Mental health glossary

175+ clinical terms in plain English. Written by Dr. Nitnem Singh Sodhi to answer the "what does that word actually mean?" questions Indians search for most.

Conditions

ADHD: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder — a neurodevelopmental pattern of inattention, impulsivity and/or hyperactivity that affects function in multiple settings.
Adjustment Disorder: Emotional or behavioural symptoms disproportionate to a specific stressor (job loss, breakup, relocation), typically resolving within six months.
Agoraphobia: Fear of situations where escape feels hard — crowds, transport, open spaces — often driven by fear of a panic attack in public. Highly treatable with graded exposure.
Anger Issues: Not a formal diagnosis, but a common presenting concern where anger is disproportionate, frequent or destructive. Often anxiety, shame or trauma underneath.
Anxiety: A future-oriented threat response where the mind over-predicts danger. Clinical when persistent, uncontrollable, and interfering with daily life for two weeks or more.
Autism Spectrum: A neurodevelopmental profile characterised by differences in social communication, sensory processing and repetitive interests. A difference to understand, not a defect to fix.
Avoidant Personality Disorder: A pattern of pervasive social inhibition and hypersensitivity to criticism that goes beyond shyness and blocks intimacy and work.
Bipolar Disorder: A mood condition with episodes of depression alternating with mania or hypomania (elevated mood, reduced sleep need, racing ideas). Requires specialist care.
Body Dysmorphic Disorder: Preoccupation with a perceived flaw in appearance that others don't notice, driving repetitive checking, grooming or avoidance.
Body Image Distress: Persistent negative preoccupation with how one looks, without meeting full body dysmorphic disorder criteria. Common in Indian teens and young adults.
Borderline Personality Disorder: A pattern of intense unstable relationships, emotional volatility, identity disturbance and impulsivity. Responds well to DBT — not a life sentence.
Burnout: A syndrome of exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy caused by chronic workplace stress. Recognised by the WHO as an occupational phenomenon.
Complex PTSD: A trauma pattern from prolonged or repeated events (abuse, captivity, chronic neglect), adding difficulties with emotion regulation, self-concept and relationships.
Conversion Disorder: Functional neurological symptoms (weakness, seizures, sensory loss) that are real and disabling but not explained by neurological disease. Trauma is often in the background.
Cyclothymia: A chronic mood pattern with milder highs and lows than bipolar disorder, present for at least two years. Often under-diagnosed.
Depression: A state of persistent low mood, loss of interest and reduced function, lasting most of the day for two weeks or more. Biological and treatable — not a character flaw.
Dissociation: A protective disconnection from thoughts, feelings, memory or identity. Common after trauma and treatable with grounding and trauma-informed therapy.
Dysthymia: The older term for persistent depressive disorder — a long-standing low-grade depression that many people mistake for personality.
Eating Disorder: A group of illnesses (anorexia, bulimia, binge eating) marked by disturbed eating and body-image cognition. Medically dangerous and treatable.
Generalised Anxiety Disorder: Persistent, hard-to-control worry across many domains (health, work, family) for six months or more, with physical symptoms like tension and sleep disturbance.
Grief: The natural response to loss. Not a disorder — but becomes clinical when it stays disabling beyond about a year (prolonged grief disorder).
Health Anxiety: Persistent worry about having a serious illness despite reassurance. Sustained by checking, googling and avoidance loops that keep the fear alive.
Hoarding Disorder: Persistent difficulty discarding possessions regardless of value, leading to unusable living space and distress. A distinct disorder — not laziness.
Illness Anxiety Disorder: The DSM-5 replacement for hypochondriasis — preoccupation with having or acquiring a serious illness, with few or no actual symptoms.
Insomnia: Difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking too early — with daytime consequences — for at least three nights a week over three months.
Loneliness: The subjective gap between the connection you have and the connection you want. Now a WHO priority — linked to depression, heart disease and shortened life.
Narcissistic Personality Disorder: A rigid pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration and low empathy that impairs relationships. Treatment is possible but slow.
OCD: Obsessive-compulsive disorder — unwanted intrusive thoughts (obsessions) plus repetitive mental or physical acts (compulsions) done to reduce distress.
Panic Attack: A sudden surge of intense fear peaking within minutes, with chest tightness, breathlessness, dizziness or a sense of losing control. Not physically dangerous, but frightening.
Panic Disorder: Recurrent unexpected panic attacks plus a month of fear about future attacks or behaviour change to avoid them.
Perinatal Anxiety: Anxiety during pregnancy or the first year after birth — more common than postpartum depression and equally treatable.
Persistent Depressive Disorder: A milder but longer-lasting form of depression (two years or more in adults) that quietly shrinks the range of daily life.
Postpartum Depression: Depression beginning in pregnancy or within a year of birth. Affects roughly 1 in 7 mothers in India and responds well to treatment.
Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder: PMDD — severe mood, irritability and physical symptoms in the week before menstruation that lift with the period. Treatable with SSRIs and lifestyle work.
PTSD: Post-traumatic stress disorder — intrusive memories, hyperarousal, avoidance and negative mood after a traumatic event, lasting more than a month.
Schizophrenia: A serious mental illness with hallucinations, delusions, disorganised thinking and reduced emotional expression. Requires psychiatric care and long-term support.
Seasonal Affective Disorder: Depression that follows a seasonal pattern (usually winter). Rare in most of India, common in higher-latitude cities. Bright-light therapy helps.
Selective Mutism: A childhood anxiety pattern where a child speaks freely in some settings and not at all in others (usually school). Treatable — not defiance.
Social Anxiety Disorder: Intense fear of being judged in social or performance situations, leading to avoidance or extreme distress that interferes with study, work or relationships.
Somatic Symptom Disorder: One or more distressing physical symptoms accompanied by disproportionate thoughts, feelings or behaviours about them, lasting six months or more.
Specific Phobia: An intense, out-of-proportion fear of a specific object or situation (heights, blood, flying, dogs). CBT with exposure clears most phobias in 4–8 sessions.
Substance Use Disorder: A pattern of alcohol or drug use causing significant impairment or distress, ranging from mild to severe. A learned regulation strategy, not a moral failure.
Trichotillomania: A body-focused repetitive behaviour of pulling out one's own hair to relieve tension. Related to OCD-spectrum; responds to habit-reversal training.

