Source: TED Talks
Read time: 2.3 minutes plus 3.7-minute video montage
 
This Happened
I watched every TED Talk about trauma so you don’t have to. There were over 34 talks.  What I found was not a celebration of science, but a festival of overreach.
Who Did This?
The TED organization, founded in 1984, is famous for posting curated talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything." TED Content Guidelines state, “At TED, we strive to present information in a way that is both compelling and 100% credible.” Further, the TED Science Standards page states that they do not support “claims that are too sweeping.”
Hmmm.
The TED Talk Trauma Epidemic
First, watch the montage below of all the TED talkers who made extraordinary claims about trauma. Look for these four main claims:
1.Trauma causes every mental disorder under the sun — and addiction too.
2.Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) cause a sweeping array of physical diseases.
3.Stress and trauma permanently rewire the brain.
4.Trauma is the single greatest public health problem in the world.
 
These talks have collectively racked up nearly 20 million views. Unfortunately, these claims have little to no support in research.

Let’s take a tour through the highlights — or rather, the lowlights.
 1. Trauma Explains Everything
The award for “Trauma Explains the Universe” goes to Liz Mullinar (TEDxNewy, 2011). She claimed “all psychotic people had trauma”, along with trauma is the causal agent in 86% of people with bipolar disorder, 90% with "border [sic] personality disorder,” and 80% with depression. That’s quite a discovery — except no such causal data exist. She also insists people are addicted to drugs because of their pain, and that trauma “cannot be remembered.” So, invisible trauma causes nearly everything, and we can’t remember it. Convenient.
 
2. ACEs: The New Universal Boogeyman
The talk that ignited the ACEs movement’s cult-like enthusiasm came from Nadine Burke Harris (2014), with a staggering 13 million views. Burke Harris equates all ACEs — including things like divorce or having a depressed parent — with childhood trauma, then claims these cause multiple lethal physical diseases. Her proof? Stress hormones. She even says she can predict suicide risk from a child’s ACE score during a routine exam. She calls ACEs “the single greatest public health threat.” Not poverty. Not infectious diseases. Childhood stress.
She’s not alone. Benjamin Perks (2015) described ACEs as “a dose of poison” that can “take 20 years off your life.” None of this has been proven with actual causal data (see here and here) — but TED audiences loved it.
By the time Eric Kuelker (2018) took the stage, the claims had mutated further: stress, he said, “tears apart DNA.” His mother’s childhood fear and shame in WWII supposedly gave her cancer.
 
3. Rewiring the Brain, One Buzzword at a Time
Next up: the neurohype crowd. Vicky Kelly (2014) claimed that childhood trauma rewires the brain to become “Velcro for bad and Teflon for good.” Paris Goodyear-Brown (2018) said children are locked in an “epic battle of neurochemicals” between cortisol and oxytocin, and that play therapy “digests trauma.” Meanwhile, Patti Ashley (2022) explained that trauma disconnects your heart from your mind, but luckily, “you can rewire your neural connections and even change your DNA.”
To neuroscientists, this must sound like a fever dream. it's a fascinating theory, but there’s no credible evidence that cortisol routinely kills human neurons, or that trauma changes DNA in unique or systematic fashions.
 
4. Trauma as the World’s Greatest Threat
Many speakers have promoted trauma as humanity’s top existential problem. Burke Harris and Perks declared it the greatest public health threat. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Renae (2017) went further, asserting that Black women are dying of heart disease because of the trauma of racism. Jelan Agnew (2021) pushed this even further: she described Black culture itself as a collection of trauma responses — hustling, straightening hair, and trying to appear “appropriate” in white society were all forms of trauma coping.
At this point, “trauma” has become so elastic that it stretches to cover every possible hardship or cultural behavior.
 
5. The Cult of Trauma Science
What unites these TED talks is not science, but storytelling of a post-modern leftist progressive foundation that civilization is oppression. Each speaker wraps a kernel of truth — that adversity affects people — in layers of exaggeration. Terms like “rewiring,” “toxic stress,” and “public health crisis” lend the illusion of medical precision while avoiding the biological basis of human behavior based on genetics inherited at conception.
The result is a popular mythology of trauma: an all-explaining, all-powerful force that warps our bodies, minds, and even DNA. It’s gripping television, but lousy science. Instead of insight, we get moral theater — the comforting fantasy that every problem traces back to pain, and every solution is empathy and awareness.

Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
Patient A sat down and gave me the short version of her life story, which read like a highlight reel of terrifying experiences. An uncle attempted to rape her when she was 13. Two college professors propositioned her for sex in exchange for grades. She survived a serious car accident, lived through a hurricane, and suffered two miscarriages. A driver once pointed a gun at her in a road rage incident. A close friend was raped two blocks from her home. She watched her father die instantly from a stroke.
 
“I think I was traumatized by that,” she said more than once.
 
Then there was Patient B, a Black man who worked for a county road maintenance department. He noticed a rope hanging in the vehicle barn that, after thinking about it for a day, looked like a noose. He believed it was left there as a message because of tension with his white coworkers.
 
Both patients believed they’d been “traumatized.” Were they?
 
Three Definitions of Trauma
Let’s start with the strictest definition — the one used in psychiatry. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) defines trauma as an event that involves actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence — either directly or as a witness (learning that it happened to a close loved one was recently added but I believe that is wrong).
These events are sudden and terrifying — moments when you genuinely fear for your life. They’re the only kinds of experiences that can lead to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
And they’re common. In the largest survey ever conducted on this topic — over 68,000 respondents across 24 countries — about 70% reported experiencing at least one life-threatening event [1].
 
The second definition broadens the field. It includes deeply stressful life events that don’t threaten your life — things like true discrimination, emotional abuse, neglect, divorce, bullying, or watching terrorist attacks on TV. These experiences can absolutely cause emotional pain and even long-term distress, but they rarely — if ever — lead to PTSD.
 
Then there’s the everything-is-trauma definition — the modern cultural one. By this version, just about anything can count: perceived discrimination from a barista, a tough exam, a traffic jam, a breakup, or a bad performance review. We casually toss around the word all the time: “I was stuck in traffic for an hour — it was traumatic!”
 
Why the Definition Matters
Words matter. If we can’t agree on what “trauma” means, we can’t communicate clearly. Science depends on precise definitions. If two researchers can’t measure the same thing with reliability, you can’t compare results or draw conclusions.
So, when it comes to PTSD, only the narrowest definition — the life-threatening one — is correct.
 
Being Traumatized vs. Having Experienced Trauma
There’s another layer of confusion here: experiencing trauma is not the same as being traumatized.
Many people live through horrific events and never develop symptoms of PTSD. Being traumatized means you were affected — that you have ongoing symptoms and some impairment in your ability to function. To be “traumatized” means the event left a psychological wound.
The psychiatric community — through the DSM — gets to define this, and for good reason. The DSM’s definition is based on data, not vibes.

But in truth, she did feel supported; spending the time to review every painful event and assess its impact was deeply validating. It’s the opposite of brushing someone off — it’s listening carefully and diagnosing correctly. Because understanding what “trauma” really means isn’t just semantics. It’s how we ensure people get the right diagnosis — and the right kind of help.
 
Bottom line:
You can experience trauma without being traumatized.
And sometimes, recognizing that difference is the most healing truth of all.
 
 
References
[1] Benjet C and 34 additional authors, The epidemiology of traumatic event exposure worldwide: results from the World Mental Health Survey Consortium, Psychological Medicine 46 (2016):327-343
[2] Kilpatrick DG.  Resnick HS.  Acierno R.  Should PTSD Criterion A be retained? Journal of Traumatic Stress.  22(5):374-83, 2009 Oct.

Source: European Journal of Psychotraumatology
Read time: 1.9 minutes
 
This Happened
A study to rank the barriers to treatment for complex PTSD was published in the most recent issue in the leading European journal on trauma, European Journal of Psychotraumatology [1].
Who Did This?
Martin Robinson, PhD, is a psychologist at Queen’s University Belfast. He has first-authored 14 peer-reviewed papers, mostly on complex PTSD, and been secondary-author on 14 others.
Co-author Christine Courtois, PhD, was one of the earliest enthusiasts for complex PTSD, publishing one of the first books on the subject in 2008.
The Claim
The researchers created a survey of 21 potential barriers to complex PTSD intervention based on expert opinion, and then sent it to over 500 clinicians who were part of a complex trauma mailing list [2]. Only 28 clinicians responded. Not surprisingly, the respondents ranked all the potential barriers as substantial obstacles. The top three most highly rated barriers were:

1. Lack of support for clinicians.
2. Patients’ prior treatments were unsatisfying.
3. Patients perceived stigma and felt misunderstood.

The rationale for this study was not clearly stated. The authors simply asserted there was “a need to synthesize information on barriers to effective CPTSD-specific intervention.”
Analysis
Complex PTSD is not a validated disorder and remains controversial. As noted here and here, there are no reputable diagnostic validation data, which is why it was rejected by both the DSM-IV and the DSM-5.

