In March 2023, Dr Gabor Maté, a retired family physician and among the most respected trauma experts in the world, boldly diagnosed Prince Harry with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), during a live interview.
Having read the Duke of Sussex’s ghost-written memoir, Spare, Maté said that he had arrived upon “several diagnoses” that also included depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. These were not evidence of disease per se, Maté went on to elaborate. Rather, he said: “I see it as a normal response to abnormal stress.”
What Maté did is nowhere near customary clinical procedure: a diagnosis requires a structured assessment and adequate time with a patient. And to render a diagnosis publicly raises obvious privacy concerns.
However, the gesture was much in keeping with the rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.
Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual.
This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.
It is evident on #TraumaTok, where across more than 650,000 posts creators variously rant, weep and recast traits as symptoms – “Perfectionist? It’s your trauma!” – to great algorithmic reward.
The same sensibility crowds bookstore shelves. Barnes & Noble lists more than 3,300 titles under the “anxiety, stress and trauma-related disorders” category, from memoirs of resurfaced memories to healing manuals and neuro-pop analysis. (One author calls trauma “an out-of-control epidemic”, transmissible among family and friends.)
Most of these works promise uplift, if not the beginning of a new life. They also assure readers they are not alone in being undone by challenges large and small (see for instance: Tiny Traumas: When You Don’t Know What’s Wrong, But Nothing Feels Quite Right). In audio form, the Gifts of Trauma podcast considers subjects as diverse as menopause, math anxiety and inauthentic corporate leadership, while Start Thriving examines the ways a wrecked nervous system dictates partner choice.
And on any given weekend, the most well-off among us can select from a menu of expensive seminars and workshops devoted to defanging troubled memories and connecting to the inner self. For those willing to spend $6,200, there is a seven-day Adriatic cruise, Sailing into Alignment, in which Maté lectures in person on trauma’s profound impact on our wellbeing.
Trauma, which once invoked a shattering incident, is now found in the unavoidable abrasions of ordinary life. It is implicated in procrastination, occupational malaise, and listless attachments. It is the reason we are “bad at relationships”; it is why we nap too much; it is the antecedent to our compulsive binging of Friends.
As a result, trauma has been rendered meaningless. Or as psychiatrist Arash Javanbakht told me: “When everything is trauma, nothing is.”
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When trauma expanded beyond catastrophe
Writing on the subject in Harper’s, the British writer Will Self offered: “A concept is a useful tool for hacking edges into the chaos.” Trauma has proved a most useful tool for all the explanatory work we now foist upon it.
Born from the nightmares and flashbacks of combat veterans, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was inaugurated as a diagnosis in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders of the American Psychiatric Association in 1980. Initially conceived as a debilitating response to stressors occurring outside the range of normal human experience, it was soon expanded by clinicians who contended that traumatic memories were distinct from ordinary memories in the ways they are encoded, stored and experienced. If unresolved, they could linger on.
In 1994, the psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk published a paper on memory and the psychobiology of post-traumatic stress, which would become the foundation for his 2014 bestseller The Body Keeps the Score. The book argued that traumatic memories are often not explicit. Instead, they can sit outside conscious memory and lodge instead in the body’s sensory systems, in our limbs and viscera.
Imagine someone who was screamed at as a child. Years later, even though they rationally know themself to be safe, their body reacts automatically to an elevated voice: their muscles clench, their heartbeat elevates, their stomach knots. The early traumatic experience shows up later as a reflexive physiologic response, triggered long after the initial danger has passed.
His work dovetailed with that of Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, whose 1992 Trauma and Recovery knit together previously siloed threads of trauma research. She demonstrated that whether trauma was the result of combat, sexual or domestic violence, or political terror, its impact on the individual followed a recognizable pattern. These wounds were deepened, she argued, not only by the violation but also what came after – and the ways society tends to deny, distort and suppress the realities of trauma.
Think, for instance, of a woman assaulted by someone in a position of authority. If she comes forward she may be met with disbelief, blame or even intimidation because her experience confronts the dynamics that allow such abuse to occur.
Herman’s work on chronic interpersonal trauma, such as domestic violence – as distinct from single-incident trauma – helped lay some of the theoretical groundwork for van der Kolk, who has researched the ways trauma dysregulates the nervous system, distorts memory, and fractures social connection.
