News Trauma Definition - Your Thoughts?

[anthony]

A recent article that discusses trauma, and more aptly, where is the definition of trauma headed in relation to real-world diagnoses, talks about whether we're still trying to decide what trauma is. The article states, "The fact that we have these increasingly convoluted definitions shows that we are still trying to negotiate the borders of what is considered to be traumatic."

When you read the article, the above citation is in relation to people watching TV and then claiming post traumatic stress from violent images or such. Does this really mean we need to still figure out what trauma is, definition wise, or more that we simply have to continually refine the left and right arcs we use trauma within to ensure the hypochondriacs are kept away from trying to claim trauma?

I think the article concludes quite well, "The recognition of trauma, in the clinical sense, has been an important advance in mental health but its use in public debate sometimes obscures the fact that there are many forms of social damage and many sources of mental health problems that don’t need to be traumatic to be worthy of attention. The next advance will be recognising other problems as equally important."

Have a read and tell me what you think: http://www.theguardian.com/society/...-of-crisis-definition-boston-marathon-bombing

Are we still confused about trauma's meaning, or is it simply people try and manipulate the severity of trauma under the simple contextual term of "trauma" as though trauma is equal?

 

[Chava]

Trauma, as in PTSD is life-threatening. The nervous system gets flooded and disorganized. It's a neuro-physiological-psych disorder. We are beyond overwhelmed and unable to respond. As described in DSM trauma is spelled out pretty well.

But we all have traumas (like-threatening ones) and go one, scared a while, but don't develop PTSD. Others develop PTSD...has to do with resiliency, prior trauma (nervous system already derailed), ways of coping, support, etc. So we can have trauma and not end up with PTSD.

But we can also experience stress. If it feels really stressful, we sometimes call it trauma.

I sense we lack language. Life-threatening and sexual assualt are tramatizing. But being dumped or forgotten about for a while, or having mean asshole parents...is that "trauma"? Or is that something else, still terrible. We have a very limited language for these kinds of experiences. For overwhelming experiences or those we feel like we cannot cope with (that could be anxiety, depression, anything), it's easy to call it trauma?

Trauma that was life-threatening seems to include more reliving, more somatic forms of reliving, more nightmares, more self-destruction, more hyper-vigilance, less concern for social connections, more concern for basic survival.

Trauma that involves hurt feelings, rejection, lost jobs, etc. seems to involve more rumination and not so much PTSD symptoms. I think we just need a new label for that stuff. This is where CPTSD and BPD need to differ. In BPD the focus is on relationships. In PTSD it is safety, often found best through avoidance of people and isolation.

 

[user27357]

You have to accept that some people are prone to PTSD due to an accumulation of events that may not each in themselves meet any form of the definition of the word trauma or traumatic.

I think about my experiences with the public as an EMT. Some people could ride a roll over and crawl out totally calm and making good decisions, others might have a fender bender and step out of their car into the path of a bus. You get to where you expect everyone to be capable of succumbing to hysteria at any second when you spend enough time at the scenes of recent accidents.

I have to believe that it will be as difficult to determine what a trauma is quantitatively as it was for us to determine who was calm and collected and who was about to do something dangerous as a result of their stress. You just had to accept that everyone even remotely involved in an accident was a victim of that accident in some way, and their reactions were as varied as their own personal histories. I was a victim of those accidents, possibly a reader of these words will feel some trauma if I provoke a traumatic memory and response and be a victim too.

The Boston bombing- I was actually buying a big screen TV that day and saw it happen in real time on like maybe fifty big flat screens, tuned to several different channels. The staff started tuning in all of the news networks and the room became a collage of the event as seen from every camera angle being played over and over. I feel great empathy towards the victims but no personal trauma.

I know someone that was an eyewitness to the second plane impacting the tower, and he has come to accept that many people that saw it on TV are much more affected than he was.

Said it before- Tomato potato, it's all just words describing a human experience that is beyond words from the start.

 

[Deleted member 28986]

I agree with that there's quite a difference between "traumatic" events and truly traumatic events. My definition of trauma involves threats to life and threats to the sense of self, such as experienced by rape victims, torture victims, abused children, and prisoners of war.

One of my biggest frustrations with explaining PTSD to non-sufferers is that they'll usually chime in with an example of how traumatic it was when they went through a tough time in their relationship or something :rolleyes:. Or how it was traumatic when some guy on the phone criticized their writing. (Yes, that is really what a friend said to me as I was painstakingly telling her about my PTSD.) It's especially unfortunate because most of my traumas involve my parents, and everyone on planet Earth can name something that they dislike about their parents. "Yeah, my parents suck, too," they say. There's quite a difference between ordinary parental grievances and severe physical, sexual, or emotional trauma. Unfortunately, the difference flies right over the public's collective head.

I am of the opinion that one can develop complex PTSD merely from severe, prolonged emotional abuse, especially from a very young age. I suffered ample physical and sexual trauma, too, but the emotional abuse and isolation was 24×7×365, and seems to be requiring the most work in recovery.