• In 2011, a survey asked twenty-five complex trauma experts and twenty-five PTSD experts to rate symptoms believed to be part of complex PTSD and what treatment techniques worked best [4].
• In 2013, a survey sent to a self-selected group of clinicians asked them to rate four vignettes of fabricated patients [5].
• In 2016, a survey sent to clinicians asked them to make diagnoses for eleven fabricated patients [6].
• In 2019, a survey asked clinicians to rate symptoms of patients they had seen in the past using only their memories of those patients and their progress notes [7].

Why Is This Happening?
Complex PTSD was invented out of thin air over three decades ago with the radical aim of redefining personality disorders as trauma disorders (see here). Driven by a radical feminist clinician, it was part and parcel of the larger ideological capture of academia by progressive, neo-Marxism that believes human nature is highly malleable and guided by an oppressor-versus-oppressed framework. The continued popularity of complex PTSD is a hoax created by a self-reinforcing echo chamber of believers who conduct these studies and who peer review and edit the journals. Because complex PTSD is not a valid disorder, its supporters have to conduct surveys of themselves to affirm its existence.
 

References
[1] Martin Robinson and Christine A. Courtois. “Understanding barriers in supporting service users with complex post-traumatic stress disorder: a pilot survey,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology Dec;16(1) (2025):2516286.
[2] The Complex Trauma Special Interest Group is sponsored by the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.
[3] Joseph Spinazzola et al. "Survey evaluates complex trauma exposure, outcome, and intervention among children and adolescents," Psychiatric Annals 35 (2005): 433-439.
[4] Marylene Cloitre et al. "Treatment of complex PTSD: Results of the ISTSS expert clinician survey on best practices," Journal of Traumatic Stress 24 (2011): 615-627.
[5] Julian D. Ford et al. "Clinical significance of a proposed developmental trauma disorder diagnosis: Results of an international survey of clinicians," Journal of Clinical Psychiatry 74 (2013): 841-849.
[6] Jared W.  Keeley et al. "Disorders specifically associated with stress: A case-controlled field study for ICD-11 mental and behavioural disorders," International Journal of Clinical and Health Psychology 16 (2016): 109-127.
[7] Jonathan DePierro et al. "Beyond PTSD: Client presentations of developmental trauma disorder from a national survey of clinicians," Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice and Policy 14(7) (2022 Oct):1167-1174. doi: 10.1037/tra0000532.

Source: California Office of the Surgeon General
Read time: 2.3 minutes
This Happened
In June 2025, California released the latest annual report on their state-wide screening program for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), the only such program in the nation.
Who Is Doing This?
The screening program, ACEs Aware, launched in Gavin Newsom’s first year as governor. The program offers training to primary care clinicians in the Medicaid network on how to screen for ACEs and provides $29 reimbursement for each screen. Reimbursement for screenings began on January 1, 2020. The program is paid for by a state tax on cigarettes.
The Premise
Since program inception, 46,270 individuals completed training on how to screen; 21,730 of those are Medi-Cal clinicians. They conducted 4,258,610 ACE screenings of approximately 2,395,440 unique Medi-Cal patients.
For children and adolescents ages 0 to 17, 7% had an ACE score of 4 or greater, which is the legendary cutoff from research that indicates an individual is considered “high risk for toxic stress.” For adults, 17% had an ACE score of 4 or more.
Since the premise of the program is to prevent ACEs, which in turn should prevent the swath of lethal physical illnesses that are allegedly caused by ACES, the key question is, How many lives have been saved? The report didn’t say.
Huh? Isn’t that the whole point of screening for ACEs? What do clinicians do with the screen results? Nothing, it turns out. The ACEs Aware program does not include interventions to prevent ACEs or to treat the alleged harmful impacts of ACEs. Instead, the program surveys clinicians on their intent to change how they practice: 63% said they intend to change their practice based on the screen data, but did not explain how.
Analysis
What is going on here? Some experts in pediatrics have explicitly recommended against ACE screening [1], noting its lack of clinical utility. ACEs Aware is untethered from basic principles of screening that the test must detect disease with sensitivity, and a positive result must lead to actionable next steps such as more in-depth evaluation or treatment.
Even worse, research has shown that retrospective ACE reporting is wildly unreliable [2]. If individuals cannot even consistently recall their childhood stressors, what exactly is being measured?
The strongest blow, however, comes from large-scale studies [3]. Yes, ACE scores correlate with health outcomes at the population level, but their predictive power for any given individual is abysmal—barely better than flipping a coin. In clinical practice, this renders ACE scores meaningless. Another commentary—including Robert Anda, one of the original ACE architects—openly admitted that ACEs as a screen is a fraud [4].