While van der Kolk’s theories are now treated as gospel – especially among lay readers— they were initially met with skepticism by his peers (and have since attracted sustained criticism). He went on to champion an expanded diagnosis of developmental trauma disorder, suggesting that early harms did not just represent a psychological injury, but became part of the architecture of the self. However, his efforts to include this in the DSM were not successful.
When we spoke, van der Kolk described the dismissal with which his early work was met. “When you croak, no one is going to talk about trauma,” he recalls being told. But in his view, even that resistance was evidence of trauma’s implicating sweep. To not recognize the enormity of trauma, he told me, “is really a reluctance to come to terms with your own pain inside yourself”.
Today, the pendulum has swung wildly in the other direction. According to PsychNet, the American Psychiatric Association’s scholarly literature database, the term “trauma” appeared less than 3,000 times between 1980 and 1990, compared to more than 66,000 times between 2015 and 2025. Added to the zeitgeist are the harms of vicarious trauma, secondary trauma, intergenerational trauma, epigenetic trauma, ecological trauma, attachment trauma and, of course, trauma-informed everything.
Even van der Kolk concedes the paradox this profusion creates: trauma, he says, is both “an extraordinary event” and “extremely common, so unextraordinary”.
Part of this surging interest makes sense given our recent past. We have reckoned with #MeToo, and the terrorizing dynamics that led to Black Lives Matter. We have been grasping at the contours of our loneliness, amplified during the height of Covid, and gasping at the many ways society fails us all – men, women and children: no one is spared.
Nonetheless, the consequences are framed as both lasting and sweeping. Trauma, it is theorized, now lurks as the hidden germ of heart disease, cancer, autoimmune disorders, substance abuse and run-amok anxiety.
“The common template for virtually all afflictions – mental illness, physical disease – is in fact trauma,” Maté pronounced in 2021. In his bestselling books on subjects as diverse as ADD, addiction, and how toxic social values have turned the very idea of “normal” into a pathological state, Maté expands on this view: pervasive ills signal not just mounting individual distress, but the failure of systems that have stripped us of the ability to connect and cope.
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Pain is part of life, but so is resilience
The majority of Americans have experienced an event that falls within psychiatry’s parameters of trauma, said Javanbakht, who directs the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University school of medicine. “We’re talking about assault, robbery, rape, shootings, war exposures, serious motor vehicle accidents, life threatening illnesses.”
And yet, this widespread exposure does not necessarily translate into lasting debility. The lifetime prevalence of PTSD among American adults hovers just below 7%. In his book Afraid, Javanbakht describes working with refugees, survivors of torture and first responders – and notes that in such populations, the rates climb much higher. “But on an average,” he said, “in a not horribly war-exposed population, even when trauma occurs, it doesn’t mean you’re broken.”
After 9/11, professionals anticipated widespread psychological fallout in New York and resources and providers flooded the city. Fema provided more than $150m in grants for crisis counseling and programs meant to alleviate distress. But the wave of need never came, said clinical psychologist George Bonanno, who runs the Loss, Trauma, and Emotion Lab at Teachers College at Columbia University. “Hardly anybody wanted it,” he said. For Bonanno, this instance offers a prime example of the way we tend to vastly overestimate PTSD at the expense of appreciating our innate capacity to recover.
“PTSD is what happens when traumatic stress doesn’t go away, when it festers and expands and eventually stabilizes into a more enduring state of distress,” Bonanno writes in his book, The End of Trauma. But events themselves are poor predictors of their emotional aftermath. Both trauma and PTSD are “dynamic states with fuzzy boundaries that unfold and change over time”.
Bonanno has spent decades researching the other side of trauma: the fact that most people, even after enduring violence or disaster, will recover on their own with time. While resilience is equally hard to predict, we trend on average in being expert in our healing. If we were all stewards of buried trauma, acquired in our lives or passed through the generations, “we wouldn’t even be here,” said Bonanno. “We would just be the most helpless race of beings on Earth.”
The more interesting question, according to van der Kolk, is what propels survival. For the person who has been abused or subjected to horrors, what is most intriguing is the ability to surmount and continue.
“That’s really what keeps me going in this field,” he said, “when I get to know what happened to people. Oh my God, you’re still here. You haven’t killed yourself. You’re trying to be a good person.”
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‘If you follow me, you’ll be saved’
For van der Kolk, trauma becomes problematic “when it becomes your identity or your alibi”. But in today’s popular culture, it is often framed as exactly that: both the wound that defines us, and the map promising our way back.
