If you take even a cursory glance at C-PTSD, you'll see a lot of it has to do with the stress of being trapped in extreme circumstance, with highly deleterious or even catastrophic mental health effects resulting from that prolonged stress.

You wouldn't tell a POW or concentration camp survivor that their trauma was less than that of a combat veteran or shooting victim, would you? Of course not.

Consider failed startups can sometimes lead to homelessness, which is both very trapping and extremely stressful. Sometimes deadly.

Point being: if the trauma ultimately enlists the same physiological and emotional mechanisms in ripping apart the human mind, then attempting to become an arbiter of trauma severity is really besides the point, if not poor taste.

Personally, I've experienced events that satisfy Criterion A of the DSM-V PTSD diagnostic criteria. Think dealing with an enraged, manic family member with a loaded rifle. Being on the receiving end of domestic violence. Threats of sexual violence against loved ones. That level of bad.

While the effects of those events easily satisfied the remainder of diagnostic criteria at the time and lasted quite a while, they pale in comparison to the chronic effects of choosing to pursue a startup and what that did to my mental health.