Trauma, ASD and PTSD
What is “trauma”? The word seems to be used inconsistently in the mental health field, sometimes referring to an adverse event and sometimes describing the psychological injury sustained from experiencing such an event. “Trauma” comes from the Greek word for “wound, hurt, or defeat”; before 1700 it was used to mean a physical injury, the sense in which many medical practitioners today use the word. The sense of a “psychic wound, [an] unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress” has been in use from around 1900 (Harper, 2015) and is more aligned with the counselling and psychology sense. In this article, we will refer to trauma not as an event, but as the psychological injury which results from experience of the adverse event. »
