I don't know why people are doing this, but it's almost always closely bound to politics. For example, the commenter below mentioning the political commentators Will Self and Dan Carlin as evidence for the theory.
I've noticed generally that people who talk about trauma being broad in this sense also tend to have a confused understanding of psychology in general.
> One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect.
They are definitely incorrect. One pop culture way of looking at this is fairy tales. Not too long ago we used to tell children that if they went into the woods they could get eaten by people who lived there and lured children into their houses.
True CPTSD as diagnosed over time by a clinician is the result of complex traumas (complex, specifically, as that’s part of the definition. It’s what the C is for). The term is valid in that context.
In common social media language, even the term CPTSD has become diluted. It was intended to represent complex cases of PTSD which were edge cases, and correspondingly rare.
At some point the social media version of CPTSD emerged as a generic term and nearly everyone who self-diagnosed as having PTSD started upgrading themselves to CPTSD.
The comment above is right that “trauma” has become so generic as to cover everything stressful or saddening in common vernacular. The concept of CPTSD was supposed to be a step above even normal trauma, but now even CPTSD is being brought out as a generic term for any post-trauma response, which was never the definition of CPTSD.
A similar trend is happening on social media with the ADHD influencers now upgrading themselves to “AuDHD” which they say is a special more difficult variant of ADHD combined with Autism. My friends in psychiatry are at their wits end with all of the people coming in and demanding Autism diagnoses or “AuDHD” diagnoses despite not showing Autistic traits at all.
There’s an arms race going on where some people try to amplify experiences into something much more dramatic. These therapy and psychiatry terms start to lose their meaning when they get adopted by social media.
My own childhood included the relatively common experience of being sexually assaulted by a relative and being threatened with death if I talked about it, and as a young adult, while I never quite believed I had MPD, I read so many books by and on multiple personality disorder, and took both comfort and inspiration from the stories.
Like so many other things in our human society, networked technology is making this part of society more visible.
Something similar happens with medical students. They kind of start to recognize themselves in all kinds of physical conditions. It is fairly common phase they go through.
Because that's what many healers outside of western medicine are touting.
People are amplifying because the western medicine approach isn't addressing underlying issues & so people are trying to explain the compounding of their issues in the language of western medicine. The dismissiveness in these comments is a direct driver of this culture.
Western medicine is well aware of the fact that they can't treat the underlying cause of things like autism and ADHD. If you're a real patient with one of these diagnoses (or even depression), they will tell you that upfront. They're not pretending to fix anything with pills.
I was recently diagnosed as "AuDHD". I noticed that doctors who don't understand anything outside of depression and anxiety were more likely to refer to autism as a "fad".
The ICD does have an entry for Complex PTSD, but it may not match what many people think of as CPTSD, which from what I see is closer to what Bessel van der Kolk called "developmental trauma."
And, personally, I look at the world, do I meet the criteria for Asperger's? Probably, although without a time machine there doe not appear to be any way to be certain. But it's a so-what I have had no reason to ever talk to a psychiatrist about. A label won't change reality, it won't provide any solutions, why should I bother?
There has been a romantisation of Asperger/autism because people only want to look at the "benefits". But the truth is that it's a very isolating experience and the tradeoffs are rarely very nice.
In a similar fashion, people will romanticize being very tall, when they are actually many pain points to that experience as well... We always desire what we don't have, because we can't be fully aware of the compromises required without experiencing them.
It's not like I'm not used to it, anyway. At the age of 4, the responsible women at the kindergarten told my mother that I was "too different" (only recently learned this, not that I didn't realize something was going on back then). I have always been able to make friends somehow but there is always a weird disconnect.
Ah well, can't recommend the experience really.
Why would you want, much less demand, to be diagnosed with any particular disorder? Is there such a thing as being fashionably disordered?
I think that if I felt something was wrong with me, I would want to be accurately diagnosed, not fashionably diagnosed.
Anecdotally, absolutely yes. Based on what the Instagram and YouTube feeds have sent me over the last couple of years, ADHD in particular (Autism less so, but as the parent notes, "AuDHD" is becoming very popular) is totally glamourised at this point, much to the detriment of people who actually have to manage ADHD and Autism, I assume.
There is an enormous amount of monetised content around it.
When you see the drugged out people who drive people out of cities into the suburbs or give you another reason to order a private taxi for your burrito [1], note that psychosis is frequently caused or exacerbated by amphetamines. Plenty of people who get a prescription and who feel poor and that the world is unfair develop a "tolerance" for their meds because they are keeping 1 and selling 2 and they're contributing to that visible disorder you see.