The program is one of the most striking examples of bad science being turned into government policy. At its core, the program assumes that a handful of social stressors—parental incarceration, substance abuse, divorce—carry unique biological toxicity, while everyday stressors of taking exams, moving to a new school, or struggling in a demanding job are ignored. This is ideology disguised as medicine: stressors deemed “systemic” by progressive policymakers are elevated as dangerous, while the common challenges of life, which millions overcome without chronic disease, are safe.
Why Is This Happening?
The California ACEs Aware program reflects the state’s deep entrenchment in progressive, neo-Marxist ideology that views individuals, especially children, as perpetually fragile and in need of state protection. It aligns with the broader agenda of social-emotional learning, DEI mandates, and trauma-informed education: redefining resilience as vulnerability, undermining parental authority, and expanding government’s role as the arbiter of personal well-being. The program was not born from strong medical evidence but rather from a cultural shift that equates social problems as oppression-causing disease and positions government as the cure. By labeling children with high ACE scores as biologically damaged, policymakers justify endless expansions of entitlement programs, school interventions, and taxpayer-funded bureaucracies.
 

References
[1] McLennan JD, MacMillan HL, Afifi TO, McTavish J, Gonzalez A, Waddell C. Routine ACEs screening is NOT recommended. Paediatr Child Health. 2019 Jul;24(4):272-273. doi: 10.1093/pch/pxz042.
[2] Baldwin JR, Reuben A, Newbury JB, Danese A. Agreement between prospective and retrospective measures of childhood maltreatment: a systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Psychiatry. 2019; 76(6):584-593. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0097.
[3] Baldwin JR, Caspi A, Meehan AJ, et al. Population vs Individual Prediction of Poor Health From Results of Adverse Childhood Experiences Screening. JAMA Pediatr. 2021;175(4):385–393. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2020.5602.
[4] Anda RF, Porter LE, Brown DW. Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience score: strengths, limitations, and misapplications. Am J Prev Med. 2020;59(2):293-295. doi:10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.0098. 

Source: European Journal of Psychotraumatology
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
A recent study published in a leading trauma journal claimed to investigate how discrimination experienced by minorities can itself be traumatic [1]. This paper provides a perfect case study of a larger problem: how the trauma field has been ideologically captured by identity politics.
The Claim
Andrew Nicholson and colleagues began with the controversial assumption that “sexual and gender minorities (SGMs) are at an increased risk for developing mental health disorders due to their socially stigmatized identities.” Specifically, discrimination, identity nondisclosure, and internalized stigma can produce trauma-related symptoms.
They recruited 37 SGM individuals from across Canada. The researchers collected self-report data using the Moral Injury Event Scale, then compared these scores with self-report measures of mental disorder.
Their results: moral injury scores were correlated with alcohol use and PTSD scores, but not with depression or childhood trauma history. In diagnostic interviews, only 6 of the 37 participants met PTSD criteria. Despite this very limited evidence, the authors claimed to have produced the first study showing minority stress-related moral injury caused PTSD.
Analysis
The conclusion was dramatic. The evidence was not. The study did not demonstrate that discrimination is equivalent to psychological trauma. Its design flaws guaranteed it never could.
First, ignoring decades of research defining trauma as life-threatening events, the authors made no attempt to determine whether the events reported by participants were actually life-threatening.
Second, the correlation with PTSD scores was meaningless because the self-reports were not linked to specific discrimination events. Participants’ PTSD symptoms could just as easily have been tied to unrelated traumas like car accidents or assaults.
Third, self-reports of PTSD are well known to produce large numbers of false positives [2].
So how did such a weak study pass peer review in a respected journal? The answer: easily. Papers with similar flaws appear daily across psychology’s 2,000-plus journals. The paper’s premise matched perfectly with the progressive orthodoxy that dominates academic psychology, a profession where over 90% of faculty identify as liberal.
The Formula
The structure of these papers is remarkably consistent:

1. Align with identity politics. Frame the study around an oppressed-versus-oppressor narrative—SGMs as a marginalized group. The authors did not even attempt to camouflage this step—the title of their paper was “Identity in turmoil.”
   
2. Recast unpleasant experiences in the most harmful terms possible, i.e., as trauma that can cause PTSD and other mental disorders.
   
