How trauma became ideologically captured

The formula for how progressive identity politics masquerades as trauma science in peer-reviewed papers

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Author of identity-based trauma paper, psychologist Andrew Nicholson, PhD

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.

Fiction, by contrast, thrives when the story is “false because the writer and the reader want it that way” [3]. That, unfortunately, describes much of contemporary trauma research. 

​Writers and readers in psychology collude on a narrative that discrimination equals trauma, not because the evidence supports it, but because it fits their worldview. For real science, the critical question is, “Could that possibly be true?” For ideological activism, the question has shifted to, “Did I uphold the right vision?”

References
[1] Nicholson AA, Narikuzhy S, Wolf J, et al. Identity in turmoil: Investigating the morally injurious dimensions of minority stress. European Journal of Psychotraumatology. 2025 Dec;16(1):2479396. doi: 10.1080/20008066.2025.2479396.
[2] 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.
[3] Wilson, E.O. (2012). The Social Conquest of Earth, p277. Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York.