Take the word “trauma.” In the early versions of the primary manual of
psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
(DSM),17 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) recog-
nized “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 war-
rants 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.”18 The DSM III emphasized
that the event was not based on a subjective standard. It had to be some-
thing 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 with-
out any therapeutic interventions.19 In fact, even most people who do have
traumatic experiences recover completely without intervention.20
By the early 2000s, however, the concept of “trauma” within parts of the
therapeutic community had crept down so far that it included anything
“experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful . . . with
lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical,
social, emotional, or spiritual well-being.”21 The subjective experience of
“harm” became definitional in assessing trauma. As a result, the word
“trauma” became much more widely used, not just by mental health profes-
sionals but by their clients and patients—including an increasing number
of college students.
As with trauma, a key change for most of the concepts Haslam exam-
ined was the shift to a subjective standard.22 It was not for anyone else to
decide what counted as trauma, bullying, or abuse; if it felt like that to
you, trust your feelings. If a person reported that an event was traumatic
(or bullying or abusive), his or her subjective assessment was increasingly
taken as sufficient evidence. And if a rapidly growing number of stu-
dents have been diagnosed with a mental disorder (as we’ll see in chapter 7),
then there is a rapidly growing need for the campus community to protect them.
(
The Coddling of the American Mind).