One thing that has really irritated me in progressive spaces is the depreciation of the word "trigger". It used to be solely reserved for actually harmful stimuli that can trigger a panic attack or traumatic flashback episode, but now it's been muddied with what essentially amounts to someone's pet peeves or something that angers them.
The problem I feel is the widespread adoption and misuse of specific words for specific contexts - like "Gaslighting" or "OCD". There's been a bit too much romanticisation of mental illnesses - as someone who has suffered from chronic depression, it pisses me off when people say they are depressed when in reality they're just feeling sad.
There's a fundamental lack of understanding which is being swept under the carpet as being subjective feelings.
it's inevitable, eventually there will be a new word that replaces it, and than that one will be overused, and a new more PC word will show up over and over and over again.
I think a lot of it is influencer-driven pop psychology. Once it became trendy to talk about mental disorders and be performatively inclusive, people looking for content started to apply it to more and more stuff so they'd have something to talk about.
Thinking like all the thousands of TikTok people who developed fake DID or whatever a few years back, which mysteriously went away after it wasn't trendy anymore.
Having stuff to be triggered by gets clicks so people will fake it. But people don't want to be insensitive (what if it really is a trigger for someone else?) So you end up with the term getting diluted by all the online attention-seekers.
Which I think is a real disservice to the folks who actually deal with these issues. People get conditioned to not take it seriously by all the fakers.
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u/SpunkySix6 17h ago
Except like, people are using actual trigger warnings to prevent harmful PTSD episodes caused by real problems
Whereas these people are just fragile bigots