Are We Pathologizing Ordinary Life? A Therapist’s Take on “Concept Creep”

August 14, 2023. Revised Monday, 8/4/25.

A funny thing happened on the way to the DSM.

We lost plain old sadness. Misery-with-a-purpose. And that gritty little fuel called eustress.

Somewhere between bell bottoms and ChatGPT, we started confusing the human condition with a clinical condition. Or at least, that’s what some researchers are starting to argue.

According to a 2023 study by researchers from the University of Melbourne, the words depression and anxiety have changed—semantically, conceptually, and culturally—so much over the last 50 years that our collective understanding of mental health may have quietly drifted from adaptive discomfort to pathological distress.

Is this just concept creep? Or a reckoning with real suffering?

Let’s take a look.

Concept Creep in Psychology: Are We Overdiagnosing Ordinary Feelings?

The term concept creep—coined by psychologist Nick Haslam in 2016—refers to the tendency for definitions of harm-related concepts to broaden over time.

Words like abuse, trauma, bullying, prejudice, and now anxiety and depression are expanding their territory, swallowing more of our everyday experience into the diagnostic domain.

In other words, more people are feeling broken, not because they are—but because the language has shifted.

The 2023 study by Xiao, Baes, Vylomova, and Haslam used computational linguistics to analyze over 500 million words across academic publications, newspapers, novels, and spoken language from the 1970s to the 2010s.

Their question was simple: Have we normalized the concepts of depression and anxiety—or pathologized ordinary sadness and stress?

What They Found: From Blues to Disorders

According to the researchers, two major shifts happened:

Anxiety and depression became a couple.
In the 1970s and 1980s, depression and anxiety rarely appeared in the same breath. But by the 2000s and 2010s, they were practically joined at the hip. In contemporary discourse, the phrase “anxiety and depression” is now as familiar as peanut butter and jelly, or scroll and doom.

Both terms drifted closer to clinical territory.
Over the decades, the terms began to appear more frequently alongside words like disorder, diagnosis, symptom, and treatment. The semantic cloud thickened, drawing these once-everyday experiences into the gravity well of clinical language.

The conclusion? We’re increasingly interpreting normal emotional pain—grief, stress, insecurity—as signs of illness.

When “Sad” Became “Sick”

Let’s be clear: clinical depression and debilitating anxiety are real, often life-threatening experiences. They deserve compassion, treatment, and cultural visibility.

But it’s also true that sadness, grief, and anxiety have long been natural responses to an unpredictable world. They help us pay attention. They wake us up to loss, to danger, to longing. They’re functional. Sometimes even wise.

As co-author Yu Xiao noted, these states “have been pathologized rather than normalized.” And that’s not a small shift—it’s a tectonic one.

It changes how we narrate our experience.
It changes when we seek help.
It changes what we call trauma.

Is Trauma Overused in Modern Culture?

The study also points to a similar pattern with the word trauma. Historically, trauma referred to life-threatening events—war, assault, natural disaster. But in modern discourse, it can refer to anything from parental divorce to being ghosted by a Bumble date. (Seriously—search TikTok.)

As the researchers wrote:

“Once it referred only to life-threatening events, but in everyday language it increasingly refers to almost any adversity.”

We’ve entered a world where every rupture is a wound, every slight is a scar, and every heartbreak is potentially traumatic. Are we building a more empathetic society—or are we blurring the line between distress and disorder?

The Politics of Pathology

Now here’s where it gets spicy.

In 2016, Haslam suggested that concept creep reflects an “ever-increasing sensitivity to harm,” which he ties to what he calls “a liberal moral agenda.”

The implication? That progressive cultural values are pushing us to redefine harm more broadly—sometimes too broadly.

Let’s pause.

Because while this may be an academic observation, it reads a little like an absurd culture war flare-up.

And as a therapist, I’d like to ask Dr. Haslam—politely—not to pee on my metaphorical leg and tell me it’s raining liberal agendas.

Yes, the expansion of these terms can encourage performative victimhood.

But it can also be a sign of greater emotional intelligence, more inclusivity, and a growing willingness to name what once went unnamed—especially among women, children, LGBTQ+ folks, and neurodivergent people, all of whom were historically told to suck it up.

So, is this concept creep…or concept clarity?

A Cultural Fork in the Road

Here’s what we’re really wrestling with:

• Is every painful experience a clinical one?

• Who decides what counts as “real” suffering?

• Is semantic inflation making us more fragile—or more humane?

There’s no easy answer.

But we do need to be cautious. Because when we label too broadly, we risk trivializing the experiences of those in genuine psychological peril. And when we label too narrowly, we exclude the quietly suffering masses who need just enough language to feel seen.

We don’t need rigid, frozen categories. We need frameworks that can stretch and hold shape.

Final Thoughts: Stay Curious, Not Cynical

In a world that’s trying to name every ache, let’s not fall into the trap of scolding people for having names at all.

Even researchers must stay curious—and humble.

Is concept creep real? Yes.
Is it dangerous? Maybe.
Is it political? Only when we say stupid shit and make it so.

Let’s do what the best of psychology has always promised: pay attention without pathologizing, offer clarity without contempt, and expand understanding without losing common sense.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

Xiao, Y., Baes, N., Vylomova, E., & Haslam, N. (2023). Have the concepts of ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’ been normalized or pathologized? A corpus study of historical semantic change. PLOS ONE, 18(6), e0288027. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0288027

Haslam, N. (2016). Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology. Psychological Inquiry, 27(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418

Transparency Statement:
I practice under the supervision of two licensed AAMFT supervisors in accordance with Massachusetts law—one for my work in public mental health, and the other for my private practice. This article reflects a synthesis of clinical experience, social science research, and the emotional truths of real couples. It is not a substitute for professional therapy.