cathartic

adj

1. Purgative; inducing mental or physical catharsis.

   “Shaving, my favorite activity, is very cathartic.”

2. That which releases emotional tension, especially after an overwhelming experience.

   “"So, there are real opportunities to create real change with enforcement." Prosser describes how some of that change is also cathartic to those who have been directly affected by incidents on the railway, such as the families who have lost loved ones.”

   “For some, Saturday’s protests were cathartic, a show of force and solidarity by progressives who had struggled to pick themselves up from last November’s election defeat.”

   “I don’t know if [Kamala] Harris found writing 107 Days cathartic, but reading it certainly wasn’t.”

noun

1. A laxative.

   “The disease was regarded as pneumonia so far advanced that suppuration seemed to have supervened; bleeding, blisters, expectorants, and cathartics diminished the symptoms; the pulse continued frequent, hard, full, but always regular.”

   “As Jan McTavish notes, when the physician diagnosed the headache's origins in the digestive system, particularly constipation, the antidote might entail cathartics (substances that accelerate defecation) or emetics (inducers of vomiting) and other regulators of the digestive process.”