3. Reframe existing definitions as false and oppressive. Blame the DSM-5 criteria for excluding minority stress and stifling research on minorities.
   
4. Deploy jargon. Invoke flimsy models with capitalized names (the Minority Stress Model) and pseudo-technical categories (“distal stressors,” “proximal stressors,” and “structural stigma”).
   
5. Obscure weak methods. Hide reliance on self-reports under layers of “intersectionality-informed frameworks” and wordy narratives. They interviewed subjects about their negative experiences as minorities, which filled up nine pages of results while the statistical results fit into one-sixth of a page.
   
6. Ignore flaws, declare success. No matter how fragile the evidence, conclude that the hypothesis was supported.

Once these boxes are ticked, such manuscripts sail safely home through peer review.
Why Is This Happening?
Academic psychology is almost entirely insulated from challenge. With few conservatives on the playing field, there is no counterbalance to progressive assumptions. What emerges is not science but activism dressed in scientific language.
Pulitzer-prize winning biologist Edward O. Wilson once observed that science and the humanities both begin as storytelling. The difference is that science must ultimately be judged by facts.

Source: CDC
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) launched an ambitious experiment. It awarded eight states five-year grants to do something no one has ever done before: prevent stressful life experiences. Each state—California, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Virginia—will receive $485,000 annually, totaling nearly $29 million in taxpayer funding.
Who Did This?
The funding announcement was issued during the tenure of CDC director Rochelle Walensky, who is better remembered for the agency’s widely criticized mishandling of masks, lockdowns, and vaccine messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Premise
These grants were issued as part of a “cooperative agreement”—a mechanism federal agencies often use to steer research and programming toward their priorities. In this case, the CDC’s stated goal was to fund projects for “the prevention of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and promotion of positive childhood experiences (PCEs).”
Each state’s plan followed the CDC’s prescribed template:

1. Build surveillance systems to collect statewide ACE and PCE data.
   
2. Implement a prevention project targeting one or more ACEs, “with a focus on health equity.”
   
3. Use the data to guide future prevention strategies.

Analysis
At first glance, the program sounds noble. Who wouldn’t want to reduce childhood adversity? Yet the scientific foundation is remarkably weak. Researchers have observed correlations between reported childhood adversity and later health problems—but correlation is not causation.

The notion that ordinary stress can reliably “kill” people has been asserted for years with almost no pushback on the lack of a mechanism.
Even more striking, there are no known public health interventions capable of preventing the ten ACEs:

• Emotional or verbal abuse
• Physical abuse
• Sexual abuse
• Emotional neglect
• Physical neglect
• Divorce or parental abandonment
• Domestic violence
• Parental substance abuse
• Parental mental illness
• Incarceration of a family member

These are deeply personal and family-level problems, not phenomena that lend themselves to large-scale government prevention programs. ACE projects lack the basic principle of a screening program that it be connected to available and effective interventions. As others have noted “there are no evidence-based interventions tied to scores on an ACEs Checklist” [1]. Other criticisms (see here) include that crude ACE scores are inappropriate for individual screening [2].
The Leap of Faith
The CDC’s mission is to protect the public from disease, injury, and disability. Yet with this ACE initiative, the agency has skipped the essential scientific step of demonstrating that ACEs cause the claimed health outcomes. Instead, it has leapt directly to funding prevention efforts—programs with no track record of success and no plausible path to reducing stress at scale.
Why Is This Happening?
This initiative arose under the Biden administration, which consistently advanced progressive, “woke” projects across federal agencies. In that political climate, the CDC aligned itself with broader ideological goals by framing childhood adversity as a public health crisis. Rather than focusing on proven disease prevention strategies, the agency redirected funds toward social engineering under the banner of “equity.” The grants reflect not only a left-leaning administration eager to expand government authority into family and community life, but also a CDC leadership willing to embrace unproven theories in order to remain aligned with prevailing political priorities.
 