 

[Friday]

"One such study, on the Boston marathon bombings, found that people who saw the news reports were more likely to report trauma symptoms than the people who were actually caught up in the terrorist attack."

This is the thing that I just keep coming back to...

Real life is different from imagination.

People imagine all these horrible things, and spin themselves out... But in real life? One responds differently than one imagines. It doesn't really matter how (better, worse, whatever), it's simply different.

It probably shouldn't piss me off as much as it does.

 

[greenleaf]

I think the article concludes quite well, "The recognition of trauma, in the clinical sense, has been an important advance in mental health but its use in public debate sometimes obscures the fact that there are many forms of social damage and many sources of mental health problems that don’t need to be traumatic to be worthy of attention. The next advance will be recognising other problems as equally important."

Are we still confused about trauma's meaning, or is it simply people try and manipulate the severity of trauma under the simple contextual term of "trauma" as though trauma is equal?

All of the above?

There seem to be plenty of manipulators with various motivations; they could see this condition as simply another resource they might benefit from, as soon as there are resources provided to help people with ptsd.

However there are other issues that are honest problems... since it's probably an older brain part that responds to events that constitute (trauma) and can be involved in problems that we're calling various subcategories of ptsd, and we can't really ever see the details in there, we are really working with a black box...

I'd assume that our focus is not on saying "what is bad enough to constitute societally recognized trauma", but rather, "what was bad enough to really cause someone's brain to develop ptsd". Since the latter can be a combination of hidden threats (in the case of a clever perpetrator) and such that are perceivable only by the victim in some cases, it can be a huge disservice to use the former. There are so many variations that it's impossible to cover all...

 

[jaccat]

I read a news article a while back which described an incident in which a woman who worked at an abortion clinic attacked a protester outside the clinic. When asked why she said she was triggered by the image on the board the woman was holding. This seems completely wrong to me, to use this term as a way of justifying a violent act (regardless of who was right), but from what I recall it seemed to be widely accepted as a reasonable justification.

I think the article has some valid points. I think, too, people are becoming more and more afraid of doing something that may upset or offend people because it now seems so acceptable to claim trauma at anything. When you start going down that road you start questioning whether concepts like free speech is such a good idea, and whether there needs to be stricter monitoring and controls of media, or indeed anything to which the public has access. Big Brother anyone?

I watched an interview with the author Neil Gaiman in which he discussed the use of the term trigger warnings, which is the title of his new book. As he said: life doesn't come with a trigger warning.

There are always going to be things that upset or offend people. But most of those things don't cause PTSD.

 

[rightkindofme]

I have a lot of strong feelings about this stuff. I have the kind of genetic background where I am probably more susceptible to PTSD than average. Lots of messed up psychological stuff in my family. Three generations in a row of suicide. Lots of depression/addiction/anxiety/violence.

I had an abnormally high number of weird traumas in my childhood. (My adulthood is going pretty well. I'm 8 years rape free!) Lots of them weren't "big" traumas... but they seriously messed me up.

I have had a gun held to my head. But that wasn't what caused me the most harm long-term. That same person (my father) telling me that I was an inherited witch and if I couldn't make people do what I want it was because I wasn't trying hard and I should be punished... that has had much more intense long-term damage than the gun.

So I always feel weird about "definitions of trauma". Many of the things that I struggle the most with day-to-day aren't the big flashy TRAUMAS that people want me to be messed up because of. Those were just things that happened. Those aren't the things that caused all of the developmental damage.

I've been out about having PTSD for many years. As a result I have a lot of friends who have been diagnosed as well because folks like solidarity and I'm easy to find. Many of them have one isolated event that caused their PTSD. If I look at the spectrum of events in my life my friends have had one or two from one end of the spectrum or the other. Either "pervasively damaging but not that traumatic" or an isolated trauma.

We don't have good language for this. They are all bad things but they have such different impact. I mean, nightmares, flashbacks, anger issues... those are commonalities. But I wish there were more language to describe developmentally disruptive traumas vs traumatic event.

I don't think it is a matter of saying better or worse because they can't be compared. They have similar impacts on our bodies but they need to be described differently.

There needs to be a way to say long-term developmental damage during childhood that doesn't cause people to say, "Yeah my parents sucked too."

Uhm, are you from four generations of incest? No? Then we aren't talking about the same thing. It's a gradient thing.

WANT MORE WORDS. :) I'm very frustrated by the lack of useful language here. I want ways of describing the differences that aren't evaluative. That don't sound like "Person A gets to complain but Person B doesn't because it wasn't that bad." I feel like those sorts of evaluations aren't helpful. They don't allow people to be really understood where they are coming from.

I actually think the word trauma is incredibly poorly defined and it really bothers me. I think we need to have a whole set of reference words to describe "bad things" that are not traumatic things and we don't have it.

 

[scout86]

I have some thoughts on this, but am finding it uncommonly hard to put them into words.

First, there's garden variety "trauma" that's part of life, right? It's normal? It happens to everyone? I can't even imagine making it to adulthood without some kind of traumatic event or loss.

