Familiarity of Psychiatric Terms Among College Students

Recently, there has been an increase in the usage of psychiatric terminology used among internet users. Terms such as autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder are thrown around without an understanding of these words and their true meaning. These words are picked up and used in a similar context as any other internet lingo, in an ironic, joking manner, without proper consideration of their origins and meaning. Due to most content on the internet being unmoderated and seemingly endless, users are often faced with misleading information about real clinical disorders. The use of these words follows the linguistic pattern of “concept creep,” during which incompletely understood terminology expands in definition over time; essentially, people keep using terms they do not fully understand in the form of a hyperbole, gradually shifting the original definition of the word. While current research has measured how much these terms are used online, there is not much research targeting their usage in real world conversation. These words are used prominently on campus, which made me wonder what could have led to their popularity.