‘Traumas’ that only minorities would understand.

Expanding trauma to cover perceived oppression may sound compassionate, but it risks inflating diagnoses and eroding credibility.

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Tanya  Saraiya, PhD

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’s model is fiction. The types of experiences that cause PTSD are easily testable, and it’s already been done.

In a study that used interviewers—who can ascertain threat and symptom intensity with follow-up questions and without bias—the vast majority, and perhaps 100%, of cases of PTSD arose only from true life-threat experiences [2].

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