Source: Harvard Center on the Developing Child
Read time: 1.5 minutes
 
This Happened
On October 21, 2025, the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University announced a new online learning resource for pediatricians about how to insert an intellectual framework around stress and trauma into routine pediatric well visits.
The Premise
Each of the eight modules briefly presents information on how stress and trauma shape children’s brains, development, and cause adult physical diseases, and then gives pointers for pediatricians on how to talk to parents.
Modules emphasize that brain architecture is highly sensitive to environmental stress, with sensitive periods during prenatal and early childhood.
The curriculum defines three categories of stress—positive, tolerable, and toxic—and argues that prolonged, unbuffered stress can disrupt neural and biological systems.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) are described as factors that directly cause adult medical diseases and poor socioeconomic outcomes, while also noting their limitations for individual prediction.
Structural factors, including poverty and racism, are presented as key stressors that directly cause physical and mental health disorders.
To handle trauma, responsive “serve-and-return” caregiver–child interactions are presented as foundational to protect brain development.
Analysis
This curriculum trains pediatricians to become part-time neuroscience docents and part-time life coaches but with threadbare knowledge content. Doctors are urged to explain “brain architecture” to parents with a two-minute cartoon where synapses bloom or wither like a bedtime story.
It also trains them to be parenting experts, but with simplistic tropes that parenting has direct, singular impacts on neural construction. Doctors are encouraged to praise parents for activities they were already doing for centuries; “serve and return” is elevated from common sense interaction that chimpanzees do naturally to the master key of brain development, complete with dumbed-down, colorful infographics. Stress is explained via trucks overloaded with cargo. There is no problem that can’t be solved by hugs and referrals to community programs.
To teach racism as a biological stressor, physicians are taught to narrate structural inequities alongside growth charts.

​Worried that “just saying ‘stress’ more loudly wasn’t going to get them where they needed to go,” the Center invented the three categories of stress for their marketing punch and embarked on a series of campaigns to influence government policy, public opinion, and doctor-patient interactions [see here].
The program advances a form of medical activism that treats language control, early intervention, and societal redesign as extensions of healthcare—without acknowledging the highly speculative nature of its core assumptions.

Read time: 1.5 minutes
 
This Happened
Over the past decade and a half, a new construct has steadily gained traction in trauma research: moral injury. The first paper using the term appeared in 2009. Since then, more than a thousand papers have been published invoking it. By volume alone, one might assume a robust and well-established scientific construct. The reality is less reassuring.
Who Did This?
The leading figure in this literature is psychologist Brett Litz, based at the Veterans Administration Boston Healthcare System. Litz authored the original 2009 paper and has since contributed over three dozen more as primary or secondary author.
The Claim
Moral injury can be an event or an outcome. “Potentially morally injurious events” (PMIEs) are acts that violate a person’s moral beliefs—whether through commission, omission, or witnessing. While moral distress is assumed to be a normal response, moral injury is said to occur when distress crosses a threshold into impairment.
Analysis
At first glance, this sounds plausible. But the following uncomfortable facts are undisputed even by proponents of moral injury:

• There is no gold-standard assessment.
• There is no consensus definition of a moral injury syndrome.
• There is no convincing evidence that moral injury is distinct from PTSD, and most researchers describe it as a subset of PTSD rather than a separate condition.
• Advocates also claim that moral injury can arise from events that do not involve life threat—unlike PTSD—yet there is not a single well-documented case study demonstrating this.
• There is no evidence that any treatment uniquely reduces “moral injury” symptoms as such, including therapies designed specifically for that purpose. Most PTSD experts conclude that standard evidence-based PTSD treatments are sufficient [2].

 
Additional problems are barely or never mentioned:

• Over a dozen self-report questionnaires exist, but there is no interview-based measure.
• The questionnaires fail to specify qualifying events, meaning virtually any subjectively upsetting experience can count.
• Morality itself is not a unitary construct. Social psychologists identified at least six distinct moral domains, yet the moral injury literature has shown zero interest in determining which morals are supposedly “injured,” or how. The “morals” in moral injury are almost completely unexplored.
• Of most concern, individuals identified as “morally injured” most likely have pre-existing traits such as anxiety or neuroticism and histories of distress to many non-moral situations, yet no researcher has ever looked for this to my knowledge. Translation: moral injury might never be a unique type of worry.

