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Psychobabble is the misuse of psychological terms by unqualified individuals, often due to the popularity of self-help books. Terms like “dysfunctional” have lost their meaning and are open to interpretation. Dismissing mental health diagnoses as psychobabble or self-diagnosing can be problematic. Some motivational speakers and self-help writers also use jargon-heavy psychological terms without proper context.
Psychobabble is the use of psychological words, especially popular buzzwords, by people who are not actually using the words in their proper context and/or who do not have the appropriate education and credentials to use the terms accurately . The rise of the psychobabble may be linked to early diagnostic terms in psychiatry and psychology that were captured by non-professionals and then misused. Self-help books, useful as they may be, have also played their part in contributing to psychobabble, since true diagnostic terms are often taken from them and used liberally without any legitimate diagnosis or confirmation from a professional. in psychology.
The term dysfunctional, for example, has almost lost its meaning and has become one of the strong buzzwords of psychobabble. “I come from a dysfunctional family” could be interpreted in many ways, without specifically defining the dysfunction. The statement may be correct if abuse or true mental illness existed in the family, but the term dysfunctional is often loosely used to refer to any family where things have gotten rough at times.
The term also begs the question of what defines a “functional” environment, but it can be so vague as to simply mean that some aspect of the family was problematic. A dysfunctional family could be anything from an environment where a mother or father occasionally screamed, to an environment where one parent suffered from severe, untreated schizophrenia or alcoholism. The term is psychobabble because it has been jargonized and lost its original meaning and is now open to interpretation. It is abused and abused. Other terms that are being bandied about in this matter include words like codependency, depression, inner child, and empowerment.
In some cases, people use the term psychobabble pejoratively, either to express negative opinions about people who use such terms without a true understanding of their definitions, or to speak negatively about the mental health profession. When new terms come from mental health professionals attempting to describe mental illness or destructive states of being, people may simply dismiss them as psychobabble: “They’re just psychologists, making up terms.” While many of these terms do indeed accurately describe states of being, an unwillingness to accept a larger field of things as possible mental illness can lead to bias against the entire field of psychiatry and psychology.
People wonder if shyness is really a social anxiety disorder and if bablues is really postpartum depression. They can either go one of two directions and diagnose themselves or dismiss these diagnoses as made up. Both tactics are problematic. Dismissing a newly identified disease as psychobabble may not take into account cases where such disease actually and truly exists. Self-diagnosis can lead to over-reliance on chemical solutions when these are not really needed. A person who is shy and claims to have social anxiety disorder may be given medications she doesn’t need, and a person who dismisses postpartum depression and actually has it may be at risk.
Finally, such babble can also describe those who use heavily jargon-heavy psychological terms without really defining their meaning or context. This may be the case with some motivational speakers and writers of self-help or New Age books. Since the terms seem somehow powerful and scientific, they can lend credence to ideas that aren’t fully proven or that make the writer or speaker seem smarter or more rational. It should be noted that many books of this type are written with the best of intentions and contain no pseudoscientific terms, jargon, or buzzwords.
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