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By the 2000s, the concept of trauma in psychiatry had expanded to include subjective harm

As an example of concept creep, take the word “trauma.” In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the DSM, psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury. In the 1980 revision, however, the DSM III recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.”

The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions. In fact, even most people who do have traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention

By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included, according to SAMHSA as of 2023, “an event or circumstance resulting in physical … emotional … and/or life threatening harm … [and which] has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s mental … physical … [and] emotional health …[or their] social .. and/or spiritual well-being,” what ever “spiritual” well-being means. The subjective experience of “harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word “trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health professionals but by their clients and patients—including an increasing number of college students. I believe this is because pharma companies exploit the fuzziness between mild mental disorder and being probably well to extend diagnosis and sell more drugs. The more people who can be considered traumatized, the more drugs can be sold to quell their stress. An objective definition of harm limits how much harm can be considered valid for treatment.

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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Psychiatry Status:☀️

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