Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

I think this is just incorrect. You are not obligated to seek treatment for most medical problems[1]. The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in and when people enter a situation where they may need external help. One of the diagnostic criteria, which this article mentions, is that your grief is disrupting your life - but despite what this article claims they have misunderstood that criteria. Of course grief changes your routines and life. That change only becomes "disruptive" if you feel the change has somehow gone too far or you are struggling to undo it. This writer is doing neither and therefor does not meet the diagnostic criteria for disordered grief. They are grieving normally and the medical literate supports that understanding.

There are of course medical professionals who use diagnostic criteria as cudgels. Trying to force people to become patients in order to enforce their idea of what someone "should" want. This is a problem but it is a problem that the official diagnostic guidelines try to avoid. For those who are interested in this kind of problem with our medical system might look into the professional philosophy of doctors (generally arrayed around identifying and curing disease) and nursing (generally arrayed around making the patient comfortable as possible). I tend to think the nursing model is the more useful and sensible of the two - even though, of course, if one wants to cure a disease a doctor is helpful.

[1] There are very few diseases, such as tuberculosis, where you can be forced to treat the disease.

The problem is that medical diagnoses and therapy speak have spilled over into common language where they’re so diluted that they’re not accurate any more. For many there is no line drawn anywhere because they are self-diagnosing based on flawed understandings as soon as any feeling or symptom arrives.

This is scarily obvious when I’ve worked with college students and early 20s juniors lately: A subset of them speak of everything human nature in medical and therapy speak. Common human experiences like being sad about something or having a tough day are immediately amplified into full-blown medical terms like “I’m having a depressive episode today” (which is gone by tomorrow). Being a little nervous about something is “I’m having a panic attack”. Remembering an unpleasant disagreement at work “gives me PTSD”. When they’re procrastinating a task that is fun “my ADHD is flaring up today”.

This is only a subset of people, but it’s a rapidly growing percentage of younger people I work with. When someone falls into this mindset it only grows: The same people using these terms usually accumulate a lot of different self-diagnoses to cover every element of common human experience: They will claim ADHD, social anxiety, often some variation of Autism despite showing none of the signs, PTSD due to a previous relationship/boss/professor they didn’t get along with, and insomnia or delayed sleep phase syndrome. Many will have no formal diagnosis at all or even proudly claim that they don’t trust the medical system, they’re just diagnosing themselves.

I’ve been offered helpful links to TikTok ADHD influencers to help me understand them, because that’s where they think the best information comes from. 20-something engineers confidently tell me they know more than their doctors about ADHD and how to treat it (usually after their doctor refuses to increase their dose of Adderall again or denies them some other controlled substance they think they need like ketamine or perpetual daily Xanax). There’s also a growing culture of casual drug abuse and misuse that gets justified as self-medication, but that’s a topic for another post.

I guess my thoughts on the trend you're critiquing is that it happens almost entirely outside of the medical community. As you describe the people who are most impacted by this often find actual medical treatment unhelpful and un-validating and turn to self-medication or other "medically inspired" coping techniques. I think the people who actually don't have these conditions and are applying medicalized treatments and explanations are opportunistically drawing on medical language because people often respect it socially. But also there are lots of people who engage in self-deception (or just normal deception) for social advantage and I don't know that people who use medical language are better or worse? A word is just a word and unless that word is actually on a medical record somewhere it only has the power you give it.

The flip side of this is of course that the medical establishment has many well-studied and documented biases. They offer poor treatment to overweight people, black people, people with mental health diagnoses, basically every vulnerable population that's been studied gets worse service from medical professionals. That very reasonably leads to people distrusting "the system" and searching for coping mechanism outside of it. I think that is generally pretty harmless and helpful - as long as it doesn't get into the realm of serious self-medication like you describe. Basically if you like using a medical term to describe your experience ("I'm being really OCD today") I don't think there's much harm in it and you may find coping mechanisms for people with ODC helpful as a bonus.

I was with you up until this point. My wife has C-PTSD, Bipolar type 2 and ADHD, along with what her psychologist describes as "Social OCD". I can't tell you how many times I've had to explain to other people that her mental illnesses are real and some days she and I just can't hang out because she smelled a smell that gave her flashbacks. Because people have normalized the language, they think "triggered" just means upset. For someone with real PTSD, it doesn't mean upset, it means their mind has come unstuck in time and they don't know who to trust or sometimes even what is real. Sometimes this lasts 5 minutes, sometimes it lasts almost all day. She just loses that time, and all I can do is try to calm her down and try to get her to take medication to re-stabilize her.

My wife has been in therapy with a PhD psychologist for 11 years, and only just this year has gotten to the point where it seems like she could probably hold down a job and keep her trauma compartmentalized like most people do all the time. People normalize the language for these debilitating full-blown disabilities and then don't understand the gravity of the situation when somebody with a legitimate mental illness of that sort of degree comes along.

Co-opting medical language for sub-disorder level dysfunctions is bullshit. And that's fine, when you're just bullshitting with your friends or whatever, but how is someone like my wife supposed to be seen or understood, let alone properly accommodated for when everybody thinks they know what a panic attack is but has never in their adult life been so panicked they became nonverbal?