> There's been an attempt to redefine "trauma" broadly. Technically trauma is acute stress. That is, a great deal of stress delivered all at one time. There's been an attempt to redefine it to include chronic stress. That is, generally living under stressful conditions. >

Do you have any references for trauma being tide to short acute stress? Looking at Wikipedia does not include acute stress and even talks about the difference between short trauma and long term trauma.

Also I definitely recall that even when I was young (>30 years ago) we would talk about e.g. the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.

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ants_everywhere 11 hours ago | parent [-]

Acute in the sense that it's delivered all at once, not that its effects are short-lived. For example, the DSM defines PTSD, which is post-traumatic stess disorder. I.e. a trauma occurred (acute stess) and the lingering disorder is a stess disorder rather than a trauma disorder. You might colloquially say you have been living with the trauma of PTSD, but that doesn't make sense; you're really living with the stress of PTSD after having experienced the initial trauma.

They don't use the words "acute" or "chronic", that was my attempt to explain it to a lay audience. The first paragraph of Wikipedia describes it as "caused by severe distressing events, such as bodily injury, sexual violence, or other threats to the life of the subject or their loved ones." The DSM-V diagnosis requires "exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence." I.e. a traumatic event.

You can experience multiple traumatic events. But, medically, the distinction seems to be that delivering stress chemicals to your body all at once produces a different response than delivering them consistently over time.

> the trauma of child abuse or sexual abuse, which is often not acute.

People talk this way. Dictionary.com also mentions the "trauma of divorce." The trauma of divorce is clearly metaphorical rather than actual trauma. Sexual violence does count as a traumatic event. Violence toward children would also count as a traumatic event. Whether a child (or even adult) that has been abused has PTSD depends on the facts of the case.

One should not assume that trauma is better or more severe than stress delivered over a longer period. Imprisonment, child abuse, and working in a military hospital are all things that come to mind as experiences that would leave a lasting impression. But those symptoms would generally not be the same as trauma symptoms.

You do have to be careful on Wikipedia with this topic because they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens. It also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not. The article needs a pass from someone with a professional background.

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growingkittens 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Considering that psychiatry is in its infancy, your statements have a level of finality that isn't warranted at all.

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rendx 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> they mention unconscious suppression of child abuse, which is not a thing that happens

Chu, J. A., Frey, L. M., Ganzel, B. L., & Matthews, J. A. (1999). Memories of childhood abuse: dissociation, amnesia, and corroboration. The American journal of psychiatry, 156(5), 749–755. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.156.5.749

"Higher dissociative symptoms were correlated with early age at onset of physical and sexual abuse and more frequent sexual abuse. A substantial proportion of participants with all types of abuse reported partial or complete amnesia for abuse memories. For physical and sexual abuse, early age at onset was correlated with greater levels of amnesia."

Boyer, S. M., Caplan, J. E., & Edwards, L. K. (2022). Trauma-Related Dissociation and the Dissociative Disorders:: Neglected Symptoms with Severe Public Health Consequences. Delaware journal of public health, 8(2), 78–84. https://doi.org/10.32481/djph.2022.05.010

"Dissociative amnesia is characterized by gaps in autobiographical memory beyond normal forgetting, that may range from one experience to several years."

Ehlers, A., & Clark, D. M. (2000). A cognitive model of posttraumatic stress disorder. Behaviour research and therapy, 38(4), 319-345. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0005-7967(99)00123-0

etc

> also says awareness of climate change causes trauma, which it does not

Albrecht, G., Sartore, G.-M., Connor, L., Higginbotham, N., Freeman, S., Kelly, B., Stain, H., Tonna, A., & Pollard, G. (2007). Solastalgia: the distress caused by environmental change. Australasian Psychiatry, 15(Suppl 1), S95–S98. https://doi.org/10.1080/10398560701701288.

Cunsolo, A., & Ellis, N. R. (2018). Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss. Nature Climate Change, 8, 275–281. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-018-0092-2.

Usher, K., Durkin, J., & Bhullar, N. (2019). Eco-anxiety: How thinking about climate change-related environmental decline is affecting our mental health. International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, 28(6), 1233–1234. https://doi.org/10.1111/inm.12673.