 
References
[1] John D. McLennan, Andrea Gonzalez, Harriet L. MacMillan, Tracie O. Afifi, Routine screening for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) still doesn't make sense, Child Abuse & Neglect, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chiabu.2024.106708
[2] Robert F. Anda, Laura E. Porter, David W. Brown Inside the Adverse Childhood Experience Score: Strengths, Limitations, and Misapplications. American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2020;59(2):293−295; https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2020.01.009

Source: BMC Psychiatry
Read time: 2.0 minutes
 
This Happened
In February 2025, BMC Psychiatry published a meta-analysis of mind-body treatments for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescents.
Who Did This?
Neither the first author, Bianjiang Zhang, nor the three co-authors appear to have previously published on trauma or PTSD.
The Claim
The aim of the meta-analysis was to evaluate and compare the efficacy of various mind-body interventions in alleviating PTSD symptoms in adolescents.
Inclusion criteria were randomized controlled trials involving adolescents diagnosed with PTSD and treated with one of five different mind–body therapies. Twenty studies were identified: 8 involved trauma-focused cognitive-behavioral therapy (TF-CBT), 5 involved other CBT, 3 involved meditation, 2 involved yoga-meditation combinations, and 2 involved mindfulness.
Pairwise comparisons immediately post-treatment revealed no significant differences between the five mind–body therapies. The analysis of the follow-up phases indicated that CBT was significantly more effective than the other four in terms of long-term effects.
Analysis
Over the past decade, the most prominent book that has shaped public understanding of psychological trauma—including clinical work and policy discussions—has been Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. Published in 2014, it remains on best-seller lists and continues to enjoy widespread acclaim for its alleged extraordinary insights. Its two central theses are (1) psychological trauma produces enduring changes in the brain and body, and (2) certain body-based treatments are uniquely effective. Van der Kolk’s claim—echoed by scores of body-based therapists hawking their interventions through workshops—is not simply that body-based treatments work for PTSD, but that they are the only treatments that truly resolve trauma, because, you guessed it, trauma is embedded in the body.
In The Body Keeps the Score, ten body-based treatments were promoted, and only one of those—yoga—was tested in this meta-analysis.

This does not mean body-based treatments lack value, but rather that the hype of them being superior to well-validated approaches is not justified.
 Why Is This Happening?
Yoga and several of the other body-based treatments are taught in a burgeoning industry of clinician workshops and retreats, where it is highly unlikely that balanced research evidence is discussed. While a few of these approaches have shown promise in preliminary studies, the few studies of body-based interventions that exist are often small sample sizes, lack active control conditions, and have inconsistent follow-up data.
The persistence and popularity of brain re-wiring neurobiological narratives cannot be explained by experts who simply misread the research studies. It seems more likely that the belief that trauma leaves measurable “scars” in the brain and body resonates with broader cultural beliefs of an oppressor-versus-oppressed worldview that advocates for systemic cultural change [see here, here, and here].
While drawing attention to psychological trauma is commendable, the extraordinary promotion of dramatic but unsupported narratives has risks, including misguided public policy and clinical training that ignores best available evidence.
 
 
References
[1] Bradley, R., Greene, J., Russ, E., Dutra, L. & Westen, D. A multidimensional meta-analysis of psychotherapy for PTSD. Am. J. Psychiatry 162, 214-227 (2005). doi:10.1176/appi.ajp.162.2.214
[2] Weber, M. et al. Long-term outcomes of psychological treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychol. Med. 51, 1420–1430 (2021). doi:10.1017/S003329172100163X
[3] Lewis, C., Roberts, N. P., Andrew, M., Starling, E. & Bisson, J. I. Psychological therapies for post-traumatic stress disorder in adults: Systematic review and meta-analysis. European Journal of Psychotraumatology 11 (2020). doi:10.1080/20008198.2020.1729633
[4] Xian-Yu, C. Y. et al. Cognitive behavioral therapy for children and adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder: Meta-analysis. J. Affect. Disord. 308, 502–511 (2022). doi:10.1016/j.jad.2022.04.111

Source: Office of the Governor of Illinois news release
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2025, Illinois became the first state in the nation to mandate universal screening for mental health in schools.
 
Who Did This?
Psychologist Dana Weiner, PhD leads the initiative. She was appointed the Chief Officer for the Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation in March 2022. She is a Senior Policy Fellow at Chapin Hall, a progressive think tank focused on child welfare.
 
The Premise
The passage of Illinois Senate Bill 1560 sets the following timeline: By September 1, 2026, the State Board of Education, guided by the Governor’s Children’s Behavioral Health Transformation Team, must publish the materials and procedures for phased implementation. These must cover opt-out provisions, confidentiality and privacy, family communication, data safety, and follow-up care. Starting in the 2027–2028 school year, all public school districts must offer annual mental health screenings to all students in grades 3–12.
 
