Does anyone use the word “neurotic” any more?

[MadeAMistakeOops]

I never hear anyone described as neurotic any more. Has the word fallen out of fashion?

I know plenty of people who are neurotic. Wouldn’t say it to their face…

I do. About people not to their faces, largely.

Neurosis was a term coined by Freud. Freud fell out of fashion quite a while ago and neurosis was renamed into anxiety.

All about “narcissist” these days.

I use it.

Yes, I use it quite a lot …. but mainly when describing my cat !

Why do you ask?

Think it’s called OCD or anxiety in conversation these days.

I use it every now and again.

I should definitely use it more often to describe myself 😂

DH does ‘you are being neurotic’ - he is usually correct. I don’t know anyone else who says it. Even my very elderly relatives will use ‘nerves’ rather than neurotic. ‘Is it your nerves?’

Only because I found myself using the word “neuroses” in a jokey way in reply to another thread, and I thought “that’s not a word I’ve used in the last 20 years, not sure where my brain dragged it up from.”

And that made me think, I just don’t hear people say the word, I don’t see it written down. Where has it gone? I wondered if the term had been discredited or deemed so offensive/pejorative that no one uses it now (a bit like we no longer describe women as hysterical).

Me too! Google says it’s a personality trait, not a disorder (feels like a disorder to me).

Freudian assumptions remain in vogue

Me too 🙀

I used it the other day to describe somebody.

I think it about other people about 100 times a day.

But we are not allowed to say these things out loud because apparently being “judgemental” is the worst moral failing these days and will get you cancelled (by neurotic people whose judgement is always ok for some reason).

That's funny, I think you are right, I never hear it any more. I think it has been subsumed into other neurodivergences.

It's got negative overtones in the way anxious or depressed don't.

I seem to remember mental illness being split between neurosis and psychosis. Now both terms are out of favour (neurotic/psychotic).