Essay About Physical and Mental Traumas

In this world it is not uncommon to meet someone who has encountered some sort of abrasion within their lives. We observe these individuals and wonder why their outlook on life is far from positive, and wonder what happened to them that made them the way they are. We call these situations trauma. In a matter of seconds, a person’s world can take a complete 180, leaving everything they knew and loved behind. Traumas vary and can last from brief moments in time to months’ worth of hardships. Effectively taking a substantial toll on one and leading them into extended periods of suffering and isolation. 

The most stigmatized of all the categories of trauma are mental. Traumas of the mind can manifest from the physical such as injuries from a car accident, sexual assault, or being caught in a natural disaster. With mental trauma, the suffering is invisible to the outside world. Many people refer to mental trauma as “fighting with their own demons” and as a battle that one just seems unable to win. Things associated with the mental state of trauma are flashbacks, voices, self-blame, memory loss and the feeling of being disconnected to the outside world. Many feel as if they are unworthy and unable to recover from their hurt leading them to deny help and suffer alone, worried on how loved ones might regard them due to their anguish. 

Hollywood could be to blame. The media has had a long history of inaccurately depicting both mental illnesses and traumas to the world. Their failures consist of the movies, Split, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Because of the Movie Capital’s influence, trauma is both dramatized and demonized to their reality, leading to the depiction of the suffering population as insane, helpless, and a danger to the world. An extended example of this would be the movie Suicide Squad, where one of the protagonist Harley Quinn is shown to develop a personality disorder due to her physical abuse done to her by her lover. Within the movie she is seen talking to “the voices'' that were encouraging her to kill everyone around and then run away. She later jokes about this and then follows up with the line “Just kidding, that’s not what they really say” and receives wary glares from those around her. The way that Hollywood demonizes not only Harley Quinn but other characters, allows them to continuously push the narrative that the mentally traumatized ill are incapable of getting better and deeming them a threat to society. Because of this portrayal of trauma, many people become both wary and unable to provide support to the communities.

Due to the demonization of trauma in the world, many sufferers end up feeling helpless and soon begin to suffer from depression. They begin to contemplate on how if they were to take their life, then they will finally be free of their cognizance. They become set in stone with feelings of misunderstanding, and the distrust of others begins to grow. Eventually leading them to isolate themselves from loved ones and friends. An example of this would be the 2014 suicide of Robin Williams. After the death of Williams, it was later found that he suffered from Parkinson’s disease months before his death. His inability to control his body, per say, led to a sharp decline in his mental abilities. It was said that he had an incident with a head wound and was not aware that he was slowly losing himself. It was said he considered doing a psychological evaluation a week before his death. 

Many would question why the victims of trauma simply do not consider therapy or turn to medication in order to ease their distress, but it is not that simple. Suffers of trauma have the tendency to bottle their emotions inside, convinced that no one is capable of understanding them and their suffering. And at times, many people are not even aware that they have trauma. For victims of sexual assault, many are not aware of harm until years later, leading them into period of blaming themselves for not realizing sooner. As a society, we continue to learn more about the human response to shock, and the many categories it falls into. If individuals are both willing and able to release themselves of the stigmatized version of trauma they’ve learned, many at-risk individuals would be able to receive the help they need and deserve.