[Discussion] should this community stop using the word "relapse" for regain at all
Noticing a lot of regain posts use "relapse", borrowed pretty directly from addiction/recovery language. Genuinely asking whether that framing helps or hurts here — on one hand it captures the real difficulty, on the other it might import a moral-failure connotation that doesn't fit a condition that's substantially biological/mechanistic.
best — the order this archive was captured in
as someone who thinks about the biology side of this a lot: the mechanistic reality (appetite regulation returning to a prior set point once the drug effect fades) genuinely doesn't map well onto "relapse", which implies a choice or a slip. I'd support moving away from it, though I recognize changing community language is hard and slow.
that's basically the argument I was reaching for but couldn't articulate as precisely, thank you
"regain" is the more neutral word already available and used constantly in this exact community, I think the fix might be as simple as just using that consistently instead of reaching for "relapse" out of habit.
can confirm from the inside, "relapse" is the word that made my own posts feel heavier than they needed to, "regain" feels like a fact, "relapse" feels like a verdict
Good discussion, and a fair point about language shaping how people feel able to post. Not going to mandate word choice, but happy to gently encourage "regain" over "relapse" in the community guidelines as a suggestion rather than a rule.
that's a reasonable middle ground, appreciate you taking the suggestion seriously rather than either ignoring it or over-formalizing it
mild pushback, some people do describe their own experience using relapse-adjacent language deliberately because it captures a felt sense of compulsion they experienced, policing other people's self-description feels like a different kind of overreach
that's a fair point and nobody in this thread suggested banning the word for self-description, just suggesting "regain" as the community's default framing rather than "relapse" as the assumed default
ok, that's a narrower ask than I initially reacted to, agreed with that version
glad this landed somewhere both of you are comfortable with, that's genuinely all I was hoping this thread would do
rare to see a disagreement thread actually resolve instead of just fizzling out, nice to watch
tl;dr — "regain" as the default community word instead of "relapse", not a ban, just a nudge, mods are receptive
small language change, genuinely think it'll help how posts here feel to write, saving this thread
fwiw this is one of the more thoughtful meta-discussions this community has had, no pile-ons, actual movement on the disagreement
- 1mild pushback, some people do describe their own experience using…5 comments in this branch · started by u/devils_advocate_d