Therapies

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: ACT — an approach that builds psychological flexibility by defusing from thoughts, accepting difficult feelings, and committing to values-based action.
Art Therapy: Therapy that uses image-making as a way to access and process material that words cannot yet reach. Practised by trained clinicians, not craft leaders.
Behavioural Activation: A depression treatment that reintroduces small, values-linked activities to restart the brain's reward signal. Often as effective as full CBT.
Biofeedback: Training that uses real-time physiological signals (heart rate, breathing, muscle tension) to teach voluntary regulation of the stress response.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: CBT — a structured therapy that identifies unhelpful thoughts and behaviours and replaces them with tested alternatives. Strong evidence for anxiety and depression.
Cognitive Processing Therapy: CPT — a 12-session PTSD therapy that targets 'stuck points' in how the trauma was interpreted (about safety, trust, power, esteem, intimacy).
Cognitive Regulation Therapy: Dr. Sodhi's integrative approach that retrains the brain's interpretation, attention and body-signal loops so distress loses its grip. Typically 6–12 sessions.
Compassion-Focused Therapy: CFT — builds a compassionate inner voice to counter shame and self-criticism. Particularly helpful for high-shame clients (Gilbert, 2009).
Couples Therapy: Structured work with both partners to interrupt destructive interaction loops and rebuild connection, communication and repair skills.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy: DBT — a skills-based therapy combining acceptance and change strategies. Originally for borderline personality, now used for emotion dysregulation broadly.
EMDR: Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing — an evidence-based trauma therapy using bilateral stimulation to help the brain reprocess stuck memories.
Exposure Therapy: Gradual, structured contact with feared situations (in imagination or in life) so the fear response habituates and the avoidance loop breaks.
Family Therapy: Treatment that works with the family system rather than one individual. Useful when the pattern (adolescent distress, addiction, relational conflict) is systemic.
Group Therapy: A therapist-led group of peers working on shared themes. Often more effective and affordable than individual work for social anxiety and addiction.
Habit Reversal Training: A behavioural technique for tics, hair-pulling, skin-picking and nail-biting that pairs awareness with a competing response.
Internal Family Systems: IFS — a therapy that treats the mind as a system of 'parts' led by a core Self, and works to unburden protective and wounded parts.
Interpersonal Therapy: IPT — a time-limited therapy focused on current relationships and role transitions. Strong evidence for depression, especially postpartum.
Ketamine-Assisted Therapy: Use of low-dose ketamine to accelerate psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression. Available in India only under strict psychiatric supervision.
Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy: MBCT — combines mindfulness practices with CBT to reduce depression relapse. Effective when practised consistently, not occasionally.
Motivational Interviewing: A collaborative style that resolves ambivalence about change. Widely used in addiction and health-behaviour work.
Narrative Therapy: A collaborative approach that separates the person from the problem and re-authors the client's story with agency and preferred identity.
Neurofeedback: A form of biofeedback using EEG signals to train brain-wave patterns. Growing but still contested evidence — pick clinicians with medical training.
Play Therapy: Child therapy that uses play as the medium of communication, because children process feelings through play more naturally than through talk.
Prolonged Exposure: A structured PTSD therapy involving repeated imaginal and in-vivo exposure to the trauma memory until the distress reduces.
Psychodynamic Therapy: A depth approach that explores how early experience and unconscious patterns shape current relationships and symptoms. Often longer-term.
Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy: REBT — Albert Ellis's precursor to CBT, focused on disputing irrational beliefs (musts, shoulds) that drive emotional disturbance.
Schema Therapy: An integrative therapy that targets long-standing 'schemas' — early maladaptive patterns — combining CBT, attachment and Gestalt techniques. Useful for personality-level work.
Solution-Focused Brief Therapy: SFBT — a short-term approach focused on future goals and existing strengths rather than problem history. Usually 4–8 sessions.
Somatic Therapy: Body-based approaches (Somatic Experiencing, Sensorimotor) that treat trauma by working with the physiological stress response, not only its story.
TF-CBT: Trauma-Focused CBT — the leading evidence-based therapy for children and adolescents with PTSD symptoms, delivered with a caregiver.
Trauma-Informed Care: A stance across all care that assumes trauma is common, prioritises safety and choice, and avoids re-traumatisation. Not a specific technique.

Screeners

AQ-10: Autism-Spectrum Quotient short form — a 10-item screen for adults; a score of 6 or more suggests a full autism assessment is worthwhile.
ASRS: Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale — a WHO 6-item screen that flags adults who should be assessed for ADHD.
AUDIT-C: A three-item alcohol-use screen adapted from the WHO AUDIT. Fast, culturally portable and non-judgemental.
Beck Depression Inventory: BDI-II — a 21-item self-report for depression severity. Widely used clinically but requires a licence for institutional use.
EPDS: Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale — the standard 10-item screen used in pregnancy and the postpartum window.
GAD-7: Seven-item Generalized Anxiety Disorder scale. Scored 0–21; 10 or above suggests clinically significant anxiety.
HAM-D: Hamilton Depression Rating Scale — a clinician-administered depression measure. The historical gold standard in antidepressant trials.
K10: Kessler Psychological Distress Scale — a 10-item screen for non-specific psychological distress, useful when the presentation is mixed.
MDQ: Mood Disorder Questionnaire — a 15-item bipolar screen. A positive result is a signal for specialist assessment, not a diagnosis.
MoCA: Montreal Cognitive Assessment — a brief cognitive screen used to detect mild cognitive impairment and early dementia.
PCL-5: PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 — a 20-item self-report measure of PTSD symptoms in the past month.
PHQ-9: Nine-item Patient Health Questionnaire for depression severity. Scored 0–27; 10 or above suggests clinically significant depression worth discussing with a clinician.
PSS-10: Perceived Stress Scale — a 10-item measure of how unpredictable, uncontrollable and overloaded life feels over the past month.
WHO-5: A five-item wellbeing index. Scores below 50 (out of 100) suggest low wellbeing and warrant a closer look at depression.
Y-BOCS: Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale — the standard OCD severity measure, covering time, distress, resistance and control for obsessions and compulsions.