Analysis
Illinois SB1560 is being sold as a bold step toward solving the so-called “youth mental health crisis,” but in reality it is a misguided policy destined to create more harm than good. The project raises multiple serious concerns:
1. If you’re a parent and concerned about your child’s mental health, why don’t you get your own assessment? Why would you be waiting on an annual school screen?
Here’s how it likely will actually work. Competent parents will opt out. But parents who do not opt out and believe this project will magically get help for their children, are likely the same parents who have been unwilling to get help for their children on their own initiative. A school counselor cannot, and should not, unilaterally refer children to providers.
2. Research is clear that self-report surveys are riddled with flaws. These instruments routinely generate high false-positive rates [1]. Healthy children will be flagged for clinical referral because of normative unhappiness or fluctuations in mood or stress.
3. These children are a non-help seeking population. Many of them will see through the absurdity of the exercise, or rightfully resent it, and provide false answers on the surveys. The database will be riddled with invalid data.
4. Once thousands of new “cases” are generated, the already overstretched school counselors and psychologists will be buried under an impossible workload. An investigative report in 2023 documented that Illinois’ existing non-school screening program, which is much smaller than the planned school screenings, is already unable to link referrals to clinical care [2].
5. The collection and storage of highly sensitive personal information raises enormous privacy concerns. Who will see this data? How will it be shared? How are teachers—a profession not focused on health care—to guard children’s privacy? When this concern was raised in the planning stage last year, Weiner’s team brushed it off with an assurance that they will have policies in place. 

These ideological projects put into practice the arrogant claim that institutions know better than families, rooted in progressivism’s eternal folly that enlightened self-interest—not the empirically-proven moral commitments of family, tribe, and tradition—is the path to collective happiness.
This project is possibly more destructive than the other progressive projects because it appears more moderate than the controversial CRT, DEI, and transgender projects in schools. Once implemented, however, universal screening will perpetuate the myth of a child mental health crisis, the notion that humans are highly fragile, and provide a launch point for a world of possibilities for state intervention, invasion of privacy, and an expanded welfare state.
 
​
References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with  questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology 35(6):347-352. DOI:
10.1089/cap.2024.0126.
[2] Karp S, Schorsch K (March 11, 2023). Illinois lifeline program for suicidal kids struggles amid a youth mental health crisis, staffing shortages. Chicago Sun Times. 

Source: Social Science & Medicine
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
In the June 2025 issue of Social Science & Medicine, researchers published a conceptual review of the literature with a pre-determined aim to elevate the experiences of minorities to the level of psychological trauma.
Who Did This?
Tanya Saraiya, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and Assistant Professor at the Medical University of South Carolina. She has approximately 30 peer-reviewed publications, including about 14 as first author, which have focused on PTSD, ethnic minorities, and substance abuse.
Social Science & Medicine has often published papers that assert the existence of woke concepts of decolonizing, structural racism, intergenerational transmission, and racial inequities as toxic stressors.
The Claim
The researchers argued that trauma treatments are less effective for minorities and framed this as a failure of DSM-5’s trauma definition (criterion A). They claimed criterion A reflects historical biases and allege it is “racialized” for excluding experiences such as racial discrimination.
The DSM-5 definition of trauma is life-threat, as in situations where one truly fears for one’s life, involving a moment of intense panic that one is about to die. The researchers demanded a re-examination of criterion A because the “current U.S. sociopolitical climate” involves stressful inequities they believe must receive greater recognition.
To rectify this situation, they proposed expanding criterion A by inventing three new categories:

1. invisible traumas (e.g., neglect, emotional abuse, violent media exposure)
2. identity-based traumas (e.g., racism, sexism, LGBTQ+ discrimination)
3. systemic traumas (e.g., poverty, incarceration, oppressive policies).

In their speculative model, there is a catastrophic ‘iceberg’ effect wherein the vast majority of ‘traumas’ are being ignored. They argued this expansion would make PTSD diagnosis more socially just, and somehow—it’s never explained--improve treatment.
Analysis
None of these new categories involve true life-threat; they are incapable of causing PTSD. The evidence for Saraiya’s model was slim, and what exists is far from conclusive. Saraiya and colleagues briefly cited a meta-analysis of 124 studies in support of their claim but all those studies are highly flawed. The most common flaw is using self-report questionnaires for PTSD symptoms. This flaw, which they never acknowledged, is that self-report questionnaires have been proven to produce high rates of false positives [1].
For example, we once screened an adolescent female for a study and she endorsed the breakup with her boyfriend as a trauma and endorsed enough symptoms of PTSD for the diagnosis, but she most assuredly did not have PTSD.
The studies of racial discrimination are similarly flawed. These studies typically ask respondents to self-report if they perceived discrimination—not corroborating whether any discrimination or threat actually took place—and then ask them to fill out a PTSD checklist. Nearly all symptoms of PTSD that get endorsed are false positives because respondents misunderstand the instructions, and self-selected respondents are biased toward inflating the harm of discrimination.

