Episode Summary

Your boss gave you feedback.

Toxic.

Your friend canceled dinner.

Trauma.

Your ex forgot to text back.

Narcissist.

Somewhere along the way, the internet stopped describing annoying people and started diagnosing them.

In this episode of Seriously Sus, Nanette and Miranda take a skeptical, humorous, and research-driven look at how therapy language escaped the therapist’s office and took over social media.

From narcissists and gaslighting to trauma, boundaries, ADHD, attachment styles, and TikTok self-diagnosis, we explore how legitimate psychological concepts became everyday internet vocabulary—and what gets lost when complex mental health concepts are reduced to viral content.

We’ll discuss:

• Why therapy language became mainstream
• The rise of TikTok psychology
• Why everyone’s ex is apparently a narcissist
• What gaslighting actually means
• Self-diagnosis culture
• Attachment styles and online identity
• How algorithms reward certainty over nuance
• The difference between awareness and oversimplification
• Whether psychology has become the internet’s version of astrology

This episode is not anti-therapy, anti-mental health treatment, or anti-diagnosis. It’s about how social media incentives can distort important ideas—and what happens when every inconvenience becomes a clinical condition.

As always, we ask one question: How did we get here?