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.
Quantity comparisons are challenging when there are big differences in kind