Why Is This Happening?
Given this thin empirical footing, the obvious question is: why does moral injury have any momentum? Well, we’ve seen this all before. 

Moral injury has now been marinating for about sixteen years. It may be next in line: Emotionally powerful but scientifically underdeveloped, ready to be deployed in therapy markets, workshops, and social policy. If so, we are likely to hear much more about moral injury—unfortunately, not for the right reasons.

References
[1] Litz BT, Stein N, Delaney E, Lebowitz L, Nash WP, Silva C, Maguen S. (2009). Moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: a preliminary model and intervention strategy. Clinical Psychology Review. Dec;29(8):695-706. doi: 10.1016/j.cpr.2009.07.003.
[2] Walker, H.E., O’Donnell, K.P. & Litz, B.T. (2024). Past, Present, and Future of Cognitive Behavioral-based Psychotherapies for Moral Injury. Current Treatment Options in Psychiatry 11, 288–299. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40501-024-00330-z.

Source: European Journal of Personality
Read time: 1.5 minutes      
This Happened
In July 2025, a large meta-analysis addressed a question that has quietly fueled decades of clinical lore and political mythmaking: Do major life events meaningfully change adult personality?
Who Did This?
The study was led by psychologist Peter Haehner, a senior teaching assistant at the University of Zurich. Since earning his PhD in 2023, Haehner has built a research portfolio focused on personality development and change, with more than two dozen peer-reviewed publications as first or secondary author.
The Claim
The researchers pooled seven large, existing longitudinal datasets to examine whether ten common life events—both positive and negative—were associated with changes in the Big Five personality traits: Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Emotional Stability, Extraversion, and Openness. The events included starting a romantic relationship, marriage, childbirth, separation, divorce, widowhood, graduation, new employment, unemployment, and retirement.
Across 50 statistical tests (five traits × ten events), only 12—just 24%—showed any statistically significant change. Of those, eight were increases and four were decreases. When the analysis was restricted to the authors’ a priori hypotheses, only 5 of 15 predictions were supported.
Even when effects reached statistical significance, they were trivial in magnitude. Effect sizes ranged from b = 0.00 to ±0.09—numbers so small they are functionally meaningless in real-world terms (b = 0.20 or higher is considered large in the social sciences although that still would not explain the majority of influence on an outcome).
Most importantly, the authors also examined whether changes persisted over time, assessing personality at one year, two years, and more than two years after each event. Of the 12 significant findings, only one—slightly increased emotional stability following new employment—appeared consistently across all time points. The authors were compelled to conclude that personality changes linked to life events were “mostly only temporary,” with “negligible effects more than two years after a life event occurred.” Removing the science-speak: There is no impact.
Why This Matters
These findings directly undermine the dominant mythology in contemporary trauma discourse: the claim that stress and adversity routinely “scar” the brain, permanently deform personality, or derail development. The slogan “the body keeps the score” asserts enduring damage; the doctrine of so-called “complex PTSD” claims prolonged stress reshapes personality itself. Both have been used to reframe conditions like borderline personality disorder as trauma reactions rather than largely heritable traits.
This study did not include true traumatic events—life-threatening experiences that define trauma in psychiatry. Yet these findings do not bode well for these dominant theories that extend “trauma” to encompass everyday stressors while claiming lifelong psychological deformation.

