Mental Illness Terms and Hermeneutic Hijacking

Nonliteral uses of mental illness terms abound. Common examples include criticizing a person’s mood swings by saying “you’re bipolar”, hyperbolically exclaiming that a particularly difficult college exam “gave me PTSD”, or responding to a compliment about the cleanliness of one’s home by saying “I just have OCD.” There has been some pushback in recent years, both socially and within the philosophical literature, against using mental illness terms nonliterally to imply something negative about the subject. The focus so far has been on the pejorative nature of the utterances. Nonliteral uses which imply something positive about the subject have all but gone ignored. One might think that these positive uses are innocent, perhaps even helpful in combatting stigma. On the contrary, as I argue in this paper, all nonliteral uses of mental illness terms are harmful, and they are harmful for the same reason. I argue that they contribute to what I call hermeneutic hijacking. Hermeneutic hijacking occurs when a term’s literal meaning is eclipsed by a nonliteral usage in a way that prevents the original term from functioning as it should. Though people have recognized the harm of pejoration, they have overlooked the way that nonliteral uses of mental illness terms, even absent pejoration, cause hermeneutic injustice.