Although I think the phenomenon they write about is real, I have difficulty sympathizing with these types of essay because I see them as causing more harm than good.
Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind. Calling out specific performative or attention-seeking episodes? Sure. But it doesn't need to go beyond that, in my opinion.
I also think life is generally hard, and I don't begrudge anyone trying to get help in whatever form for whatever thing they might need. If you have a headache, maybe you reach for an analgesic. You don't shame people for reaching for analgesics because some others are in truly need of global anesthetic.
"Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind."
Everyone self diagnosing has its own problems though and these days what is presented as trauma on social media has a ridiculously low bar. That's fine if you can look at it objectively and see the hyperbole attention grabbing for what it is but how does that play with all the kids who don't have that capacity? Or adults looking for external reasons to blame their woes on?
I also think life is generally hard, as we all have our personal challenges we deal with that cannot be compared and contrasted. I would suggest though that this is less about shaming people for reaching for pain relief and more about shaming those that are telling the entire world it is in severe pain and should be taking prescription pain killers.
I'll argue the opposite. Severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar) is neurodevelopmental in origin -- trauma probably effects the progression, but on the other hand the neurodevelopmental difference attracts the trauma.
Personally I think the trauma theory is one of the most dangerous ideologies of the 21st century and to me part of resilience is effective resistance against it.
Robin M. Murray, Department of Psychosis Studies, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience: "In the last 2 decades, it has become obvious that child abuse, urbanization, migration, and adverse life events contribute to the etiology of schizophrenia and other psychoses. […] I expect to see the end of the concept of schizophrenia soon." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5605250/
The Role of Childhood Trauma in Psychosis and Schizophrenia: A Systematic Review: "There is a correlation between histories of child maltreatment with several structural changes in the brain." https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8858420/
I thought it's been known for decades that schizophrenia involved both a genetic predisposition and a stressor that caused it to manifest. Has that understanding changed?
Even before epigenetics (in the modern sense) or environmentally induced gene expression was talked about that's what my school textbooks said.
All you can measure is correlation. The rest are theories, and always have been.
"Heritability" is a misnomer, since research into genetics relies on twin studies, so it is impossible to delineate what is 'inherited' from influences during prenatal development. Since technology to "look into the womb" has vastly improved in the past decades, there is more and more research into prenatal effects, which shifts the potential narrative (working theory!) from "it's in the genes" to "it is prenatal trauma due to adverse environmental circumstances".
We don't really know if there ever was or is a "genetic predisposition". Remember, in contrast to "diagnoses" in medicine, psychological classifications such as "schizophrenia" do not describe etiology or biology, they merely describe observable symptoms, with a lot of overlap and redefinitions in between the different categories. More and more voices in the psychotherapeutic community argue that these classifications do more harm than good and should be replaced by a multidimensional system. At least in Europe, my understanding is that they serve mostly health insurance billing purposes, not patient-oriented treatment purposes.
The danger in the "genetic predisposition" line of arguments is that it may sound like something that cannot be "healed", only managed, which we know now thanks to epigenetic research and [brain] plasticity is not the case. Modern therapies can achieve more than merely manage symptoms, and what was previously believed to be "untreatable" is now known to be fixable. Which, as an aside, is one of the reasons why "narcisstic personality disorder" has been dropped, so "it doesn't exist any more".
I think the issue is that rather than arm themselves with the tools to overcome, they succumb and end up posting it on TikTok or YouTube or wherever. Instead of dealing with the core issues they have.
News Flash, we all have issues, we all have past events that have shaped our thoughts and actions. Like you said, it’s the resilience we build by dealing with it, putting it behind us, and moving forward.
> Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind.
I think this is emblematic of the problem with these clinical diagnostic concepts entering common vernacular: In a clinical context, diagnosing someone with a specific clinical term with a specific set of diagnostic criteria isn’t “gatekeeping”, it’s just being accurate and precise. Improperly diagnosing or over diagnosing a condition is not harmless and can bring its own unintended harms. Clinicians have a duty to avoid giving the label too broadly as this can have negative effects.
When these words escaped into common discussion, the idea of limiting the applicability of a term or questioning someone’s self diagnosis makes a lot of people uneasy. It feels judgmental or like we’re unfairly excluding people.
There is a real problem with the way these terms have been adopted to mean something divorced from their clinical definitions, though. When everyone has trauma, the word stops meaning something so serious and now has come to refer to generic realities of life. Now people suffering from serious trauma are actually underserved by the word, because someone immersed in TraumaTok has convinced themselves that they are in the same boat as everyone else with trauma too.
There’s another problem with the dilution of these words that the autism community has been dealing with for decades: When people start broadly diagnosing themselves with conditions despite not reaching the level of clinical diagnostic criteria, they start to move the window for what is considered representative of that condition. Parents of severely autistic children are starting to encounter problems where others are unprepared to handle or even react to their severely autistic children because the popular understanding of autism has shifted to include even self-diagnosed people who may have some slightly quirky behaviors or social skills a few grade levels behind their peers. It’s sad to encounter situations where people encounter a severely autistic person and actually reject autism as the explanation and insist something else must be going on because they’ve come to believe that autism is a relatively mild condition after encountering so many self-diagnosed or over-diagnosed people with autism.
Even clinical providers and educators are getting overwhelmed with parents trying to force TikTok diagnoses on their children. When finite budgets for special needs students have to be spread across 1/3 of the class despite only 1-2 children having actually significant handicaps, it’s not hard to see why “gatekeeping” these popular diagnoses is actually a good thing for those suffering from the conditions.
Gatekeeping trauma with a broad brush is never good in my mind. Calling out specific performative or attention-seeking episodes? Sure. But it doesn't need to go beyond that, in my opinion.
I also think life is generally hard, and I don't begrudge anyone trying to get help in whatever form for whatever thing they might need. If you have a headache, maybe you reach for an analgesic. You don't shame people for reaching for analgesics because some others are in truly need of global anesthetic.