Brain & body

Allostatic Load: The cumulative biological wear from repeated stress adaptation. Explains why chronic stress ages the body, not just the mind.
Amygdala: A pair of almond-shaped structures in the brain that flag threat and drive the fight-flight-freeze response. Over-tuned in anxiety and PTSD.
Circadian Rhythm: The roughly 24-hour biological clock that governs sleep, mood, hormones and alertness. Anchored by morning light and consistent meal times.
Cortisol: The primary stress hormone. Useful in short bursts, harmful when chronically elevated — links stress to sleep, immunity and cardiovascular risk.
Default Mode Network: A brain network active during rest and self-referential thought. Over-active in depression and rumination.
Dopamine: A neurotransmitter central to reward prediction and motivation. Blunted in depression, dysregulated in addiction.
Executive Function: The cognitive control skills — working memory, flexibility, inhibition — that plan and coordinate behaviour. Often impaired in ADHD, depression and burnout.
GABA: The brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter — the 'brake pedal' that benzodiazepines and alcohol enhance.
Glutamate: The brain's main excitatory neurotransmitter and the target of newer antidepressants like ketamine.
Hippocampus: A brain region central to memory and context. Chronic stress shrinks it; therapy and exercise help it recover.
HPA Axis: The hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal system — the body's main stress-hormone highway, producing cortisol in response to threat.
Interoception: The sense of the body's internal state — heart rate, breath, hunger. Distorted interoception underlies anxiety, eating disorders and dissociation.
Melatonin: A hormone that signals night to the body. Available over-the-counter in India as a short-term sleep aid; not a substitute for sleep hygiene.
Neurogenesis: The birth of new neurons, especially in the hippocampus. Supported by exercise, sleep and antidepressants; suppressed by chronic stress.
Neuroplasticity: The brain's ability to rewire itself with experience. The reason therapy works — and the reason unhelpful patterns can be unlearned.
Oxytocin: A hormone involved in bonding, trust and social recognition. Released in touch, feeding and safe connection.
Polyvagal Theory: A model proposing three autonomic states — social engagement, mobilisation, shutdown — and how the vagus nerve mediates between them. Popular but debated.
Prefrontal Cortex: The front of the brain responsible for planning, impulse control and emotion regulation. Coming online more slowly explains a lot of adolescent behaviour.
Serotonin: A neurotransmitter involved in mood, sleep, appetite and impulse control. The target of many antidepressants (SSRIs).
Vagus Nerve: The main nerve of the parasympathetic system. Slow breathing, humming and cold exposure stimulate it and dial down the stress response.

