My early TV viewing preferences were perhaps a clue that I’d make a career researching psychological trauma . I spent my youth watching the American war comedy drama M*A*S*H*, which followed a team of doctors and support staff stationed at the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Uijeongbu, South Korea, during the Korean war. In my 20s, I became a fan of the Chicago-based emergency room drama ER.
In these TV series, reflecting the eras in which they were set, “trauma” referred only to devastating physical injuries. The term has since moved into common parlance to describe the psychology of extreme events, as well as physical injury. But it retains a medical connotation that I think is unhelpful.
My research radically rethinks psychological trauma. Instead of trying to specify what is “wrong” with those adversely affected by psychological trauma, I focus on shared characteristics that place some, and not others, at risk of trauma. These shared attributes, known as social identities, are really important to recovery from trauma too.
Major life-changing events are common. And the most common response to traumatic events is psychological resilience: people bounce back. More than 90% of people who experience direct traumatic events such as war, sexual assault, road accidents and natural disasters do not have adverse psychological outcomes in the long term.
For the most part, people manage these events and move forward. But while most people show resilience, traumatic .