Addressing Collective Trauma Must Be a Top Priority

"In the past few years, I have spent significant time helping communities deal with collective traumas generated by the impacts of the climate-ecosystem-biodiversity (C-E-B) crisis. Mixed with these struggles are often pervasive traumas generated by social, economic, and political hardships. The mental health field has predominantly focused on treating individual trauma. This is insufficient to address collective traumas. Collective traumas can occur whenentire communities or nations experience overwhelming or prolonged systemic inequalities, genocides, or extreme weather disasters like hurricanes, wildfires, or floods."

"They produce the same symptoms as individual trauma, such as fear, anxiety, hyperarousal, avoidance behaviors, and altered moods. However, the impacts occur on a much larger scale and can be far more perilous. When it builds over time, collective trauma often causes large numbers of people to withdraw into a self-protective survival mode and numb themselves to reality. This often leads to rigid thinking that causes them to believe misinformation and myths as a way to make sense of their experience."

"I have personally seen this occur among many Americans. The life-changing harm caused by the C-E-B crisis, and fear of the deep changes in lifestyles needed to minimize it, have led many to believe it is a hoax or not important enough to meaningfully address. Many working-class and rural Americans have also disconnected from reality and embraced myths and falsehoods due to the decades of shame they have experienced from the loss of meaningful family-wage jobs, skyrocketing economic inequality, and the breakdown of their community."

Collective traumas arise when entire communities or nations experience overwhelming or prolonged systemic inequalities, genocides, or extreme weather disasters. They produce symptoms similar to individual trauma — fear, anxiety, hyperarousal, avoidance, and altered moods — but affect large populations and can be far more dangerous. Over time collective trauma can push many people into self-protective survival modes, causing emotional numbness, withdrawal, and rigid thinking that fosters belief in misinformation and myths. The climate-ecosystem-biodiversity crisis and allied social and economic hardships have driven denial and disengagement among many Americans. Prevention and recovery require collective, community-based responses because individual therapy alone is insufficient.

Read at Psychology Today