Psychiatrist: Don't Ignore Teen Girls' Therapy-Speak

Teen girls aren't just learning therapy language in treatment—they're showing up already fluent, writes psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell in a New York Times opinion piece. She describes a wave of young patients who introduce themselves with labels like ADHD, anxiety, or depression, often self-diagnosed via TikTok, Instagram, or online quizzes. The therapist in Garfinkle-Crowell would immediately begin thinking about treatments, but "another part of me—the parent, the Xennial—would struggle to suppress an inner eye roll." In her essay, Garfinkle-Crowell cautions against those eye rolls. The girls' self-diagnoses may not be clinically correct, but they can tell us something. "We should take the therapy-speak, to borrow an expression, seriously but not literally."

For example, several "young women insisted they fit the clinical definition for anxiety, because it was less scary to blame an inherent flaw in their brains than to explore the causes of their very real discomfort—which turned out to be a mix of anger toward their loved ones and guilt for having those feelings." Treat the words as clues to underlying emotions, suggests Garfinkle-Crowell, not final verdicts on mental illness. That approach, she says, balances empathy with realism and helps girls feel heard without forcing them into an "illness identity." Read the full essay.