An Overview Of Trauma Reels On Social Media

He had been gushy—sending compliments, creating a music playlist, and engaging in flirty texts with multiple girls. A classic creep, “West Elm Caleb” went viral on TikTok. However, in the language of TikTok, he was more than a creep: he was “pathological,” “love bombing” women by showering them with attention, “gaslighting” them into thinking that he liked them, and abruptly leaving the “victims” together to “trauma dump” (Bennett 2022). Suddenly, social media has become a vehicle to misuse and overuse words typically saved for the therapist’s couch; words meant to describe highly abusive and manipulative relationships. An unqualified trauma “coach” suggests that any behavior can be a trauma response in a reel; and, by an unofficial “put a

Reels on social media most commonly promote overpreparing, overanalyzing, overachieving, getting defensive, being a perfectionist, and struggling to make small decisions as trauma responses. These behaviors could describe someone’s trauma response, however, to display such common traits as part of trauma only leads to incorrect labels and misleading information about mental health (Palus 2021). The hashtag #TraumaTok has nearly 600 million views, teaching users that the inability to stop scrolling might not just be a product of boredom, but a trauma response (Bennett 2022). With colorful text written over sad piano music, non-licensed “therapists” and “coaches” with 340,000 followers oversimplify trauma responses, often labeling characteristics as trauma that could also just be predictable responses to anxiety (Palus 2021). Even social media channels have started to characterize relatively innocuous behaviors and habits as symptoms of trauma, like watching a show repeatedly, leading to more confusion over what is qualified as trauma. This in turn promotes inaccurate self-diagnosis and creates an intolerance of experiences that are difficult but not disabling (Guha 2022). By extracting and assessing the accuracy of

With words being thrown around in the media, if labels are thrown on trauma terms too quickly, it can derail nuanced and important conversations, creating the idea of an assumed meaning (Haupt 2023). While trying to end the stigma around mental health online, the constant awareness and prevalence of psychological trauma terms have caused trauma to become a “buzzword” used to describe anything shocking, distressing, or slightly uncomfortable. The true meaning has shifted away, robbing the term of its value and complexity. If a bad date is “traumatic,” what term can describe someone who is critically injured and scarred from a school shooting? If everyone who feels disappointed is “depressed,” what term describes someone who ponders suicide all day? The casual use of trauma and trauma jargon can dilute these words that once had a purpose, an impact (Reidbord 2022). Trauma is used in therapeutic settings to quickly and clearly describe the severity of an experience to those who may not otherwise understand it. It is meant to be a clear word to describe a diagnosis and a layout for treatment and counseling. When using the wrong words, other people are likely to misunderstand a person’s feelings, which only makes it harder for others to