[1] https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/good-cities-cant-exist-without...
https://www.amazon.com/Autism-Matrix-Gil-Eyal/dp/074564399X
and you can ask the question of why schizotypy
https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...
is ignored which is that by being a developmental disability "autism" avoids the stigma that a diagnosis of severe mental ilness would bring (e.g. confirmed bipolar Kanye West thinks he is autistic, Elon Musk who sure acts like he's bipolar but is not diagnosed also thinks he is autistic) If you told the parents of the kid who's being bullied in first grade who shows some signs of anxiety and seems to be dressed oddly that he has a 10% chance of losing his mind completely as a young adult they'd be horrified. Tell them that he has autism and they can get more resources.
The less flippant rewording of that is that the schizotypal mindset prefers strong-link "positive-sum" problems
AFAIK, schizotypy is not culturally associated with positive traits.
You're right that in the past there were more messed up events, which had high chance of being traumatic.
But you're forgetting is the role that Perception has in that equation - from the perspective of a human, a traumatic event isn't a comparison exercise to all possible events, or to past events on previous generations.
Your subjective experience is bound to your context.
In that sense, I wouldn't be shocked if there was more trauma now from the amount of stimulus were getting throughout our life, and the volume of dramatic changes we go through.
Not to mention that our life styles don't even allow us to process traumatic events properly.
In psychiatry trauma has long been defined much more narrowly than just acute stress. Specifically exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence. So not just any acute stress but stress associated with real life violence. That’s the DSM definition of trauma for PTSD and you’ll sometimes find nitpicky professionals sticking to this narrow definition. But it’s not how most people use the word.
I don't believe the person with PTSD of your definition benefits from gatekeeping an understanding of ptsd.
It also just flatly does not correspond to the research. Modern PTSD and cptsd concepts exist because the existing concepts didn't work, and the patients fit classic outcomes.
Put another way,
If someone was assaulted in church, maybe they had a more "real" PTSD If someone was different in their head and felt constrained at church everyday and their heart rate goes up every time they enter a church to the same degree as the assaulted persons does too....that's the outcome being similar (with some simplifications).
Trauma is the bad thing and being unable to do anything about it, and what that can do to your psyche.
People develop trauma not just because of how bad the experience was, but the circumstances before and after.
Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.
Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
They don't use the words "acute" or "chronic", that was my attempt to explain it to a lay audience. The first paragraph of Wikipedia describes it as "caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones." The DSM-V diagnosis requires "exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence." I.e. a traumatic event.
You can experience multiple traumatic events. But, medically, the distinction seems to be that delivering stress chemicals to your body all at once produces a different response than delivering them consistently over time.
> the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.
People talk this way. Dictionary.com also mentions the "trauma of divorce." The trauma of divorce is clearly metaphorical rather than actual trauma. Sexual violence does count as a traumatic event. Violence toward children would also count as a traumatic event. Whether a child (or even adult) that has been abused has PTSD depends on the facts of the case.
One should not assume that trauma is better or more severe than stress delivered over a longer period. Imprisonment, child abuse, and working in a military hospital are all things that come to mind as experiences that would leave a lasting impression. But those symptoms would generally not be the same as trauma symptoms.
You do have to be careful on Wikipedia with this topic because they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens. It also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not. The article needs a pass from someone with a professional background.
Chu, J. A., Frey, L. M., Ganzel, B. L., & Matthews, J. A. (1999). Memories of childhood abuse: dissociation, amnesia, and corroboration. The American journal of psychiatry, 156(5), 749–755. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.156.5.749
"Higher dissociative symptoms were correlated with early age at onset of physical and sexual abuse and more frequent sexual abuse. A substantial proportion of participants with all types of abuse reported partial or complete amnesia for abuse memories. For physical and sexual abuse, early age at onset was correlated with greater levels of amnesia."
Boyer, S. M., Caplan, J. E., & Edwards, L. K. (2022). Trauma-Related Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders:: Neglected Symptoms with Severe Public Health Consequences. Delaware journal of public health, 8(2), 78–84. https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2022.05.010
"Dissociative amnesia is characterized by gaps in autobiographical memory beyond normal forgetting, that may range from one experience to several years."
Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour research and therapy, 38(4), 319-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00123-0
etc
> also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not
Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(Suppl 1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.
Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8, 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.
Usher, K., Durkin, J., & Bhullar, N. (2019). Eco-anxiety: How thinking about climate change-related environmental decline is affecting our mental health. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 28(6), 1233–1234. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12673.
Coffey, Y., Bhullar, N., Durkin, J., Islam, S., Usher, K. (2021). Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps, The Journal of Climate Change and Health, Volume 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047.