Medication

Antipsychotic: Medications used for schizophrenia and severe bipolar states, and sometimes as add-ons in depression. Require psychiatrist supervision.
Atomoxetine: A non-stimulant ADHD medication used when stimulants aren't suitable. Slower onset (4–6 weeks) but no controlled-substance status.
Benzodiazepine: A class of fast-acting anti-anxiety medication (clonazepam, alprazolam) with real dependence risk. Best used briefly and under specialist supervision.
Buspirone: A non-sedating anti-anxiety medication without benzodiazepine dependence risk. Takes 2–4 weeks to work.
Discontinuation Syndrome: The flu-like, dizzy, 'brain-zap' cluster some people feel when stopping an SSRI/SNRI too quickly. Not addiction — a signal to taper slower.
Lithium: The oldest and still most effective mood stabiliser for bipolar disorder. Requires blood-level and thyroid monitoring.
MAOI: Monoamine oxidase inhibitors — an older antidepressant class reserved for treatment-resistant cases; require strict dietary restrictions.
Mood Stabiliser: Medications like lithium, valproate and lamotrigine used mainly for bipolar disorder to reduce mood swings.
Naltrexone: An opioid antagonist used to reduce alcohol and opioid cravings, available in oral and long-acting injectable forms.
Prazosin: A blood-pressure medication used off-label at bedtime for PTSD-related nightmares.
SNRI: Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors (venlafaxine, duloxetine) — useful when SSRIs alone don't work or when pain is a co-symptom.
SSRI: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors — first-line antidepressants (sertraline, escitalopram, fluoxetine) that increase available serotonin. Take 4–6 weeks for full effect.
Stimulant Medication: ADHD medications like methylphenidate that improve attention and impulse control by boosting dopamine and norepinephrine. Prescription-only in India.
Tricyclic Antidepressant: An older antidepressant class (amitriptyline, imipramine) still used for depression, chronic pain and migraine when SSRIs don't fit.

Concepts & skills

Anhedonia: The reduced ability to feel pleasure. A core depression symptom and often the last to lift in recovery.
Attachment Style: A relational template (secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganised) shaped in early relationships and carried into adult intimacy.
Behavioural Experiment: A CBT tool where a client tests a specific prediction in real life to gather evidence that updates a belief. Often more powerful than debate.
Bibliotherapy: The structured use of self-help books as an adjunct to therapy. Evidence-supported for mild-to-moderate depression and anxiety.
Boundaries: The limits you set on what you will and won't do to protect your energy, values and relationships. Not walls — filters.
Catastrophising: The habit of jumping to the worst possible outcome as if it were the most likely. A signature cognitive distortion in anxiety.
Cognitive Defusion: The ACT skill of watching a thought without being controlled by it. Turns 'I'm a failure' into 'I'm having the thought that I'm a failure'.
Cognitive Distortion: A systematic thinking error (catastrophising, mind-reading, all-or-nothing) that fuels emotional distress. CBT identifies and reframes them.
Compassion Fatigue: The exhaustion and secondary traumatic stress that build in people who care for others professionally. Not a weakness — an occupational risk.
Confidentiality: The clinical duty to keep what a client shares private, with narrow legal exceptions (imminent risk to self or others, child protection).
Countertransference: The therapist's own emotional reactions to the client. Not a failure — a source of information when noticed and supervised.
Digital Detox: A period of deliberate reduction in device use to reset attention, sleep and mood. Effective when specific, not vague.
Doomscrolling: Compulsive scrolling of distressing news or social content. Reliably worsens mood, sleep and anxiety — a behavioural target worth naming.
Emotional Contagion: The automatic mirroring of others' emotional states. Explains why one anxious person can shift a whole room.
