Beyond the Buzzwords: How to Talk About Mental Health Without Losing Its Meaning with Joe Nucci

The One You Feed

Eric Zimmer, The One You Feed

Education, Self-improvement, Religion & Spirituality, Health & Fitness, Buddhism, Mental Health

4.6 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2025

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Joe Nucci explores what it means to go beyond the buzzwords and how to talk about mental health without losing its meaning. He explains how mental health language has become less useful as it’s gained popularity, and how clinical terms meant for specific purposes have drifted into everyday speech until they describe everything, and therefore, nothing. The words we use create the world we see, and once you start viewing yourself through a diagnostic lens, it can be hard to see in any other way. One of the most powerful takeaways from this conversation is that the value of a psychological term lies not only in its accuracy, but in its usefulness, and sometimes the language we use builds a cage instead of offering clarity.

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Key Takeaways:

The popularization of mental health language and concepts.
The phenomenon of “psychobabble” and its implications.
The concept of “concept creep” in mental health terminology.
The importance of accurate mental health diagnoses and their clinical usefulness.
The balance between clinical accuracy and practical application in mental health discussions.
The complexities of people pleasing and its underlying motivations.
The overuse and misapplication of the term “trauma” in contemporary discourse.
The distinction between normal emotional responses and clinical disorders.
The role of language in shaping perceptions of mental health.
The need for nuanced, context-sensitive approaches to mental health treatment and understanding.

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If you enjoyed this conversation with Joe Nucci, check out these other episodes:

How to Harness Brain Energy for Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer

Why We Need to Rethink Mental Health with Eric Maisel

Insights on Mental Health and Resilience with Andrew Solomon

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What we give up, I think, when we shirk the idea of diagnosis altogether, or like, these are just socially constructed or whatever people might say, is we're basically saying, okay, well, then all of the evidence, all the scientific evidence, all the clinical wisdom that has gone into studying and treating these things quite successfully a lot of the time, we're just going to kind of throw it out the window, and I think that's completely unfair.
0:34.1	Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have.
0:39.6	Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true.
0:43.9	And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
0:48.5	We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.
0:51.5	We see what we don't have instead of what we do.
0:54.7	We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
0:56.9	But it's not just about thinking.
0:58.5	Our actions matter.
1:03.0	It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living.
1:10.0	This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
1:17.6	I used to think that having precise clinical language for my internal experience would help me navigate it better. Turns out that's only half true. Joe Nucci is a therapist who wrote
1:23.5	Psychobabble because he noticed something. As mental health language became more popular,
1:28.7	it became less useful. Clinical terms used for specific purposes turned into everyday descriptions
1:34.6	that ended up describing everything, which means that they describe nothing. Like, if everyone has
1:41.3	trauma, what does that word even mean? If we're all depressed when we're sad, what happens to people who are actually clinically
1:48.7	depressed?
1:49.6	The words we use create the world we see.
1:52.7	Once you start viewing yourself through a diagnostic lens, it can be hard to see any other
1:58.0	way.
1:58.7	One of the most powerful takeaways for me was the idea that the value
2:02.4	of a psychological term lies not just in its accuracy, but in its usefulness. And sometimes the
	...

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