Our emotional pain became a product

Summary

Illustration: Guardian DesignIn March 2023, Dr Gabor Maté, a retired family physician and among the most respected trauma experts in the world, boldly diagnosed Prince Harry with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), during a live interview.Having read the Duke of Sussex’s ghost-written memoir, Spare, Maté said that he had arrived upon “several diagnoses” that also included depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. These were not evidence of disease per se, Maté went on to elaborate. Rather, he said: “I see it as a normal response to abnormal stress.”What Maté did is nowhere near customary clinical procedure: a diagnosis requires a structured assessment and adequate time with a patient. And to render a diagnosis publicly raises obvious privacy concerns.However, the gesture was much in keeping with the rash of diagnostic claims and self-labeling that have swept the internet and mass-market publishing, creating a space where confessional zeal and memeified pseudoscience – sometimes abetted by therapists who should know better – have become almost routine.Today, an entire industry has spawned around the idea that everything is trauma. Once understood as the psyche’s confrontation with genuine catastrophe, trauma is now treated as a personal possession: something to be owned, narrated and curated by the individual.This drift marks the entrance point to a broader cultural shift: the commodification of pain.It is evident on #TraumaTok, where across more than 650,000 posts creators variously rant, weep and recast traits as symptoms – “Perfectionist? It’s your trauma!” – to great algorithmic reward.The same sensibility crowds bookstore shelves. Barnes & Noble lists more than 3,300 titles under the “anxiety, stress and trauma-related disorders” category, from memoirs of resurfaced memories to healing manuals and neuro-pop analysis. (One author calls trauma “an out-of-control epidemic”, transmissible among family and friends.)When everything is trauma, nothing isMos...