Commodifying Trauma
Right-sizing our perceptions of trauma can keep the pipeline to healing open.
The Guardian recently published a piece exploring how the term trauma has been commodified in the attention economy. The author, Katherine Rowland, warns that when influencers package pain as content, clinical nuance gets lost—and complex suffering becomes a meme. The article lays out how trauma has become a cultural currency—overflowing in self‑help books, social media, and wellness industries—turning real suffering into monetized content that draws clicks and capital. It shows how platforms reward and amplify emotional vulnerability, encouraging people to recast ordinary struggles as trauma in order to find belonging, validation, or financial gain. And it issues an urgent reminder: naming pain can be lifesaving—but when trauma becomes a brand, we risk diluting its meaning and losing the depth that drives true healing. Yet, the solution isn’t to abandon the word. It’s to use it wisely.
Rowland’s article gives me hope that we can continue being critical of how we apply the term trauma and deepen the discussion beyond the personas that drive perception. This caught my attention as being particularly useful when talking about remapping our neural pathways: “There is a paradox influencers and their followers rarely foresee: the tighter one clings to the wound, the narrower life becomes. Indeed, research suggests that labeling distress as a mental health problem gives rise to a genuine increase in symptoms. The label itself becomes destructive.”
This is not new. Plenty of people turn their issues—their diagnoses, their injuries, their personality test results—into their identities. But the point we need to recognize is that it’s not always permanent. It’s for a snapshot in time for when it’s useful. It has worth when it’s their entry point, their need to feel a sense of validation or belonging, their pathway. If folks—if we—cling to it beyond its usefulness, when it becomes rigid, maybe that’s when we note how growth could be helpful to move past it, past resilience, and into something even better. A post-whatever state of wellness.
When an influencer takes a term and turns it into a brand, it becomes difficult terrain. We’ve seen this before: the term codependency suffered a similar fate. It was stretched far beyond its original meaning by lay-led groups and influencers...and probably some clinicians. Was the term itself problematic? Not really. When an editorial director at Hazelden Publishing, I asked one of our astute editors to do a deep dive into codependency content and we concluded that the term is solid—explanatory, helpful, understandable. In fact, the term remains incredibly helpful for many consumers, patients, and clients. It gives people a way to describe what they’re experiencing, identify what needs work, and move toward wellness. The misuse didn’t erase its therapeutic value—it just made clarity harder to find.
The same applies to trauma. If we start from a patient-centered, person-centered, or even self-centered approach, the term fits much lived experience—especially when viewed through a culturally relativist lens. That matters because it helps mend the gap left by the deemphasis of DEIB principles. It reminds us to look at everyone’s situation and how they experience pain—whether chronic, endogenous, or exogenous. This article seems to suggest substituting “pain” for “trauma,” but the deeper point is that context matters. Trauma isn’t one-size-fits-all; it’s shaped by culture, identity, and circumstance, as are our neuro-biopsychosocial selves.
But the need for personas is important in the larger view because consumers—patients, we—are also diverse in how we access our mental and behavioral health, internally and externally. Someone who soaks in self-help material until their fingers get pruny and perhaps to the point of influencing others is a persona. Someone who is less tuned into the online world and follows the Twelve Steps is another persona. Someone who goes the route of seeking guidance from their pastor is another one. And someone who goes the DIY route and keeps the self-help to themself is yet another. For those people—especially the less performative, harder-to-find ones—I hope we keep the term trauma accessible. If naming our experience as trauma helps people seek help, and that help moves people toward post-traumatic growth—beyond resilience—then the word has done a great service. Language can be a bridge, not a barrier, when used with care.
Because language creates the pipeline. For those reading this, the words I’ve typed become a pipeline. Influencers are a pipeline. Books are pipelines. Memes are pipelines. Ads are a pipeline. Anything that raises awareness is a pipeline toward opportunities for people to get help and move toward wellness. If using—and perhaps even overusing—the term trauma opens that pipeline, then it serves a purpose. It gives people a starting point, a way to name what feels overwhelming, and that naming can lead to action: therapy, support groups, spiritual guidance, or self-help practices.
Plus, as someone in recovery from alcoholism and an eating disorder, and who also spent some of the best years of my thinking and feeling life working for an esteemed mental and behavioral health institution, I think it’s high time to see addiction and eating disorders as containing trauma within them. Not just as the pre-indicators of trauma or the results of trauma, trauma is part of the neuro-biopsychosocial experience of both substance use and addiction as well as the restricting, overeating, over-exercising, and dysmorphia of disordered eating. These conditions are that serious; they are more than pain, more than distress. They are landmines and torpedoes that hit us and our lives repeatedly, until we find our pipelines to help.
The risk isn’t in the word itself; it’s in losing its meaning through commodification. When influencers turn trauma into a brand, nuance disappears. But if we strip the term away entirely, we risk closing doors for those who need language to make sense of their pain. The challenge is balance: keep the term accessible without letting it become hollow. That means honoring context—cultural, personal, and clinical—and recognizing the diverse personas who use these pipelines. Some will broadcast their healing journey; others will quietly seek help. Both deserve language that works.