Trauma, Dysfunction, and Identity
Notes on mental health, part three
Written by Carl Lorenz Cervantes (originally published here)
I see this a lot on social media: influencers offer pseudo-diagnoses for serious conditions. This is not new. For years, clinical terms have been thrown around, mainly as insults, and sometimes as supposed personality quirks. Wanting picture frames and chairs to be aligned to some internal measurement doesn't necessarily meant that one has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Suddenly changing one's decision doesn't necessarily mean that one is Bipolar. When I was in grade school, the word "autistic" would be thrown around to hurt other children who are just unconventionally creative. Today we see the word "trauma" in everyday conversation, particularly in reference to awkward social situations. While it's great that people are being more open about difficult and potentially traumatic experiences, most experiences labeled as "trauma responses" are really just reasonable and very valid responses to stressful events. The danger of self-diagnosis is, perhaps most obviously, unnecessary anxiety, but it can also delay appropriate interventions. There is a normal spectrum os psychosocial experiences, which may range from pleasant to distressing; meanwhile, disorders require careful assessment from a trained professional, in order to identify proper treatment.
In our modern day watering down of the term, there is a danger in mislabeling or even imposing a trauma identity on relatively healthy or resilient people. Experiencing a traumatic event doesn't necessarily have to meant that a person has trauma - or, when it turns into a personality trait, that they are a "traumatized person." On an individual level, when we identify too much with our traumas and dysfunctions, then most likely we wouldn't actually want them to be solved or, at the very least, addressed - otherwise, we would lose an integral part of our identity. But identity, however it's defined, is really just memory - that is, the memory of our interactions with the world around us. It can be forgotten, even momentarily when we act in a way that's "out of character." We call this nawala sa sarili, or lost from the self - implying, therefore, that the "self" is something we can wander away from.
We know who we are because identity is really just our agreement with our social and physical environment. The implicit morality of "functional" and "dysfunctional" as "good" or "bad" depends heavily on our expectations of each other, which in turn shape our expectations of ourselves - this is what George Herbert Mead called the "generalized other." In short, society is, itself, just a game with specific rules. In Psychotherapy East & West, Alan Watts pointed out that our society is an agreement we make with each other, much like any other game with rules. This applies even to - and perhaps especially to - conflict among people. We can blame a clear enemy for our traumas, but this only strengthens our personal identity - by creating a "them," we are reinforcing the "us." The world becomes kaniya-kaniya (to each their own), where individuals are too separate to ever find mutual ground.
We must therefore disrupt the con that we are separate from each other, from nature, or from history - we are more alike than we think. Returning to a kapwa mentality (that is, other centred) can be a radical act, especially when many of those in power want us fragmented and isolated, so that we can be easier to control. Well-being is not just embodied and individual; it's also a societal issue.
Just to be clear: I am not advocating that we should stop publicly discussing trauma or mental disorders, or that we should "gatekeeper" clinical terms to avoid misuse. The scientific and academic fields already have too much jargon that life-changing frameworks and discoveries have become to inaccessible to the everyday person. I think it's great that there is an increase in mental health awareness, even if it means that there will be misinformation. These are all opportunities for education and dialogue.
What I hope you could take away from all this is that I think it's important to realize that traumas and dysfunctions don't just emerge from the individual. We must consider community and connectedness to the world as part of a reasonable diagnosis of one's conditions. Further, we shouldn't romanticize debilitating mental illnesses to the point of it simply being an everyday quirt of personality because that only encourages the existing systems that have made it so inconvenient in the first place. We must be able to see that our personal problems are so often rooted in larger social issues. Our ability to see that connection is what C. Wright Mills called "sociological imagination." He said that many important public issues are often described in psychiatric terms, as a "pathetic attempt" to avoid addressing the most pressing problems of modern society.
In summary, we can of course start to recognize that there are many valid ways of existing in a society filled with oppression, violence, and status anxiety. What we do about it will depend on how willing we are to work together and build more inclusive systems where our current mental health issues won't even exist as we know them today.
