[hector_vasquez]

"User Engagement" is now indeed code for "Addiction," but not because user engagement has changed in any meaningful way. It's because society has been transforming terms that used to have medical/clinical definitions to mean something completely different. PTSD and OCD are two more examples.

[zerocrates]

Of course that process of "mainstreaming" clinical terms and shifting their meaning hasn't meaningfully changed either. See as an example the endless treadmill of clinical terms for intellectual disabilities re-purposed as insults by the general populace, causing the medical community to shift to new ones, and so on.

[Judgmentality]

I've heard OCD used casually/incorrectly before, but never PTSD. Is that really a common term?

[haswell]

I think there are two things going on here.

I personally suffer from C-PTSD (C=Complex) stemming from childhood trauma. C-PTSD (generalized as PTSD caused over months/years vs. a single or cluster of traumatic events, e.g. warfare) is still relatively new compared to the traditional understanding of PTSD.

So there is some legitimate expansion of the definition of PTSD.

But one thing I've noticed since I received the diagnosis is just how many people around me use the term "PTSD" casually.

- "That project gave me PTSD"

- "I have PTSD from my last boss"

- "I have PTSD from the last four years of political upheaval"

Now, I should be clear, I do think it's possible to be impacted by truly traumatic circumstances that don't rise to the level of what we traditionally think about when we hear the term.

But I also see the term used far too casually, far too often.

[teh_infallible]

Agreed. Overuse of these words trivializes the actual conditions they originally described.

[ketzo]

"Oh man, I hate scrum stuff; I've got some real PTSD from how my old job did it"

"I wanna be hopeful about the Bears' playoff run, but I've got PTSD from last year's reverse sweep"

I hear stuff like this pretty commonly, yeah.

[8note]

What did the tobacco industry used to call addiction? It can't be that new.

Also, I didn't know that addiction was originally a clinical term. til