Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Psycobabble used to be about growth now it's about disorder

I read a variety of psychology blogs and this morning one that popped up was particularly interesting. It's title Irritating Psychobabble disorders win. They polled their readers for their (least) favourite examples of psychobabble - technical psychological terms used out of context.
The winner was:
  1. I get really OCD about...
    (click here to read the others)
The blog author compared this to an article on psycobabble from TIME in 1977 on psycobabble and said this:
At least the psychobabble of the '70s was warm and fuzzy, while what we have now is clinical and cold, cynical even; driven not by the language of intellectual or emotional growth, but by the language of disorder.
When I read this I paused and felt somewhat sad for society. There are a lot of great resources in counseling, why is that the words people have taken away from psychology are all about labeling? Is it because naming and judging people feels powerful? Is it because we depend too much these days on research and medical diagnosis over human potential and the things we can't label?

Let's stop labeling ourselves and our disorders for each other and get on with living.

1 comment:

Deb said...

It's the only way people can seem to reference to or make any or little sense to.