Psychic Technologies

The tools and gadgets designed to enhance, measure, or simulate psychic abilities, ranging from ancient divination tools to modern brain-computer interfaces that are definitely not mind-reading devices (wink). This includes Zener cards for testing ESP (you guess the symbol, I record the data, we both pretend this proves something), EEG headsets that claim to let you control objects with your mind (they work, barely, if you concentrate really hard and the stars align), and the classic crystal ball, which is just a decorative sphere but looks impressive when you stare into it mysteriously.

Psychic Technologies Example: "He bought a psychic technology headband that promised to boost his telepathic abilities. After a month of wear, he hadn't read any minds, but he had developed a persistent headache, which he interpreted as the universe trying to communicate through discomfort. The manual called this 'psychic sensitivity.'"

by Nammugal February 14, 2026

Psychic Sciences

The systematic study of claimed mental abilities that defy conventional explanation, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and knowing exactly who's calling before looking at your phone (though that one's usually just pattern recognition). Psychic sciences attempt to apply rigorous methodology to phenomena that are notoriously difficult to replicate in a lab, especially when the skeptics are watching. The field has generated decades of research, countless conferences, and a reliable conclusion: people really want to believe they can read minds, and scientists really want to prove they can't.

Example: "She got a degree in psychic sciences and set up a practice reading auras. Her methodology was consistent: she'd close her eyes, hum, and then tell people what they wanted to hear. When asked about her success rate, she said the universe works in mysterious ways, which is psychic-scientist for 'I'm guessing.'"

by Nammugal February 14, 2026

Psychiatrization of Everything

A specific form of pathologization where the framework is explicitly psychiatric—human experience interpreted through the lens of mental disorder, diagnosis, and treatment. Under Psychiatrization of Everything, all distress becomes mental illness, all difference becomes disorder, all suffering becomes syndrome. The psychiatric vocabulary colonizes experience: trauma, trigger, narcissist, borderline, bipolar, schizo—terms once clinical now applied broadly, casually, often inaccurately. The result is not better mental health but the medicalization of life itself, with everyone a patient and everything a condition.

"Your ex was selfish? 'He's a narcissist.' Your friend is moody? 'She's bipolar.' You're anxious about the future? 'That's generalized anxiety.' That's Psychiatrization of Everything—turning human complexity into diagnostic labels. Not understanding, just categorizing. Not healing, just naming. The psychiatric gaze sees disorders everywhere, people nowhere."

by Dumu The Void February 28, 2026

Psychiatric Sophism

The use of psychiatric labels and authority to dismiss, control, or silence those who challenge power or convention. Psychiatric Sophism turns diagnosis into social control: political dissent becomes "paranoia"; resistance to injustice becomes "oppositional defiant disorder"; grief becomes "depression" that needs medication. It's sophistry in medical clothing: using the authority of psychiatry to pathologize the inconvenient.

"He protested injustice. They called him delusional. Psychiatric Sophism: using diagnosis as dismissal, psychiatry as policing. The label wasn't clinical; it was political. Psychiatry became a tool for silencing, not healing."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 7, 2026

Psychiatric Moralism

A form of moralism where psychiatric diagnoses and categories are used to judge, condemn, and exclude those whose behavior or beliefs deviate from approved norms. The psychiatric moralist treats mental illness not as suffering to be alleviated but as moral failing to be condemned, using diagnostic labels as weapons rather than tools for care. Political dissenters are "crazy," social deviants are "disordered," those who won't conform are "mentally ill." The moralism lies in using the authority of psychiatry to pathologize difference, treating those who don't fit as sick rather than simply different, and deploying diagnostic language as a form of social control rather than healing.

Example: "He dismissed her completely different worldview as 'delusional'—not a clinical judgment, just a way of saying she was wrong. Psychiatric Moralism: using the language of illness to avoid engaging with difference."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026

Psychiatric Puritanism

A purity culture within communities that elevate psychiatric diagnosis as the primary framework for understanding human difference and distress, where proper diagnostic thinking becomes a test of virtue and belonging. Psychiatric puritanism demands that true members understand all human variation through diagnostic categories, treat non-psychiatric frameworks as naive or unscientific, and maintain the purity of diagnostic boundaries against contamination by alternative approaches. Members compete to demonstrate their diagnostic sophistication, their ability to spot pathology everywhere, their commitment to the medical model against all challenges. The result is a community that claims to help the suffering while pathologizing all human variation and dismissing any approach that doesn't fit diagnostic categories.

Example: "They diagnosed everyone who disagreed with them—not clinically, just as a way of dismissing difference. Psychiatric Puritanism: using the language of diagnosis to police the boundaries of acceptable humanity."

by Abzugal Nammugal Enkigal March 14, 2026

Psycho-Orthodoxy

The established, institutionalized set of beliefs that dominate mainstream psychology—the often-unexamined assumptions about how to study mind, what counts as psychological knowledge, what methods are valid, and what theories are acceptable. Psycho-orthodoxy includes commitments: that quantitative methods are superior, that laboratory experiments reveal psychological truth, that statistical significance matters more than effect size, that Western populations represent humanity, that individual behavior is the right level of analysis, that psychological findings are universal, that replication crises are methodological rather than theoretical. Like all orthodoxies, it provides a framework for psychological research, but it functions as gatekeeping—determining what research is published, what theories are taught, who gets tenure, and what questions are worth asking. Psycho-orthodoxy shapes not just what we know about mind but what we think it's possible to know, making certain approaches feel scientific and others "soft" or "unscientific."

Example: "Her qualitative research on lived experience was rejected as 'not real psychology'—psycho-orthodoxy, where method defines the field rather than questions. The orthodoxy's power is making its preferences feel like standards."

by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026