Words, like any living entity, change and evolve over time, a process called semantic change or shift. The word ‘silly’ originally meant blessed, happy, or fortunate but over time came to mean weak and vulnerable and more recently, foolish. While some words have taken centuries to change, in the field of psychiatry and psychology transformation of words and their associated meanings has been quicker. This is important because the way we define, describe, and label a person and their experience will influence how they understand themselves and effect how we, as practitioners, respond to them.
Concept Creep
Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology at the University of Melbourne contends that in the last twenty years the meaning of some of psychology’s key concepts has changed in a systematic way with negative concepts which refer to ‘undesirable, harmful, or pathological aspects of human experience and behaviour’ having expanded their meanings. This semantic ‘extension’ of the original concepts takes two forms. “Vertical expansion” occurs when a concept’s meaning becomes less rigorous to include milder versions of the same phenomenon. An example of this would be depression which once referred to debilitating and all-encompassing distress but now routinely refers to contextually understandable sadness. This occurs ‘through identifying a phenomenon or through the relaxation of criteria for defining it’. A second form is “horizontal expansion,” ‘when a concept extends to a qualitatively new class of phenomena or is applied in a new context.’ One example is the word “refugee” which used to refer to people displaced by war but has expanded to include those fleeing environmental disasters.
He notes that while these changes have been recognised in specific instances by our field, the general pattern has been missed and reviews evidence for concept creep in abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice. He suggests that there is evidence for ‘an increased sensitivity to negative experience and behaviour, an increased focus on harmful forms of inaction, and an increased acceptance of subjective criteria for deciding when the concepts apply.’
Concept Creep and Trauma
In a recent article in The Conversation, Haslam specifically addresses concept creep in relation to the term trauma. In the original DSM, trauma referred exclusively to physical injury but has now come to include the subjective distress an event causes, straddling both the physical and psychological. It is also now generally used in a wider range of semantic contexts and in less emotionally fraught circumstances making it milder and normalised. In the public domain and strongly driven by social media, the concept has further stretched to include big traumas and small traumas, like harassment in the street or conflict with a friend.
Does it Matter?
While at one level extension of these concepts may indicate that we have become a more compassionate society, there is a more troubling side. Stretching can pathologize ordinary events and engender a sense of hopelessness and decreased capacity to exercise control over difficult circumstances. It can also encourage overdiagnosis and medicalisation of situations that are painful and difficult but within a person’s capacity to change. Finally, it collapses distinctions which are important to maintain when dealing with those who have experienced devastating, long term and repeated experiences of betrayal and abuse, from those that are unpleasant and transitory to lifechanging physical and emotional assaults.
Haslam, N. (2026) What is trauma? The more we talk about it, the more it means The Conversation Published: May 27, 2026
Nick Haslam (2016) Concept Creep: Psychology’s Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology, Psychological Inquiry, 27:1, 1-17, DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2016.1082418
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