Source: Biological Psychiatry
Read time: 2.4 minutes
 
This Happened
In a new study, researchers scanned the brains of police recruits before and after active-duty exposure to stressful and traumatic experiences to test the crucial question of whether brain differences related to PTSD pre-exist trauma or are caused by trauma. These types of pretrauma prospective studies are difficult to conduct for a variety of reasons, and therefore are relatively rare. The findings are worth highlighting.
Who Did This?
First author was Licia de Voogd, Ph.D., employed at Radboud University (Netherlands). She has nine first-author and four secondary-author publications, mostly focused on brain imaging related to stress and trauma.
The Premise
One hundred seventy-nine Dutch police recruits had their brains imaged before graduating to active duty (Baseline) and then again after 8 months of active duty (Follow-up). While lying in the brain scanner, they viewed virtual images of a suspect raising a gun at them under two conditions. In the High Threat condition, this threat was paired with an electric shock. In the Low Threat condition, there was no shock.
While on active duty, they experienced an average of five stressful or traumatic events. At Follow-up, 12 individuals met criteria for PTSD, and 61 individuals met criteria for subthreshold PTSD.
The Results
At Baseline, those with relatively greater activation in the left amygdala went on to develop significantly more PTSD symptoms at follow-up.
No significant association was present within the periaqueductal gray region.
At Follow-up, amygdala reactivity showed no alterations in relation to increases in PTSD symptoms.
The authors concluded, “This prospective longitudinal study shows that dorsal amygdala hyperresponsivity during threat anticipation is associated with increased vulnerability for developing PTSD symptoms.”
Analysis
This study adds to the growing list of well-conducted studies showing that trauma and PTSD do not alter the neurophysiology or size of brain centers, i.e., the body does not keep the score. By my count there are now 32 pretrauma prospective studies of neurobiological variables, of which six involve the amygdala. All three literature reviews of these types of studies concluded that differences in neurobiology between those with PTSD compared to those without PTSD existed prior to experiencing any trauma [1-3]. And, there is little to no good evidence that trauma associated with PTSD causes lasting alterations in brain function, brain center volumes, or other neurobiological variables.
The researcher activists who relentlessly promote the narrative that trauma damages brains cite many human studies that seem to support their claim, but those are always weak cross-sectional studies that possess zero ability to determine what came first. The only type of studies that have causal explanatory power are pretrauma prospective studies where the brains and neurobiology are measured both before and after trauma exposure.
What This Means
The central importance of this study lies in what it reveals about the direction of causality—a point that sits at the heart of the “body keeps the score” controversy. If PTSD-related brain differences are largely pre-existing, rather than created by trauma, then the dominant narrative in clinical training, public health messaging, and educational policy is fundamentally misaligned with the best evidence.

For research, the study underscores the necessity of prospective designs. Cross-sectional studies—still the backbone of trauma neuroscience because they are cheaper and easier—cannot answer causal questions, and their continued use perpetuates misleading interpretations about trauma-induced brain change. Funding priorities should shift toward designs capable of distinguishing vulnerability from consequence.
For social policy, the findings challenge sweeping claims that trauma universally harms the brain. Policies built on that assumption—such as mandated trauma-informed programs or broad neurological narratives in schools—risk oversimplifying human resilience, misallocating resources, and promoting deterministic views of children and adults.
In short, the evidence points toward pre-existing vulnerability, not neurological scarring, with major implications for how society understands and responds to trauma
 

References
[1] Julia A. DiGangi et al. (2013). Pretrauma risk factors for posttraumatic stress disorder: A systematic review of the literature. Clinical Psychology Review 33:728-744.
[2] Andrea Danese et al. (2017). The origins of cognitive deficits in victimized children: Implications for neuroscientists and clinicians. American Journal of Psychiatry 174:349-361.
[3] Michael S. Scheeringa (2020). Reexamination of diathesis stress and neurotoxic stress theories: A qualitative review of pre-trauma neurobiology in relation to posttraumatic stress symptoms. International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research 30:e1864. doi: 10.1002/mpr.1864

Source: The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
In July 2025, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA) brought nearly 100 of its trauma-informed staff to Atlanta for the organization’s first mental health summit. The gathering was celebratory in tone, designed not only to reward staff for their work but to energize them toward BGCA’s newest goal: integrating trauma-informed practices into all 5,400 Boys & Girls Club locations across the country.

Who Did This?
At the center of this transformation is Jennifer Bateman, Ph.D., BGCA’s senior vice president of youth development. Bateman earned a master’s degree from Harvard and a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, and is a vocal supporter of Pride Month.
The Premise
The trauma-informed overhaul rests on a singular premise: that American youth are in a so-called mental health crisis so severe that BGCA determined it had a responsibility to intervene. With help from a $10 million partnership with Blue Cross Blue Shield, BGCA scaled its training dramatically. As of 2024, BGCA reports:

• 40,000 youth have already been served by trauma-informed programming
• Clubs are adding “zen dens,” calming rooms, and sensory tools to help kids manage emotions
• Thousands of staff are being trained in trauma-informed behavioral approaches

Clubs are expected to transform their culture using BGCA’s 39 “Trauma-Informed Standards,” a detailed document outlining the transformative ways staff should think and communicate through a trauma-informed lens. The standards frame trauma as not merely the result of abuse and violence, but also a near-universal condition caused by poverty, food insecurity, racism, “systemic inequities,” and the “general hardships of life.” Trauma, in this worldview, defines nearly everyone.
Analysis
This is not a casual rebranding. It is a strategic, organization-wide “cultural shift,” which they have credited in part to the trauma-based ideology popularized in the last decade by Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score [debunked here].

