The Future of the Word "Cult": What Hysteria Can Teach Us
Crossing the Line: Coercion and Harm in High-Control Groups was tabled in the Victorian Parliament in July 2026, and I've spent a lot of time contemplating the issues it brought up — before, during, and after — as a co-author of the Beyond Belief submission, in a personal submission of my own, and then in the pages of the finished report. One of the most striking things about the report is a small but important detail: it talks about Coercive High-control Groups, not cults. This is not an accident, and it's impact has less to do with diplomacy or squeamishness than some critics may think. It's the sign of something bigger — I predict it is part of a slow shift in how we talk about this kind of harm, happening in real time, one inquiry and one piece of legislation at a time. It’s worth thinking through properly rather than just noticing in passing.
That title didn’t come from nowhere, and I know that better than most. "High-control group" is the term my co-authors and I chose deliberately for Beyond Belief itself, and we didn’t land on it quickly. There were lengthy discussions in which cult, new religious movement, coercive group and a handful of other options were all tossed around, and none of us could agree that they meant the same thing to the same person twice. High-control group was the term we unanimously agreed on — all of us wanted it — and we then tested it with at least 65 victim-survivors from a range of different backgrounds, where it resonated clearly in a way the alternatives hadn’t.
So that’s what this post is: an attempt to actually think through the word "cult." Where it earns its keep. Where it lets us down. And — because I don’t think you can talk sensibly about where a word is heading without looking at a word that has already made a similar journey — what the history of a very different term, "hysteria," might tell us about where "cult" is going next.
Why "cult" won’t go away easily
Start with what the word does well, because it does genuinely do things.
"Cult" is concise in a way that "coercive control" and "undue influence" simply aren’t. It communicates, in one syllable, that something involving control, exploitation or abuse is at stake — and it does that for an audience who has never read a psychology textbook and never will. That recognisability has real power. It’s why journalists reach for it, why documentaries are titled with it, and why it can pull a story about an obscure organisation into the national conversation in a way that "high-demand group" never could.
For survivors specifically, that same bluntness can be a relief rather than a burden. "I was in a cult" is a sentence that does in five words what would otherwise take five paragraphs of explanation about manipulation, isolation and control. It gives people a place to start, and often a way to be believed without having to litigate every detail first. Some survivors go further and reclaim the word deliberately — using it on their own terms, as a way of naming what happened to them rather than accepting a euphemism the group itself might have preferred.
And precisely because it’s so blunt, "cult" is hard for a harmful organisation to talk its way around. Softer, more official-sounding language can be assembled by any group with a communications budget. "Cult" resists that kind of laundering. It’s part of why the word still has real advocacy value: it gets attention, it names power and exploitation rather than "unconventional belief," and it gives survivors, families and advocates a shared vocabulary for something that would otherwise be very hard to talk about at all.
Why "cult" keeps letting us down
But the same bluntness that makes "cult" so useful is also exactly what makes it unreliable.
There is no agreed legal, academic or clinical definition of a cult. Everyone — survivors, researchers, journalists, the groups themselves — uses it slightly differently, which means the word can lump together wildly different organisations and experiences under one label without telling you anything about what actually happened inside any of them. It doesn’t distinguish financial exploitation from sexual abuse, isolation from coercive theology, a genuinely dangerous group from one that is merely unfamiliar. Calling something a cult and calling something coercively controlling are not the same claim, even though they often get treated as though they are.
That imprecision has real costs. It can be unfairly stigmatising toward minority or unconventional religions that have done nothing wrong. It invites guilt-by-association reasoning — the label doing the work that evidence should be doing. And because the word carries such a strong, sensationalised cultural image — robes, compounds, mass suicides — it can actually make the far more common, far less cinematic forms of coercive control harder to recognise, not easier. A relationship, a small church, a wellness program that never looks anything like the stereotype can hide in plain sight precisely because it doesn’t match the picture the word conjures.
There’s a credibility cost too. Survivors who use the word can be dismissed as biased, dramatic, or "still processing" — even when their account is accurate and serious. And at the level of public debate, focusing on whether something is a cult can quietly replace the more useful question of what the group actually does, which is really the only question that matters if you’re trying to identify and address harm.
All in all, the word's own complex history of positive and negative usage, that date back to its origins in the Latin cultus, creates much ambiguity around what the term actually describes. Its long religious and sociological history, combined with increasingly sensationalised connotations—particularly throughout the 20th and 21st centuries—has made the word both powerful and problematic.
The uncomfortable middle ground
What makes this genuinely interesting, rather than just a simple case of a good word or a bad one, is that the meaning of "cult" is contested in ways that don’t resolve neatly. Survivors, academics, journalists and the groups themselves all use it differently, and the same organisation can be described in three completely different ways by three different people who have all encountered it directly.
Being called a cult doesn’t, by itself, establish that coercive control occurred — and a group can absolutely be coercively controlling without ever being popularly labelled a cult. Terminology like new religious movement, high-control group, high-demand group and coercive group each carry their own assumptions about what’s being claimed, which means the choice of word is never really neutral. It’s always doing some interpretive work, whether the person using it realises that or not.
