Why Are Psychiatrists Called “Shrinks”?
Ever wondered why people often refer to psychiatrists or therapists as “shrinks”? It sounds so casual that you might assume it’s been around forever.
The nickname likely developed from the slang term “headshrinker”, which TIME magazine explained in 1950 as “Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist". The phrase may have been inspired by the South American practice of shrinking and preserving human heads for spiritual purposes—but in Hollywood it was used jokingly, as if psychiatrists could “shrink” oversized egos or problems down to size.
By the 1960s, the shorter version “shrink” appeared in print in Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49, and the word quickly stuck.
Funny how a tongue-in-cheek Hollywood quip grew into a term we all still recognize today.
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