Saraiya et al. seemed unaware of this evidence. Instead, they advanced sweeping claims and never once considered why equating stress with trauma might be conceptually flawed.
Why Is This Happening?
This paper exemplifies how psychiatry is increasingly recruited to advance liberal progressive and neo-Marxist worldviews. By redefining trauma to include nearly any adverse experience, the authors align diagnosis with identity politics, emphasizing oppression, systemic forces, and group disparities over clinical validity. The effect is to politicize diagnostic standards, expand the reach of trauma indefinitely, and present psychiatry as a vehicle for “social justice” rather than a medical discipline grounded in evidence. If everything from poverty to using the ‘wrong’ pronouns counts as trauma, then the word means nothing at all.
 

References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2025). False positives for Criterion A trauma events and PTSD symptoms with questionnaires are common in children and adolescents and could not be eliminated with enhanced instructions. Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology, DOI: 10.1089/cap.2024.0126.
[2] Kilpatrick, D. G., Resnick, H. S., & Acierno, R. (2009). Should PTSD Criterion A be retained? Journal of Traumatic Stress, 22(5), 374–383. https://doi.org/10.1002/jts.20436

Source: RiverBender.com
Read time: 2.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On August 1, 2025, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker signed a bill requiring all police officers and first responders to undergo recurring trauma-informed training.
Who Did This?
The legislation was sponsored by State Senator Mary Edley-Allen, a Democrat from suburban Chicago. It sailed through both chambers of the Democrat-controlled legislature with unanimous votes before receiving the governor’s signature.
The Premise
The law establishes the First Responder Trauma-Informed Response Training Act. Before hiring, every first responder must complete a state-approved trauma-informed curriculum. Once employed, they must repeat the training every 18 months. Failure to pass retraining bars them from key duties—such as answering emergency calls or interviewing victims—and may even result in loss of licensure.
The bill also amends the Illinois Police Training Act to require ongoing instruction “addressing trauma-informed programs, procedures, and practices meant to minimize traumatization of the victim.” Police officers must complete retraining every three years.
The curriculum, by law, must follow “evidence-based standards” covering report writing and responses to sexual assault and abuse. It emphasizes victim-centered, age-sensitive interviewing techniques purported to “minimize retraumatization.”
Analysis
Illinois now joins Florida (2019) and Washington (2025) as the third state, to our knowledge, to impose trauma-informed training on law enforcement. This development raises serious questions—both about the premise of such training and about the broader implications of mandating it by law.
First concern: the ideology behind the training
Trauma-informed care is not a neutral, evidence-driven practice. It emerged in the early 2000s from activist scholarship, not from medical or psychological science. Its central claim is that trauma can leave individuals permanently fragile, vulnerable to “re-triggering” when they encounter reminders of past experiences. There is no credible evidence that ordinary service practices routinely retraumatize customers or hinder their access to care. Yet, advocates argue that victims struggle to access services because institutions inadvertently retraumatize them—through paperwork, questioning styles, or perceived insensitivity. The proposed solution is sweeping: train staff in every public-facing institution to assume all clients may be trauma survivors and to modify interactions accordingly.
Second concern: the evidence gap
While the Illinois bill insists that training be “evidence-based,” no such evidence exists. Studies have not shown that trauma-informed programs change staff behavior, improve victim experiences, or increase service access. Despite hundreds of workshops and dozens of academic articles, the research base remains non-existent.
Equally absent is any consideration of costs—both to individuals and society. These mandates effectively tie employment in emergency services to ideological compliance. First responders risk their licenses if they do not repeatedly pass the prescribed training. Beyond employment, the broader social cost lies in cementing a view of trauma survivors as permanently damaged and easily destabilized—a categorization that risks fostering dependency rather than resilience.
Why Is This Happening?
The spread of trauma-informed training has not been driven by grassroots demand. No significant constituency of victims or families has petitioned for it. Instead, the movement was conceived and championed by a small group of activist scholars and amplified through sympathetic media and nonprofits (see here, here, and here).
These organizations positioned themselves as training authorities, producing curricula and certifications that state legislatures then codified into law. The strategy has been remarkably effective: identify a supposed form of oppression, construct a theory to explain it, create training programs to address it, and then push legislation requiring compliance. The benevolent rhetoric of “helping the vulnerable” has shielded the movement from scrutiny, leaving little room for debate.