Walinski, A., Sander, J., Gerlinger, G., Clemens, V., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., & Heinz, A. (2023). The Effects of Climate Change on Mental Health. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 120(8), 117–124. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0403
"The available evidence shows that traumatic experiences due to extreme weather events increase the risk of affective and anxiety disorders, *especially the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder*. Heat significantly increases the morbidity and mortality attributable to mental illness, as well as the frequency of psychiatric emergencies. Persistent stressors such as drought, food insecurity, and migration owing to climate change can also be major risk factors for mental illness."
etc
Psychohistory, Freudianism, repressed memories, and multiple personalities are all debunked ideas. Dissociative amnesia is just the rebranding of the repressed memory hypothesis. Anxiety and grief are not trauma.
I don't see how "outright cranks", "debunked ideas", are a constructive way to engage in such discussions. You asked for professional opinions, I provided professional opinions. You provided nothing.
But if you're interested in the topic, most of what I've said is covered in a university intro to psych course. I think they may also be covered in AP psych courses. I recommend looking up some of the top psych programs and seeing what they use for their intro undergrad course. That will go over the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis, the difference between things like anxiety and trauma, and most likely the repressed memory fiasco in the 80s and 90s.
Wikipedia has references for dissociative amnesia under the controversy section. Also check out the repressed memory article.
For the basics of science and pseudoscience you'd have to take a course in scientific methods.
"In light of our accumulating empirical and theoretical understanding, genuine recovered memory experiences no longer appear as bizarre or counter-intuitive as they have been painted by those who are skeptical of their occurrence. The field has not been well-served by much of the existing literature, which has uncritically embraced a variety of myths, logical errors, and false assumptions, and adopted a simplistic approach to what are complex and fascinating memory phenomena […]"
Brewin, C.R. (2012). A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Recovered Memory Experiences. In: Belli, R. (eds) True and False Recovered Memories. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol 58. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1195-6_5
The Rise and Fall of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation
https://news.isst-d.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-false-memor...
You are not my child and it's not my job to educate you. I'm not going to explain physics to everyone who thinks he has a perpetual motion device either.
When someone comes in with a bunch of links that can be confusing to people who don't know the field.
If you have motivation and strong enough confirmation bias you can find papers that claim to support anything. Even the existence of telepathy https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=extrasensory+perception
That's why it's hard to have good judgment about a field unless you've studied it formally.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shit_life_syndrome
in that it describes the interaction of poverty and mental illness which can well be interpreted in a left-wing frame (these people are victims of the system, they need to get some more resources to get their footing) or a right-wing frame (these people don't take responsibility, they drive away, squander or destroy resources)
At times theories of broad trauma were respectable such as Freud's Oedipus theory and even today I think certain kinds of organizations such as the U.S. Marines and the medical profession can be seen as transmitting their culture through traumatic experiences.
Adding to your examples, there's tiger-mom type trauma (+Jewish variants of that) which has inherited the superficial respectability of Oedipal (neo-Bronze? Neo-aetic? Neo-chalcic?) myths
Tying back to GP's fairytales, obviously
Maybe it isn't totally factually accurate but it has enough truth to me that it represents a small flicker of hope in what is too often a chronically invalidating world.
Basically, the common argument is that life WAS emphatically much more brutal in the preindustrial past, and people felt the same grief that we do today — however, such events were less likely to serve as an etiology of chronic anxiety-centered conditions like PTSD for a multitude of reasons. E.g. you can’t lay around depressed in bed all day if you rely on subsistence agriculture because you’re going to slowly and painfully starve, or you’re exposed and desensitized to brutality from a younger age, or you have less strict social requirements/expectations than a modern 9-5 would impose so you can grieve and act out on your own terms, etc.
Dan Carlin’s “Painfotainment” is a good self-contained intro to these ideas for a casual audience, if it seems up your alley.
i believe (i don't know enough about this) a big factor is also how your peers treat you after you experience trauma. think about veterans coming home, friends and family don't understands what they went through. they can't talk to anyone because nobody takes them seriously, even to the point of disbelief, or they blow things out of proportion. maybe the veteran doesn't feel any pain, but they tell him that he should. either way, the veteran is completely misunderstood. (again, this is not backed by any knowledge of psychology, just a guess based on some personal experience)
so because in the past everyone experienced the same brutal life (except the land lords o otherwise well off), it wasn't as traumatic as it would be today.
On the individual level… for me, certainly, the hardest part of dealing with my particular flavour of living nightmare was that literally nobody could relate to it, and the others who went through it are scattered to the winds. When you explain something painful and the response is “I would have considered myself lucky to be in your situation” or words to the effect, it’s a rather lonely thing.
