Thoughts on trauma: psychopathology or paradigm?
Giovanni M. Ruggiero, Gabriele Caselli, Sandra Sassaroli
Many clinical procedures and psychotherapeutic protocols focused on post-traumatic stress disorder are spreading, some of which showing evidence of empirically confirmed efficacy. In some cases, however, these protocols tend to present themselves as a new clinical paradigm that implies a hyper-inclusive and all-explanatory definition of the trauma. Hyper-inclusive because this paradigm suggests that any kind of aversive experience at the basis of emotional disorders is actually traumatic, that not only PTSD but also many other diagnoses of emotional disorder have a significant traumatic aspect, that the etiology of emotional suffering is explainable in terms of trauma and that the therapy is to be developed in terms of treatment of traumatic aspects. This work reviews the scientific literature behind this conception, discussing the extent to which it can be interpreted in narrow terms as confirmation that there is a traumatic area of emotional suffering, or in the hyper-inclusive and omni-explanatory terms above mentioned.
Keywords
Trauma, Emotional disorders, EMDR, Psychopatology, Psychotherapy, PTSD.