​To understand the magnitude of this shift, remember what BGCA is. For more than a century, Boys & Girls Clubs have been known for providing safe after-school activities, sports, mentorship, and tutoring—often serving the country’s most disadvantaged kids. The national organization holds a congressional charter and receives federal funding; more than four million young people attend its clubs nationwide. The mission has historically been simple: keep kids safe, active, and on track for a brighter future.

This is not subtle. It is a philosophy about the fundamental nature of humans—that children are highly fragile, easily scarred, and institutions need to step in to supersede parents.

The Bigger Picture
This massive paradigm shift represents the latest example of a national institution adopting an expansive ideological framework without adequate scrutiny.

• When trauma becomes an all-purpose explanation for every adversity a child might face, the definition loses meaning.
• When organizations equate “systemic inequities” with psychological trauma, they shift from youth development to political messaging.
• When staff are trained to interpret normal childhood emotions as symptoms of injury, they unintentionally pathologize ordinary kids.

BGCA undoubtedly believes it is acting out of compassion, but their new mission is not balanced by other important moral considerations. It undermines the primacy of the family—the fundamental unit of society—has undue faith that institutions can raise children better than parents, and ignores a more conservative viewpoint that humans are not incredibly fragile.
The sweeping scope of this mission, its ideological assumptions, and its redefinition of trauma demand serious public debate—especially for an organization that receives federal funding and serves millions of America’s youth.

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: 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: 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: 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: James Cooke Substack
Read time: 2.0 minutes plus video
 
This Happened
In May 2025, Judith Herman appeared on James Cooke’s Substack podcast in a post titled Tyranny & Trauma vs. Justice & Healing.
 
Who Did This?
Herman, a clinical psychologist, is the famed inventor of complex PTSD based on a 1992 paper. Now 83, she is promoting a new book on restorative justice. Cooke, a neuroscientist, launched his Substack in 2024 to explore consciousness.
 
The Premise
In recent decades, claims about trauma have grown increasingly dramatic—describing it as the greatest public health crisis or promoting treatments that are the singular path to personal and societal salvation. These narratives almost always frame trauma as a form of oppression that leaves deep, lasting damage to the mind, body, and self.
Yet, closer examination repeatedly finds little evidence in support and substantial evidence against such claims (see here on complex PTSD, here on The Body Keeps the Score, here on toxic stress, here on ACEs, here on trauma-informed care, here on epigenetics, and here on intergenerational transmission).
 
Shared Traits of Trauma Entrepreneurs

​A similar admission appeared in an interview 25 years earlier, where she acknowledged applying a social justice ideology across multiple issues, perceiving that “oppression takes many forms.” The interviewer summed it up more concisely that this worldview (social justice to right the wrongs of perceived oppressions) seemed to provide the spark of creativity for her psychological work. While complex PTSD was not directly discussed, the connection is clear: her activism preceded and may have inspired the disorder’s creation without supporting empirical evidence.

This pattern of fashioning oppression-based worldviews absent heavy lifting of supporting evidence is typical of the progressive personality. It is evident from the very beginning, in the eighteenth century, with Rousseau, who himself admitted he is exhausted by reasoning power and takes more “pleasure in meditating, in searching, in inventing.”
 
Why Is This Happening?
In my critique of The Body Keeps the Score, I argued that such expansive errors require attention: “the vastness and completeness of van der Kolk’s wrongness demands an explanation. If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive.” [1]. For Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and others, ideology appears to be that explanation: a moral framework where empathy for the disadvantaged outweighs all other  moral concerns. Within this worldview, human fragility becomes an assumed truth, forming the psychological foundation of progressive and neo-Marxist thought.

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References
[1] Scheeringa MS (2024). The Body Does Not Keep the Score: How Popular Beliefs About Trauma Are Wrong. Columbia, SC: Kindle Direct Publishing. ISBN 979-8344969244.