My T says that's he's seen situations where there were 3 soldiers in a vehicle that hit an IED. One gets killed in a particularly messy way. One ends up with a debilitating case of PTSD, and the third goes back to the base, cleans up, eats lunch, and goes on with life basically unaffected. He says he has no idea what the difference is, just that there IS one.

I fell asleep one time, driving, ran off the road, hit a tree, totaled my truck, and walked away unphased. I had a 1200# bale of hay flip off a loader and only avoided being squashed because I ducked. (Really fast!) The bale hit the steering wheel, the fenders, the back of the tractor seat, and I felt it touch my back, before it bounced off and landed behind me on the road. I shut off the tractor, walked to the house & had a cup of coffee, then finished feeding hay. Either of those events could have caused PTSD, or so I hear. (And I actually have a few more of those "Oh it wasn't a big deal" /Near death experience type stories.) None of them affected me much. I have PTSD, apparently, because of some childhood stuff that, although I wouldn't recommend it, was actually probably not LITERALLY as life threatening. Seems weird to me. One thing I DO notice.I can tell funny stories about "I could have been killed" all day, no problem. But the "childhood stuff" pretty much just gets referred to that way, if I refer to it at all. There appears to be a difference.

I have come to realize that I AM wired a bit differently than was probably original equipment, for what ever reason. I'm inclined to think that "where you're at" is more important that how you got there. If someone gets to the point where PTSD symptoms are a real part of their lives and causing them problems, who am I to say they "can't" have PTSD because it's not the "right" kind of trauma.

I know. "The Makers of Lists" insist we have "criteria". Since that true, it's good to have the criteria as accurate as possible.

BUT, I've also had a few of those "Everybody does that/ has that happen. I know just what you mean." moments when the speaker actually had no idea. It's frustrating, to say the least. I work a little at reminding myself that I don't actually have to defend my right to have a diagnosis. It's tempting to think "it wasn't bad enough" or what ever. The thing is, if you have the symptoms, it WAS bad enough, what ever it was.

Can you get PTSD from watching something on TV? I don't know. One thing I noticed after 9/11 was the remarkable number of people who were saying that their world view had changed and the world no longer felt like a "safe" place. I talked about this with a friend whose childhood was a lot like mine. We had a good laugh about "These people thought the world was SAFE? What ever gave them THAT idea?" Is it normal to think the world is "safe"? I really don't know. It surely would be "normal" to be affected by realizing that it's NOT for the first time.

Another thing is, in the immediate aftermath of traumatic events, I think it's "normal" for people to react to it. After 9/11, I would think looking up when you heard a plane was normal. I would think nightmares were normal. I would think being totally unphased might be a little "off" in some way. But 5 years down the road? THEN I would think "normal" is those memories and experiences recede into the past as "normal memories" rather than traumatic memories and THERE is a big part of the difference, I think.

 

[Anarchy]

I think that the trauma that causes PTSD is entirely personal. It was sufficeint for that particular person (with all of their life history, baggage, cognitions and the frame of mind of their inner lizard) at that time.

I'll use that indescribable quality as an excuse for a Zen quote:

He then called his four students, Dao Fu, Dao Yu, nun Zhung Chi and Hui Ko and asked them to state their original insights.

Dao Fu said, "I comprehend that the path of Buddha hood surpass the language and the words, yet is thoroughly in conditioned with them"

Bodhidharma said, "You are my skin"

Nun Æhung Chi said, "Honourable Master, that I comprehend is like gladly seeing the Buddha Land, yet seeing it once you never see it again"

Bodhidharma said, "You are my flesh"

Dao Yu said, "The four elements are empty since the beginning and the five aggregates are not exist. Not one thing of what I comprehend is possible"

Bodhidharma said, "You are my bones"

Then, Hui Ko simply stood up, prostrated himself before Bodhidharma, stood up and returned to his seat without uttering a word.

Bodhidharma smiled and said, "You are my marrow"

 

[Anarchy]

I have to believe that it will be as difficult to determine what a trauma is quantitatively as it was for us to determine who was calm and collected and who was about to do something dangerous as a result of their stress. You just had to accept that everyone even remotely involved in an accident was a victim of that accident in some way, and their reactions were as varied as their own personal histories.

A few days back, I got to spend some time with a gentleman who had been intimately involved with the Bradford football stadium fire, back in 1985, both before the fire, and as a key member of the inquiry after it.
He said that although there was a clear path for people to walk forward and onto the pitch and safety, approximately 50% of the people took the route they were accustomed to taking, which took them back, deeper into the fire where they died. He said you don't know which 50% you are in, until it is too late.

 

[anthony]

people are becoming more and more afraid of doing something that may upset or offend people because it now seems so acceptable to claim trauma at anything

Don't worry... whilst I'm here, I won't be tolerating that shit upon this community and will say so at such given times if read. I can't stand political correct nonsense just for the sake of saving someone being hurt through being honest with them about facts... not my opinion, but facts relating to PTSD and what is traumatic enough.