’t misuse so much as language doing what it always does when it goes mainstream. The consequence, though, is a flattening of intensity: when everything is trauma, we lose ways of naming gradations of hurt,” Dr Sharoon explains.
When everything upsetting is labelled as trauma, then it becomes hard to recognise the difference between a mere bad day and a singularly traumatic event that reshapes someone’s nervous system.

“These words are both enabling and reductive. For many people who earlier lacked a socially legitimate language for distress, this vocabulary offers recognition — a sense that this feeling counts. At the same time, online communication rewards speed and recognisability. So these terms often become shortcuts or placeholders. Instead of narrating an experience, people point to a label and expect it to carry the full emotional load. In that sense, the word can end explanation rather than begin it,” she says.

Online clinical verdicts

Nowhere else do you see this more than on social media platforms. Take LinkedIn, for example. Almost every other day, you see a viral post from someone who says their manager was toxic. Read through the post, and you will see a mix of poor feedback culture, overwork, unclear expectations, and conflicting styles of work and communication — not what a psychologist would call ‘toxic’ in the clinical sense of the term.

A few years ago, a friend told me that it was ‘abuse’ that I had shared with him my purchase of a Garmin watch, angered that I hadn’t been mindful of my own privilege and his socio-economic status in doing so. What deeply unsettled me was not just the argument itself, but the way therapy-speak turned a normal, awkward moment into a clinical verdict. If every discomfort is labelled as ‘abuse’ or ‘toxic,’ then there’s no room for repair. No room for human clumsiness. Needless to say, that friendship didn’t last long, but those words still ring in my ears. And that’s the problem. Words have impact. They have terrifying power. We are quick to dismiss labels but run to self-diagnose ourselves or others with the same labels. You are simplifying complex human dynamics. I think of it a bit like junk food for mental health. And the problem with fast food is that people mistake it for real nutrition. It’s good to have once in a while, but real mental health language comes from understanding the complexities of our minds and lives.

The context of privilege

This new vocabulary also comes with a ‘class’ accent. Linguistically, therapy-speak is also very English, urban, and platform-specific. Contrast this with Indian languages. Common Hindi phrases often include “tension ho raha hain,” or “dil bhaari ho gaya,” to loosely map distress, anxiety, or heaviness, but not actual words like trauma or depression. Someone watching a reel might say, “I was so triggered, it activated my trauma response,” in English. But a Hindi speaker might just say, “Dil ghabra gaya.” A Kannada speaker might say, “yeshtu bhaya aitu, gotha.” Indian languages use broad terms that are often stigmatising (like pagal, huccha), but they rarely veer into diagnostic labels.

Dr Sharoon adds further perspective to this. English already signals education, urbanity, and global belonging; therapeutic language adds a layer of moral and emotional capital.

On social media, fluency in this vocabulary can signal not just awareness but virtue. Those without access to this register, often speakers of Indian languages, may find their emotions read as less articulate or less valid.

No labels, please!

We are becoming more fluent in mental health literacy, but we aren’t necessarily becoming more precise. The real question is not whether we know the words, Dr Sharoon states, but whether we can still describe experience without immediately reaching for a label.

“Real emotional work is a journey of vulnerability where you dare to dive deep to identify, understand, process, and heal your feelings, emotions, and behaviours. It needs consistent and persistent efforts of self-work,” Sindhiya says. “I would say that it is like peeling an onion. You peel layer after layer to reach the core or the essence of your being. However, in the end, you find that nothing but those layers put together is everything you were originally. It is messy, teary-eyed, revealing, yet also insightful, wholesome, and an exciting journey of self-discovery.”

Now, to me, those are the words we should be using as we navigate this year. We can be messy. We can be teary-eyed because we broke up with someone without having to classify the relationship as toxic. We can call out bad behaviour without labelling it. We can offer empathy to those who speak of trauma and be mindful of our own usage of it. We can articulate our vast emotional landscape with words designed to hold space for them.

Therapy-speak or not, language is a tool. What matters is not the tool, but how we use it. And if we use that to convey this unfathomably chaotic inner world of ours, we create meaning. For us. For others.