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
Get the Psychic Sciences mug.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
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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
Get the Psychiatric Sophism mug.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
Get the Psychiatric Moralism mug.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
Get the Psychiatric Puritanism mug.The established, institutionalized set of beliefs and practices that define mainstream psychiatry—the often-unexamined assumptions about mental illness, diagnosis, treatment, and the role of psychiatry in society. Psychiatric orthodoxy includes commitments: that mental disorders are brain disorders, that diagnosis is objective, that DSM categories name real diseases, that medication is often the best treatment, that psychiatric authority is legitimate, that the current psychiatric system is basically sound, that critics are anti-science or anti-treatment. Like all orthodoxies, it provides frameworks for understanding and treating mental distress, but it functions as institutional power—determining who gets diagnosed with what, what treatments are covered, who counts as mentally ill, and what alternatives are marginalized. Psychiatric orthodoxy shapes not just how we treat mental distress but what we think mental distress is, making particular conceptions of illness seem natural and alternatives (social, psychological, spiritual) seem insufficient.
Example: "She suggested that some distress might be social rather than medical—and was accused of denying mental illness. Psychiatric orthodoxy had made its framework feel like the only way to take suffering seriously."
by Dumu The Void March 17, 2026
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