Do girls today need to be sick to be heard? A few years ago, I noticed many of the girls in my psychiatry practice were coming to me having diagnosed themselves with conditions like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. They had researched their symptoms and taken quizzes about them on social media, conferring with friends about their results. As I began to tune into this language, known as “therapy-speak,” I noticed something else: Many, especially older, people were responding with an impatience and irritation that seemed unfair to the girls. The objections to therapy-speak appeared to stem from the same belittling cultural impulse that causes many girls to experience distress and psychiatric symptoms in the first place. While therapy-speak sometimes made it hard for me to understand what my patients were experiencing — a phenomenon I wrote about in a Times Opinion guest essay this week — it always seemed worth listening to. It was a sign of a greater internal struggle, and an indicator of something to take seriously, if not always literally. In my essay, I lay out a formula for getting past the therapy-speak to what’s really on your daughter’s (or student’s or friend’s) mind — a simple gesture that can have a big impact.
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