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I don't know if this is a new trend, but it seems like I can't read or watch anything created by zoomers/millennials without someone going into the "trauma" they experienced.
Now a good portion of the time they are using it in jest; talking about scary media they watched as a child that haunted them such as "The Scary Maze Game" or the T-Rex scene in "Jurassic Park". However, I see it more frequently being used by people of the "Mental Health" (TM) milieu to describe times where they felt uncomfortable as traumatic.
This particular passage from "The Coddling of The American Mind" really stuck out to me when I read it.
Take the word “trauma.” In the early versions of the primary manual of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychiatrists used the word “trauma” only to describe a physical agent causing physical damage, as in the case of what we now call traumatic brain injury. In the 1980 revision, however, the manual (DSM III) recognized “post-traumatic stress disorder” as a mental disorder—the first type of traumatic injury that isn’t physical. PTSD is caused by an extraordinary and terrifying experience, and the criteria for a traumatic event that warrants a diagnosis of PTSD were (and are) strict: to qualify, an event would have to “evoke significant symptoms of distress in almost everyone” and be “outside the range of usual human experience.” The DSM III emphasized that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be something that would cause most people to have a severe reaction. War, rape, and torture were included in this category. Divorce and simple bereavement (as in the death of a spouse due to natural causes), on the other hand, were not, because they are normal parts of life, even if unexpected. These experiences are sad and painful, but pain is not the same thing as trauma. People in these situations that don’t fall into the “trauma” category might benefit from counseling, but they generally recover from such losses without any therapeutic interventions.
Many of these people who claim to have experienced trauma fall into the latter category, but some don't even point to particular events as being traumatic, instead pointing to symptoms as signs they were traumatized as a child. A particularly egregious example I saw was one person suggesting that they had trauma because they can tell if a person is mad by the sounds of their footsteps in the house. Now mind you, I also can tell if a person is upset by their walking patterns, but not due to any past experience of a regularly angry parent, but just common sense. Generally people who are upset tend to stomp more and act rushed. This is just general human behavior! Being observative to walking patterns doesn't mean you buried down past trauma of an angry parent, it just means you have a functioning brain and ears!
This is a general trend I see within the "Mental Health" (TM) milieu, trying to find problems where there are none under the guise of "destigmatization". Most of the proponents of metal health genuinely want to help people, but unfortunately the form that destigmatization takes is that of pride and celebration. People who ARE experiencing an episode of depression or extreme sadness are told by Mental Health positive media to embrace it. Communities are formed online as "support groups" where mental illness takes the form of social capital. Members are incentivised to maximize (and sometimes embellish) the hardship they are going through because it means that receive more support. This in turn incentivises people to re-contextualize events in their lives as traumatic. These people are genuinely experiencing a hard moment in their life, but this is normal, everyone experiences hardship. Where in a professional setting, real support groups aim to help a person move past hardship, these community support groups become just that, a community. Moving past this hardship then means that this person would lose this community, so people cling to mental illness as a form of identity. This exacerbates their mental illness, since they view it as a part of life which they will always experience and will not get any better.
I say all this as a person who ran tangentially with many people like this. I experienced teenage depression where I needed to seek professional help. I personally did not gain much from support groups, but nevertheless it was part of them as part of the program I was in so I attended them. Many of those who appeared to be experiencing their mental illness in an extreme form also mentioned being part of online support groups. Later on I was a member of a discord server which included a section that was a "support group" where people would talk about their experiences and get nothing but support, but as I interacted with members who regularly participated within the support group, I could see they were becoming worse and feeding off one another. When I ran into members of the in-person support group down the line, members who had spoken about being part of online support groups, I could also see that they had not improved.
When originally writing this I made the assertion that mental health discourse was influenced by the LGBTQ movement. Upon reflection I think that this is not the case. Instead I think that these two run parallel to eachother, that many of the issues within mental health discourse are also prevelant within LGBTQ spaces because mental illness is more prevalent in these spaces. One does not dictate the other. However I still stand by the rest of what I said, just not that the LGBTQ movement has influenced it.
This discussion is also not whole without mentioning the role that LGBTQ discourse is also an influencing factor. Despite attitudes regarding same-sex relationships being at an all time high, and to a lesser but still prevalent extent, attitudes towards trans issues, there is an air of self-victimization within these groups. This is partially to be expected, since these communities faced significant repression and stigmatization in the recent past, as well as currently throughout large portions of the world. However, within these communities, those who actually receive the least amount of discrimination are those who claim to experience the most amount of trauma. Any form of doubt is incentivised within these groups to be viewed as a direct attack. This is especially dangerous within trans communities as many of their claims regarding hormones, desisting, and puberty blockers are misleading if not demonstrably false. A father of a they/them child within the in-person support group I was part of was brought to tears when he accidentally called the child 'she', resulting in the child not speaking to him. Members of the original Stonewall riots have also been attacked by younger members of the LGBTQ movement for supposedly facing a lesser level of discrimination because the majority of them were cis white men, despite most of these younger members not facing structural oppression. Trauma within these communities is treated as a given by its members and so when there is any perceived discrimination or lack of support, regardless of intention, is viewed as a trauma inducing attack.
The obsession over trauma hurts the individual. It incentivises those to re-contextualize their experiences as traumatic, hindering them from moving past these experiences. This also lessens the impact of efforts to help those with real trauma, those who have experienced damaging hardship such as war or true child abuse.
Most of what I drew from is my own life experience as well as light research into psychology, but I hope this issue is addressed more seriously within the mainstream as I believe this is an important issue of good intentions hurting those it was meant to help.