Everyone's a "narcissist" now: how diagnosis culture took over the internet - Silicon Canals

"In 2025, the language of therapy jumped the fence. Words that once stayed inside intake forms and supervision rooms-narcissist, gaslighting, trauma, attachment wound-now ping through Reels, TikToks, and office Slacks with the easy confidence of household terms. The shift has a name: "pop pathology," a phrase popularized in an essay arguing that our cultural habit of reaching for clinical labels to explain ordinary conflict is spiraling into confusion and harm. You can read that argument in Psychology Today's "Pop Pathology: The Modern Obsession With Diagnosis", which crystallizes the trend and why it resonates right now."

"Strip away the hashtags, and a simple tension remains. Social media has helped millions find vocabulary for painful, real experiences; at the same time, the platforms reward oversimplification. That combination has turned "narcissist" into shorthand for difficult exes, "gaslighting" into a synonym for disagreement, and "ADHD" into a catchall for modern distraction. The question for 2026 is whether the data underneath those labels matches the level of online certainty."

Therapy vocabulary migrated onto social platforms, turning clinical diagnoses into commonplace labels and prompting the label "pop pathology." Social media furnished language for real, painful experiences while incentivizing oversimplified explanations. Terms like narcissist, gaslighting, trauma, attachment wound, and ADHD increasingly serve as shorthand for difficult relationships, disagreement, or distraction. Popular impressions of a narcissism boom conflict with research findings. A cross-temporal meta-analysis of Narcissistic Personality Inventory scores across 1,621 samples and over half a million participants found scores generally declined. Population-level diagnostic estimates compiled in The Lancet Psychiatry indicate diagnostic rates have remained stable rather than surged.

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