![]() ![]() And the new stuff, too, is still pretty Freudian. Freud, in particular, showered Western letters with now common phrases: repression, death wish, slip of the tongue, denial, transference. As Saxbe pointed out, the language of the therapist’s office has long flooded popular culture: terms like “hysteria,” “shell shock,” and one’s “inner child” all reflected the psychoanalytic approaches of their day. “We live in a lonely country,” Darby Saxbe, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, told me. (In one study, conducted last September, more than half of eleven-to-seventeen-year-olds in a screening of 1.5 million said that they’d thought about suicide or self-harm “nearly every day” for the past two weeks.) A growing awareness of mental illness may be prodding these numbers even higher, although our everyday lexicon still lags behind the science. COVID-19 has correlated with soaring rates of depression and anxiety, especially among young people. According to one report, nineteen per cent of adults experienced a mental illness between 20, an increase of 1.5 million people from the previous year. Perhaps the language of mental health is burgeoning because actual mental health is declining. ![]() Your mother issues! Your daddy issues! A clammy wave engulfed me. But, countered my brain, after four years of Trump and four seasons of COVID, are you not hurting? The earth is dying. First, overapplying the term might dilute its meaning, robbing “people who have experienced legitimate trauma of language that is already oftentimes too thin.” And, second, invoking “trauma” where “harm” might suffice could play into the hands of “people who despise and fear vulnerability.” During this exchange, Twitter served me an advertisement that urged me to “understand my trauma” by purchasing a yoga membership. When I asked Twitter whether the word’s mainstreaming was productive, I was struck by two replies. ![]() The trauma of puberty, of difference, of academia, of women’s clothing. We need to do the work.Īround every corner, trauma, like the unwanted prize at the bottom of a cereal box. We diagnose and receive diagnoses: O.C.D., A.D.H.D., generalized anxiety disorder, depression. We feel seen and we feel heard, or we feel unseen and we feel unheard, or we feel heard but not listened to, not actively. We project and decathect we are triggered, we say wryly, adding that we dislike the word we catastrophize, ruminate, press on the wound, process. We practice self-care and shun “toxic” acquaintances. We joke about our coping mechanisms, codependent relationships, and avoidant attachment styles. If we are especially online, or roaming the worlds of friendship, wellness, activism, or romance, we must consider when we are centering ourselves or setting boundaries, sitting with our discomfort or being present. It’s as though the haze of our inner lives were being filtered through a screen of therapy work sheets. ![]()
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