May the Real Trauma…Please Stand Up, Please Stand Up,Please Stand Up

my copy of Bessel Van Der Kolk’s the body keep the score (Jan 2022)

Hi Beautiful People,

Hope you are enjoying these last days of September.

(If you’re a millennial, that title sorta-kinda makes sense; if not, it’s a nod to Eminem’s The Slim Shady song, which was a hit back in the day. This blog is all about demystifying stuff, and I didn’t want to lose you from the jump.)

Business of the day:

I read an interesting article last night that got me thinking, and I wanted to share it with you ( just in case I decide to turn it into a research project and blog about my findings).

The article, How Trauma Became Big Business (and a £900 Conference Ticket) by Alexandra Jones, published by the UK’s Sunday Times, said this about trauma:

“The word used to be reserved for war, abuse and other serious crime. Now it’s a buzzword tied to a multibillion-dollar industry.”

“…over the past two decades, trauma has ballooned from a clinical term into a cultural shorthand for almost any form of suffering.”

“Too often, he [Michael Scheeringa] argues, trauma is a label that offers an easy way out. ‘People will call just about anything trauma because it gives them a sense that there’s a single reason for their problems. It means they don’t have to look within themselves.’”

This got me thinking:

When we say “that experience/situation/period in our lives was traumatic”, what do we really mean?

When service providers say “they offer trauma-informed services,” what exactly are they offering?

When there are mass shootings, pandemics, floods, and other disasters that have us talking about “collective trauma” what are we actually talking about?

MHA Lancaster Suicide Prevention Conference 2025, Sept 18th 2025

In my last post highlighting the MHA Lancaster Suicide Prevention Conference 2025, I shared that the keynote speaker used these words to describe trauma “… ‘too much, too soon, too fast’ and highlighted the toll of both complex and vicarious trauma.”

Now I am curious, do those ‘levels’ of trauma really exist if there are doubts about what trauma is?

I remember when I was just getting into mental health advocacy (15 years ago).

Back then, words like trauma were reserved for MASSIVE OCCURRENCES, and equating every experience to mental health diagnoses was a big no-no. We used words like stigma to make sense of what was happening.

Now it feels like the pendulum has swung all the way to the other side, and suddenly we are all walking DSM-5 experts, ready to diagnose everything. Overnight, everyone is “neurodivergent,” and somehow we all have a Clinical Masters or PsyD to back up these findings.

I’ve been seeing conversations about the dangers of this, and slowly noticing a move against it. From both my research and lived experience, I see the beauty of awareness, but also the dangers of hyper-awareness, especially on social media and now through AI validation.

I’ll be doing more digging on how we got here and how this swing “backwards” is shaping up, what it means for people who need care and for those working in care.

I might even try to make a proper research project out of it.

For now, I just wanted to share/bookmark these thoughts here.

If you have been thinking through this, working on this, I would love to hear from you as I make time to read some books mentioned in the article:

• Trauma Industrial Complex: How Oversharing Became a Prod in a Digital World – Darren. McGarvey (article about the book The perils of oversharing — and the rise of the Trauma Industrial Complex by Sonia Sodha)

• The End of Trauma: How the New Sci of Resilience Is Changing How We Think About PTSD – George Bonanno (@gorgiobee)

• The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Pop Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong – Michael Scheeringa, MD (@m_scheeringa) (I’m especially curious to compare this one to The Body Keeps the Score—aka the “trauma bible.”)

Thinking about all of this also makes me reflect on my research in addiction.

Much of the literature on substance use and addictive behaviors points to traumatic experiences as the genesis. If trauma becomes a buzzword or performative label, do we risk missing the deeper, lived realities that actually drive these struggles? Perhaps this will become the specific focus of my research: exploring how definitions, misdefinitions, and hyper-awareness of trauma shape the support people actually receive in addiction and mental health care.

Until the next update on this project,

Sending love and light,
Sitawa