My Psychiatric Word of the Year 2025 Is . . . What Might be Yours?

PSYCHIATRIC VIEWS ON THE DAILY NEWS

In recent years, various organizations devoted to words have picked their words of the year. A popular one is that of Oxford. Interestingly, their recent choices have clearly been psychological in important ways. Take the last 4 and note the prominence of social media.

• Rage Bait for 2025. Rage bait seems to refer to internet content designed to provoke anger.
• Brain Rot for 2024. Brain rot seems to refer to how our mental energy is lost due to being preoccupied with trivial content online. We covered it in our column from January 23, 2025, on “Social Psychiatric New Year Resolution #4: Prevent Rotting Brians,” which focused on the new Australian law to ban social media for those under 16.
• Rizz for 2023. Rizz seems to be more positive, referring to charisma and attractiveness.
• Goblin Mode for 2022. Goblin Mode seems to put a positive spin on lazy behavior.

If these words of the years refer so much to our minds and behavior, and if we are a field based on the importance of communicating the right thing at the right time, shouldn’t we have our own word choice for the year? Right and therapeutic words are essential for the therapeutic alliance in clinical psychiatry.

So, I thought, why not try for the previous year 2025? However, it did not seem easy. What criteria should be used? A common word? None of those Oxford words seemed very common. An unusual word? Psychologically problematic in some way?

Perhaps a word premonition occurred to me in our video from almost 2 years ago, on January 31, 2024, and important enough to be rebroadcasted on February 5, 2025. It had to do with the challenge of what to do when someone is in trouble.

We in psychiatry do that every day in responding to the mental health needs of our patients. It becomes especially challenging for those with suicidal risk and severe psychosis, perhaps part of the reason why some psychiatrists decline to work with such patients. Some psychiatrists will also refuse to treat potential patients whose values are dramatically different than theirs.

We are confronted with our own troubles, given the ongoing epidemic of physician burnout and rising moral injury. Here, do we just push on with as much resilience as we can or fight to remove some of the system obstacles?

And it also can be applied to societal troubles, big or little, acute or chronic. Such global troubles include climate instability, nuclear, risky leadership, and perhaps AI. In war, there has traditionally been a special category of being a conscientious objector. In psychiatry, we do have the obstacle of our Goldwater Rule to not publicly comment on public figures. When do we decide to ignore that or demand its revision? News organizations can have similar ethical and moral challenges on what to report and how.

Perhaps last year’s culmination in responding to trouble happened during the mass shooting in Australia right before the Jewish holiday of Hanukah. In the overall context of the invasion of Israel by Hamas and ensuing war in Gaza, as well as the rippling out of Interfaith conflict, a Muslim man, Ahmed Al-Ahmed, stopped being a bystander and after a very brief hesitation, ran out to engage and disarm one of the of the shooters at risk of his own life. We have a built-in mental mechanism to immediately respond to perceived risk, but we can sometimes cognitively override it.

In essence, there are not only such responses in a major disaster, but everyday decisions to step up—or not—to help. Some of this can be taught, as in the Heroic Imagination Project set up by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo.

However, this kind of societal responsiveness has at least 2 kinds of potential moral dilemmas or complications. One is the risk to oneself. Then there is the moral consideration ironically conveyed by the last name of a citizen in Minnesota who was shot dead by an ICE officer recently, Renee Good, mother of 3. What is the “good” is often a reflection of personal morality.

As psychiatric professionals, we have our personal moral values, which may or may or not have a strong religious basis, as well as our professional ethical values. Professionally, we have to primarily prioritize the needs of patients, but secondarily also the public mental health needs of communities, our colleagues, and ourselves, as in the Preamble of the American Medical Association ethical principles.

Politically, President Trump recently replied that his decisions on foreign intervention, as in Venezuela, are based on:

“Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Citizens will vary in their consideration of such morality in such a powerful leader. People can be protestors, supporters, or bystanders. Perhaps the psychiatric goal is to strive to find a way to effectively intervene when there is social or personal injustice from traumatic bullying. That, finally, more or less defines my psychiatric word of the year:

UPSTANDER

Dr Moffic is an award-winning psychiatrist who specialized in the cultural and ethical aspects of psychiatry and is now in retirement and retirement as a private pro bono community psychiatrist. A prolific writer and speaker, he has done a weekday column titled “Psychiatric Views on the Daily News” and a weekly video, “Psychiatry & Society,” since the COVID-19 pandemic emerged. He was chosen to receive the 2024 Abraham Halpern Humanitarian Award from the American Association for Social Psychiatry. Previously, he received the Administrative Award in 2016 from the American Psychiatric Association, the one-time designation of being a Hero of Public Psychiatry from the Speaker of the Assembly of the APA in 2002, and the Exemplary Psychiatrist Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in 1991. He presented the third Rabbi Jeffrey B. Stiffman lecture at Congregation Shaare Emeth in St. Louis on Sunday, May 19, 2024. He is an advocate and activist for mental health issues related to climate instability, physician burnout, and xenophobia. He is now editing the final book in a 4-volume series on religions and psychiatry for Springer: Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, Christianity, and now The Eastern Religions, and Spirituality. He serves on the Editorial Board of Psychiatric Times.