In the past, if you said “the baron came and murdered my child on a whim”, people would likely sympathise - in today’s society… well. We have such a buffet of lives and possibilities that comprehension of the worlds of others is increasingly challenging.
Solzhenitsyn put it well - can a man who is freezing understand one who is starving?
Even in areas that were some distance from the towers there was a relatively high incidence. They put it down to a background level of stress including sources like violence on TV.
This was in comparison to other parts of the world that were less modern and less busy than experienced more traumatic events but had less PTSD. The conclusion was that if you generally have a more boring/ quiet life you will be better able to absorb trauma if it occurs.
What makes you think this wasn't common?
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind
When we start redefining trauma to cover everything down to the basic realities of life like having to pay for rent to live somewhere, the term loses meaning. With a definition this broad, where do we draw the line between stress and trauma? Is there a line between basic inconvenience and trauma, if the person suffering the inconvenience doesn’t handle it well?
The less discussed problem is that some people have a problem of exaggerating everything into catastrophic stressors, thereby turning common experiences into traumas. This itself is a problem that is addressed through therapy, but it’s not as amenable to garnering sympathy on social media. It’s not appealing to read someone whine about having to work a job to eat food in a first world country, because that’s life and it’s a hundred times easier than it was for our ancestors. However, reframe that as a high-brow article about the perils of capitalism and how it inflicts trauma on us and causes PTSD and now it feels like we are the victims who deserve sympathy.
That's not how to handle any complex system with accuracy and effectiveness.
Therapy doesn't address systemic oppression, which does lead to more incidents resulting in PTSD & is a generator of CPTSD (which isn't just for edge cases, but for recurrent stressor that don't allow the body time to recover from past events).
Western therapy is failing. The therapists attending to what's going on are speaking out and some are abandoning their practices because they realize they've been co-opted in systemic harm.
https://www.traumaandphilosophy.com/ and https://traumatheory.com/
Other writings: For example the books by Vivian Broughton, a UK therapist: https://www.vivianbroughton.com/my-books/ Her latest book ("You were just a child...") contains critical essays, which you might enjoy.
Essential reading: The books by Judith Herman, who coined the term "Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" and lobbied to get it added to the DSM. Her latest book is all about justice for victims (and how the system is failing them).
The most famous critical essays about modern society from a therapist are by Sigmund Freud. You may want to start with "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1929). Quote:
"The present cultural state of America would give us a good opportunity for studying the damage to civilization which is thus to be feared. But I shall avoid the temptation of entering upon a critique of American civilization; I do not wish to give an impression of wanting myself to employ American methods."
https://www.ludwig-janus.de/downloads-in-english.html
Various texts by other psychologists linked to at the bottom of that page.
My experience matches very much with this thread. After years of therapy I hit a limit to what conventional psychology could explain or understand or “treat”, and the only thing that worked after that was going deeper into my own psyche with meditation.
The whole psyche is available for exploration when you stop believing that you are made of thoughts. It becomes extremely clear where all the anxiety and depression and addiction comes from, and that almost all conventional approaches merely treat the symptoms.
Catastrophizing is unhealthy, yes, and is amenable to therapy. It's also true that social control in a modern world functions through a thousand channels all woven into an apparently gentler but no less effective apparatus than old fashioned methods.
The apparent conflict of narratives here serves to divide. These points of view can in truth be reconciled. What is needed is to try to illuminate the issue from whichever perspective is most appropriate for a given context. It is wise to council resilience and fortitude to someone who is leaning into a self indulgent tendency, in one situation. Equally important in another situation is to refuse the malevolent or careless the freedom to blame the victims of their schemes for inadequate capacity to acclimate to an environment engineered against them.
Felt more like a journal entry.
Anecdote: try everything but the drugs if you can. What helps me: regular exercise, cut alcohol, do my best to sleep/wake up with a schedule. Make a list of what I need to do every day that isn’t insane.
Not going to solve everyone’s problems. But I’ve consumed clonapen here and there for very specific reasons and otherwise don’t need it when I keep all of the above as top life priorities.
The "ripple effect" of trauma is magnified more than ever. You don't even have to go out of your way to get the news, as with the past, oh, before 30 years ago...now it's in our pockets. I think the assumption passes the intuition prima face test in my world, too bad not yours. Equipment may need better calibration.
One of the main premises of this article is that society today is more traumatic than in the past, which I find to be laughably incorrect. They took what could have been a good article simply exploring modern drug use and ruined it with all these tangential and unfounded claims.