Emotional Labour: The effort of managing one's emotions to meet a role's demands — heavier in caregiving, teaching, healthcare and customer-facing work.
Emotional Numbness: A blunted or absent emotional response, often after trauma or in deep depression. A protection — not a personality.
Emotional Regulation: The set of skills used to influence which emotions you have, when, and how you express them. Learnable at any age.
Grounding Technique: A sensory practice (5-4-3-2-1, cold water, feet on the floor) that returns attention to the present when overwhelm or dissociation rises.
Hypervigilance: A state of heightened scanning for threat. Common in PTSD and severe anxiety; exhausting to live with.
Impostor Syndrome: The persistent feeling of being a fraud despite evidence of competence. Common in high performers and first-in-family professionals.
Informed Consent: The ethical requirement that a client understands the nature, risks and alternatives of a treatment before agreeing to it.
Learned Helplessness: The passive giving-up that follows repeated uncontrollable stress. A model of depression — and reversible by rebuilding agency.
Locus of Control: The belief about whether outcomes are driven by your actions (internal) or by luck and others (external). Internal locus predicts better mental health.
People Pleasing: A learned strategy of prioritising others' comfort to secure connection or safety. Erodes boundaries and often masks anxiety.
Perfectionism: The drive to meet impossibly high standards, often with harsh self-criticism when they slip. Predicts depression, anxiety and burnout.
Post-Traumatic Growth: The positive psychological change some people experience after trauma — new priorities, deeper relationships, greater strength. Not a requirement, a possibility.
Psychoeducation: The clinician's practice of explaining the condition and its mechanisms in plain language. Reduces stigma and accelerates change.
Rejection Sensitivity: A heightened emotional response to real or perceived rejection. Common in ADHD, anxious attachment and depression.
Resilience: The capacity to bend without breaking under stress. Built by relationships, meaning, sleep and rehearsed regulation — not by 'being tough'.
Rumination: Repetitive, unproductive dwelling on the same worry or regret. A core driver of depression and anxiety — and specifically trainable.
Rumination Trap: The pattern where reflecting on a problem feels productive but actually deepens the low mood. Behavioural activation breaks it.
Self-Compassion: Treating yourself with the same warmth you'd offer a friend in the same situation. Reduces shame; strengthens resilience. (Neff, 2003).
Sleep Hygiene: The habits and environment that protect sleep — consistent schedule, morning light, no screens in bed, no caffeine after 2 pm.
SMART Goal: A goal that is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Time-bound. Useful because vague goals ('be less anxious') can't be worked on.
Somatic Symptom: A physical symptom (pain, fatigue, breathlessness) driven or amplified by psychological distress. Real, not imagined.
Stigma: The social discrediting of a group — in mental health, still the single largest barrier to Indians seeking care.
Therapeutic Alliance: The collaborative bond between client and therapist. Consistently the strongest predictor of therapy outcome — larger than technique.
Toxic Positivity: The pressure to feel or perform good feelings all the time, at the cost of authentic emotional processing. Common on social media wellness spaces.
Transference: When feelings from an earlier important relationship are unconsciously redirected onto the therapist. A working material in psychodynamic therapy.
Values Clarification: The ACT process of naming what genuinely matters to a person, so behaviour can be re-aligned toward it. Not a wish list — a compass.
Vicarious Trauma: Changes in a helper's inner world (worldview, trust, imagery) from empathic engagement with clients' trauma. Requires supervision and self-care structure.
Window of Tolerance: The zone of arousal in which a person can think and feel effectively. Trauma narrows the window; therapy widens it.