Coffey, Y., Bhullar, N., Durkin, J., Islam, S., Usher, K. (2021). Understanding Eco-anxiety: A Systematic Scoping Review of Current Literature and Identified Knowledge Gaps, The Journal of Climate Change and Health, Volume 3, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joclim.2021.100047.

Walinski, A., Sander, J., Gerlinger, G., Clemens, V., Meyer-Lindenberg, A., & Heinz, A. (2023). The Effects of Climate Change on Mental Health. Deutsches Arzteblatt international, 120(8), 117–124. https://doi.org/10.3238/arztebl.m2022.0403

"The available evidence shows that traumatic experiences due to extreme weather events increase the risk of affective and anxiety disorders, *especially the risk of post-traumatic stress disorder*. Heat significantly increases the morbidity and mortality attributable to mental illness, as well as the frequency of psychiatric emergencies. Persistent stressors such as drought, food insecurity, and migration owing to climate change can also be major risk factors for mental illness."

etc

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ants_everywhere 9 hours ago | parent [-]

With due respect I assume you believe these papers are somehow relevant and that you're making a point, but these papers aren't the evidence you think they are. You are also promoting outright cranks in other comments.

Psychohistory, Freudianism, repressed memories, and multiple personalities are all debunked ideas. Dissociative amnesia is just the rebranding of the repressed memory hypothesis. Anxiety and grief are not trauma.

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rendx 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Citations needed.

I don't see how "outright cranks", "debunked ideas", are a constructive way to engage in such discussions. You asked for professional opinions, I provided professional opinions. You provided nothing.

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ants_everywhere 8 hours ago | parent [-]

I have a hard rule that I don't provide citations to people who don't know the field and seem motivated primarily by politics. This cuts down on sealioning.

But if you're interested in the topic, most of what I've said is covered in a university intro to psych course. I think they may also be covered in AP psych courses. I recommend looking up some of the top psych programs and seeing what they use for their intro undergrad course. That will go over the rejection of Freud and psychoanalysis, the difference between things like anxiety and trauma, and most likely the repressed memory fiasco in the 80s and 90s.

Wikipedia has references for dissociative amnesia under the controversy section. Also check out the repressed memory article.

For the basics of science and pseudoscience you'd have to take a course in scientific methods.

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rendx 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You add another ad hominem, great. You know nothing about me and my educational background. You are not required to engage in a discussion, but my point stands: You provide no supporting evidence whatsoever for your perspective.

"Prolonged trauma in childhood, however, can produce severe identity disturbances that may interfere with the encoding and later retrieval of personal semantic and autobiographical event information. […] In light of our accumulating empirical and theoretical understanding, genuine recovered memory experiences no longer appear as bizarre or counter-intuitive as they have been painted by those who are skeptical of their occurrence. The field has not been well-served by much of the existing literature, which has uncritically embraced a variety of myths, logical errors, and false assumptions, and adopted a simplistic approach to what are complex and fascinating memory phenomena […]"

Brewin, C.R. (2012). A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Recovered Memory Experiences. In: Belli, R. (eds) True and False Recovered Memories. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, vol 58. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-1195-6_5

The Rise and Fall of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation (2020)

https://news.isst-d.org/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-false-memor...

"Debates are frequently characterised by people hunkering down with theoretical rigidity and engaging in ad hominin attack, rather than using scientific debate to further knowledge"

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ants_everywhere 8 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes we are all familiar with the repressed memory cranks like Chris Brewin. He's been at it since the 1990s.

You are not my child and it's not my job to educate you. I'm not going to explain physics to everyone who thinks he has a perpetual motion device either.

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rendx 8 hours ago | parent [-]

You are totally right. Nobody asked you to respond to my contributions in this thread. You decided to talk down on me and other people with zero arguments other than personal attacks. That's fully on you. "We are all familiar" with that pattern.

	▲	ants_everywhere 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I responded because I care about science education and psychology education and wanted to correct the record. When someone comes in with a bunch of links that can be confusing to people who don't know the field. If you have motivation and strong enough confirmation bias you can find papers that claim to support anything. Even the existence of telepathy https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=extrasensory+perception That's why it's hard to have good judgment about a field unless you've studied it formally.