Is there a “concept creep” of how we understand depression and anxiety in Academia?
Monday August 14, 2023.
A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century. We lost ordinary sadness, and adaptive eustress. Over the past 50 years, two Australian researchers claim that Academia has slipped the surly bonds of adaptive resilience.
Are we seeing a “concept creep” in our understanding of depression and anxiety as wholesale pathology?
The disease model of being in a funk…
‘Everyday’ sadness and ‘adaptive’ anxiety are increasingly thought of as diseases, research finds.
Two researchers from the university of Melbourne claim that over the last fifty years, the meanings of the words ‘depression’ and ‘anxiety’ in Academia have come to include psychological states that previously would have been seen as familiar and normal, if temporarily distressing.
In other words, Academia notions of “depression” and “anxiety” have both evolved in meaning, which has become more unwelcome states over the last half century.
Rather than depression and anxiety being normalized, our understanding has intensified, potentially making more humans to feel afflicted, and in need of relief.
How the study was conducted
To reach these conclusions, the study’s authors looked at almost 50 years of writing about psychology not only in Academia, but also in global popular culture.
This included things like newspaper articles, fiction, spoken language, as well as academic research.
They analyzing over 500 million words. The take away is that these researchers discovered that the definitions of the words “depression” and “anxiety” had intensified and broadened over this period.
The study’s authors explained that they saw two key changes in how depression and anxiety were used:
“First, “anxiety” and “depression” increasingly appeared close together. For example, “depression” was not among the top ten collocates of “anxiety” in the general corpus in the 1970s or 1980s, but by the 2000s and 2010s, it became the most common one.
Second, over the past five decades, the two concepts increasingly appeared in the vicinity of illness-related words—like “disorder” and “symptom.” It tells us that “depression” and “anxiety” are increasingly understood as clinical phenomena.
Together, these two trends help to explain why “anxiety” and “depression” have come to have more severe connotations both in academic psychology and in everyday language use. “Anxiety” and “depression” have come to be seen as a pathological couple.”
From everyday experience to clinical intake…
What this suggests is that anxiety and depression are now seen more as clinical problems than they were fifty years ago.
As one of the study’s author, Yu Xiau put it:
“They have been pathologized rather than normalized.”
Anxiety and depression are part of the human experience…
Although depression and anxiety are sometimes pathological; at tolerable levels, both have historically been unpleasant, but otherwise familiar aspects of human existence that require neither diagnosis or medication.
The authors say that something similar has happened to the word ‘trauma’:
“…we have shown that as “trauma” has been popularized in recent years, it has broadened its meaning to include less severe experiences.
Once it referred only to life-threatening events, but in everyday language it increasingly refers to almost any adversity.”
Other Words with concept creep …prejudice …bullying …abuse
Other concepts whose meanings have broadened over time include ‘abuse’, ‘bullying’ and ‘prejudice’, according to Australian Professor Nick Haslam, study co-author.
Professor Haslam discussed the findings with a disturbing political assertion:
“I contend that the expansion primarily reflects an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm, reflecting a liberal moral agenda. Its implications are ambivalent, however.
Although conceptual change is inevitable and often well motivated, concept creep runs the risk of pathologizing everyday experience and encouraging a sense of virtuous but impotent victimhood.” (Nick Haslam, 2016).
Final thoughts on concept creep
Concept creep?…So what?
It’s hubris that researchers outside the USA offer up notions of “impotent victimhood” and a “liberal moral agenda” (any functioning liberal moral agenda, quite frankly, is dominated by American cultural norms). As proud Americans, we own impotent victimhood, and I, for one, prefer that we conduct that long dark night of the soul ourselves.
Furthermore, an expansive understanding of “abuse” “bullying” and “prejudice” are pretty fuc*ing welcome from an American academic perspective.
Is it also possible that we’ve modified our understanding over half a century because we’ve learned more about the nature of these afflictions? Could we be dealing with concept clarity as opposed to concept creep?
We can do without rigid, unchanging concepts, thank you very much.
American leads the world in Academia, because when confronted with neglected ideas of significance and social import, instead of dismissing them, we explore them. And, if appropriate, we change our minds.
Yikes! …Mr. Haslam, I’m disappointed to see researchers sliding into culture wars. Although word analysis research is not particularly sexy …talking about “liberal moral agendas …an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm” and “impotent victimhood” is decidedly less so.
And I’m also asking you not to pee on my leg with complaints about liberal moral agendas…bless your heart. Researchers should strive to avoid seeing their data though a political lens.
Who gets to decide which human is absurdly pathologizing their everyday experience, and which human is characterized by a overwhelming daily experience of authentic soul-crushing pathology?
We may be slicing and dicing these ideas a bit too thinly, to the annoyance of many, including myself.
But we must engage in these discourses! It’s too grave a spiritual dilemma for researchers to grapple with if they’re inclined to see “liberal moral agendas” under every rock.
Even researchers need to stay curious and kind. Godspeed, gentle reader.
RESEARCH:
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
Nick Haslam (2016) Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology, Psychological Inquiry, 27:1, 1-17, DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
