You've heard it, maybe said it yourself. "I'm so OCD about my desk." "He has ADHD when it comes to assignments." "That meeting was actually traumatic." Clinical words have now slipped into everyday small talk, and mostly nobody blinks. There's a real cost to that slide though, and it's worth actually looking at.
This phenomenon has a name, and it's been studied
Psychologist Nick Haslam coined the term "concept creep" back in 2016 to describe this pattern: clinical and harm-related words gradually stretching to cover milder and milder versions of what they originally meant. He looked at terms like trauma, addiction, and mental disorder and found the same thing happening across the board — words that once pointed to something specific and severe had quietly widened to include everyday discomfort.
Later research built on this and found it isn't just a vibe. Text analysis of psychology journals and everyday writing going back decades shows the language itself shifting, so words like "symptom" and "disorder" showed up more and more next to ordinary emotions like anxiety, stress, and worry, especially from the 1970s onward.
Why it matters more than it seems
Using "OCD" to describe liking a tidy desk, or "ADHD" for being a bit distracted, or "PTSD" for a bad day at work isn't just imprecise — it reshapes what those words mean for everyone, including the people actually living with the conditions.
Diagnosed OCD often isn't about tidiness at all. It can look like hours trapped in intrusive thoughts and compulsions that interfere with someone's day. When the word gets used to mean "a bit particular," that lived reality gets flattened into a punchline.
ADHD isn't about where you put your keys sometimes. For a lot of people it means a lifetime of struggling with executive function in ways that intervene with activities of daily living and family relationships. PTSD isn't only a rough Monday after an unforgettable instance. It's a diagnosable response to trauma, with its own specific symptoms and its own treatment path.
Borrow the words for smaller things and two things tend to happen. People with the actual condition can feel like their experience is being trivialized. And people without it start assuming the real thing is milder than it is, which makes it harder to take someone's actual diagnosis seriously when it eventually comes up.
It's not about walking on eggshells
We can work on this by noticing the habit and reaching for a more accurate word when we want to convey that to people. "I like things organized" instead of "I'm so OCD." "I got distracted" instead of "I'm being so ADHD." "That was really upsetting" instead of "that was traumatic," unless it genuinely was.
Small swap. It does two things at once — keeps the language useful for the people who actually need it, and it's usually just a more honest description of what you're feeling in the first place.
The bigger picture
Concept creep also reflects a cultural shift toward taking mental health more seriously, which is a good thing, and Haslam's later work points out there are upsides — broader familiarity with these terms can make people more willing to seek help when they need it. But the issue lies in the very fact that the specific words are stretching thin, to the point where they start losing the precision that made them useful in the first place.
So next time one of these words is halfway out of your mouth, it's worth a half-second pause. The word probably fits someone else's experience better than it fits the moment you're describing.