Once cloaked in shame, trauma has shifted from “stigmatizing to romanticizing”, Javanbakht said. It is the modern hero’s journey, facilitated by a booming marketplace and algorithms that reward the recitation of our misery.
In our secular age, the excavating of our pain for public consumption has replaced the descent into the underworld and the voyages of peril and bravery. The hero is not Odysseus or Orpheus, but the survivor who finds courage to tell their tale, and what was once tragedy has become a product.
“They sell these tragedies,” said psychotherapist Antonieta Contreras of the proliferating options pandering to our pain. “They are selling everything as trauma. ‘You are broken and if you follow me, you’ll be saved.’”
The promise is always the same: we can be healed, we can triumph, we can transcend.
Trauma has become a form of cultural currency that risks pathologizing every day experience and confers an identity that is “virtuous but impotent”, writes psychologist Nicholas Haslam of the University of Melbourne. Trauma is, by definition, something external – a rupture that tears through what we imagine to be an otherwise continuous life. Because of that, Haslam told me, it can serve a psychological function by giving meaning to feelings of distress, stuckness and the confusion we all feel in life.
Moreover, he said, it suggests a badge of honor: “We tend to elevate people who’ve suffered at someone else’s hands.”
When I asked Bonanno why he thinks people cling to self-imposed labels of trauma, he admitted to a cynical outlook. “I think it’s an excuse,” he told me. “It takes away our personal agency and it also removes responsibility. It’s not me. I was traumatised. That’s why I’m behaving this way.”
Contreras sees in this trend a certain level of entitlement, in which the individual, through publicly confessing their story, in effect inures themself from any criticism. It offers the stamp of validation, while also providing “an easy way out of how difficult life has become”.
The vision of trauma as expressed by Maté and others is deeply appealing. By flaunting the label, one becomes blameless. I am acting brutishly, recklessly, selfishly not because of some characterologic flaw, but on account of subterranean pains that dictate my actions. This view is what Javanbakht describes as a “secondary gain” of trauma self-labeling.
We are meaning-making creatures, he said, we default to narrative explanations to give order to our lives. Trauma offers a way to rationalize “the things that are bothering us and sometimes give us an excuse for lack of functioning”.
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‘Pain is the way the world is designed’
There is a paradox influencers and their followers rarely foresee: the tighter one clings to the wound, the narrower life becomes. Indeed, research suggests that labeling distress as a mental health problem gives rise to a genuine increase in symptoms. The label itself becomes destructive.
While talking more openly about our private hurts has raised awareness of mental wellbeing, it hasn’t made us healthier. Instead, as Contreras told me, it deepens our sense of defeat. That is not to say the pain is unwarranted, she said – especially for younger generations coping with digital displacement, environmental decline, strained social ties, and the collapse of structures that once suggested some kind of upward path.
“People think it’s trauma,” she said, “But no, it’s pain, and pain is the way the world is designed.”
Another unintended consequence: as trauma saturates our culture, those most harmed are eclipsed by those who are most prolific. Online performances of distress, Javanbakht argues, risk trivializing the suffering of people who have endured truly debilitating harm.
He pointed out: “How many survivors of torture, how many refugees, how many veterans, how many firefighters, how many people coming from extreme poverty have you seen on TikTok or social media talking about their trauma?”
Rather, he observed, we hear from those who have “the time and the resources and the sense that I am important enough to share my glorious trauma with others”. The privileged get platformed and access to therapeutic resources, while systemic suffering is shunted further into the margins.
Javanbakht’s comments track with observations from the social sciences. In their pointed critique, The Empire of Trauma, anthropologist Didier Fassin and psychiatrist Richard Rechtman argue that trauma has moved beyond a medical or psychological diagnosis to become a moral and political category.
“Trauma,” they write, “has become the privileged idiom through which individual and collective suffering is expressed, acknowledged, and governed.” As a moral category, it determines who deserves both resources and compassion. To be recognized as traumatized is to claim a ticket to legitimacy.
If the badge of trauma is ultimately more injurious than palliative, Javanbakht suggests we cease brandishing it.
“Your freedom” – to choose, to process, to make meaning, to resist – “is the most important thing you have,” he said. “I tell my patients, you live just once. And every minute that is gone is gone and will not come back.”