Underneath all of this sits a genuine tension between precision and accessibility. "Cult" is imprecise but instantly understood. "Coercive control" is far more precise but requires context most people don’t have. That tension doesn’t have a tidy resolution — which is really the central question this whole piece is circling: can "cult" survive as useful, accessible shorthand, provided it’s accompanied by more precise language about actual behaviours and harms? Or does its imprecision eventually make it more trouble than it’s worth in contexts — like legislation — where precision is the whole point?
What "hysteria" already went through
I think there’s a useful precedent here, and it isn’t really about cults at all. It’s about hysteria.
For a long time, "hysteria" did for psychology roughly what "cult" now does for coercive groups: it gave a name to a huge, poorly understood cluster of symptoms, and in doing so it validated that something real was happening to the person experiencing it, even before anyone could say precisely what. It had genuine clinical utility in its era. It was part of how early psychiatry and psychology started paying attention to experiences that had previously gone unexamined altogether.
It was also, in hindsight, a mess. The category was far too broad, grouping together conditions we now understand as having entirely different causes. It was heavily gendered, historically weaponised against women, and capable of pathologising perfectly normal distress. Because it described a presentation rather than a cause, it could obscure the very thing that needed to be understood, and because it eventually became a colloquial insult, it did real damage to the credibility of the people it was applied to.
Here’s the part that matters for this post: hysteria didn’t get quietly retired by decree. It was gradually superseded, as psychology and neurology developed more differentiated diagnostic categories — trauma-related conditions, specific psychiatric and neurological diagnoses — that could describe the underlying mechanism rather than just the surface presentation. The word didn’t disappear from the language. It disappeared from the diagnostic manual while staying very much alive in everyday speech, which tells you something important: a term can become obsolete as a technical classification while remaining alive as cultural shorthand. Those are two different lifespans, not one.
| Hysteria | Cult |
Definitional precision | Broad, poorly defined | Broad, poorly defined |
Public recognisability | High | High |
Communicative function | Useful shorthand for real distress | Useful shorthand for real harm |
Risk | Could obscure underlying cause | Can obscure coercive mechanisms |
Trajectory | Superseded by trauma/PTSD and more specific diagnoses | May be superseded by more precise terms like coercive high-control group |
Cultural afterlife | Survives in everyday language despite declining clinical use | May survive in everyday and survivor language despite declining professional/legal use |
My prediction
When the parliamentary committee took the term a step further, into "coercive high-control group," my first reaction was to bristle at the tongue-twister and reach straight back for the ease of "cult." I still feel that pull, if I’m honest. But I understand why it happened: "cult" doesn’t fit legal language for the same reason "hysteria" doesn’t fit modern mental health language — bluntness and legal precision pull in different directions, and precision usually wins where the stakes are a courtroom or a piece of legislation.
So here’s the prediction, refined a little further than where I started: I don’t think the long form gets abbreviated away in the places that matter most. Legislation and legal documents will very likely keep using the full term — "coercive high-control group" — because that specificity is the whole point of writing it that way in the first place. A statute doesn’t get to shortcut the thing it’s trying to define. What I expect to shift instead is everyday use, outside the legal text itself: practitioners, journalists, advocates and eventually the public settling on CHG or CHCG as practical shorthand — the version people actually say out loud and type in a hurry — while the long form keeps doing its precise, unglamorous work in the statutes and case law behind it.
That’s not so different from how a lot of legal and clinical language already works — a full term for the record, a shorter one for everyday use. And I don’t think "cult" disappears from any of this either. I expect it to do what "hysteria" did: stay fully alive as a cultural and survivor term — the word people reach for first, the word that gets you believed quickly, the word that still shows up when someone searches for help — even as it becomes less useful as a formal, evidentiary category. That’s not really a contradiction. It’s just two different jobs that one word has been doing simultaneously, splitting apart as better tools become available for one of them.
Words don’t have to be perfect to be useful, and they don’t have to be abandoned to be outgrown. If "cult" follows hysteria’s path, it won’t disappear. It’ll just stop trying to do the job it was never really built for, and hand that job to language that was.
... and dare I say it, letting go of the word cult will hopefully appease the cult apologists ..
The future of the word cult
To close, I want to stress that I’m not about to give up the word myself. While I predict that the future of the word cult is destined to eventually decline, I suspect we’re still at least a generation or two away from that happening. Until a term such as CHG or CHCG gains genuine public currency, cult remains my first-choice shorthand when I want to quickly and clearly communicate the concept.
I’d genuinely like to know where you land on this. Does "cult" still do useful work for you, or has it started to get in the way more than it helps? And if you’ve come across "coercive high-control group" out in the wild, has it started shrinking down to CHG yet — or does it still feel like a mouthful? Let me know in the comments.
If you’ve been impacted by a cult or coercive high-control group, you don’t have to navigate the aftermath alone. Support is available, whether you’re recently out, have been rebuilding for years, or are supporting someone you care about.
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