Crisis & safety

AASRA: A Mumbai-based 24×7 suicide-prevention helpline (91-9820466726) staffed by trained volunteers.
iCall: A TISS-run free helpline (9152987821) providing counselling in multiple Indian languages over phone and email.
Involuntary Admission: Admission to a mental-health facility without consent, permitted under India's Mental Healthcare Act 2017 only in narrowly defined situations of imminent risk.
Means Restriction: The suicide-prevention practice of reducing access to lethal means (medications, pesticides, firearms) during periods of elevated risk. Evidence-strong.
No-Suicide Contract: An older clinical practice of asking a client to promise not to attempt suicide. Now considered ineffective and replaced by collaborative safety planning.
Safety Plan: A short written plan a clinician co-creates with a client to reduce risk during a crisis: warning signs, coping steps, contacts, and emergency numbers.
Self-Harm: Deliberate injury to one's own body, usually as a way to cope with overwhelming feelings — not always linked to suicidal intent, but always worth addressing.
Suicidal Ideation: Thoughts of ending one's life, ranging from passive ('I wish I wasn't here') to active planning. Always worth discussing with a clinician; never a taboo.
Tele-MANAS: India's national 24×7 mental-health helpline. Call 14416 or 1800-891-4416 for free confidential support in multiple Indian languages.
Vandrevala Foundation: A 24×7 free mental-health helpline in India (1860-2662-345). Trained counsellors available in English and Hindi.

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