What is trauma?

Consequences of interpersonal violence and abuse

Interpersonal violence and forms of abuse during childhood in particular can be an important source of distress.

How does trauma arise?

Trauma can arise at any moment in life. Bad, intense experiences early in life relatively often lead to an accumulation of traumas. This creates a cluster of traumatic experiences.

Causes

Such a cluster of accumulated traumatic experiences can include, for example:

• Chronic debt
• Persistent insecurity about your livelihood
• Violence (emotional and/or physical)
• Witnessing violence and war
• Bullying
• Growing up with addiction
• Neglect
• Abuse
• Serious medical errors that were never acknowledged
• Discrimination
• Injustice
• Long-term unemployment

PsychosisNet helps

PsychosisNet wants to be a source that helps you become aware of traumatic experiences. We help with trauma-focused psychoeducation and with ways of treating the spectrum of adversity, pain and trauma in childhood. That is what the pages in this chapter on trauma are for.

Mental distress caused by trauma

If you are faced with one or more of the factors in the cluster, without enough resilience, you often experience mental distress later on.

About 30 to 40% of all mental distress in young adults stems from exposure to the cluster of early childhood adversity. The manifestations of early childhood adversity cut right across the whole of psychiatry:

• Eating disorder
• Personality problems
• Psychosis
• Anxiety
• Depression
• Dissociation
• Bipolarity
• Post-traumatic stress
• Complex trauma

It all runs together and merges into each other as a result of adversity and trauma. Perhaps you are not yet aware of this, and you are looking for explanations for things in yourself that you do not understand.

Complex trauma

There is a difference between going through a single car accident as an adult and being a victim of sexual abuse for years as a child. To make this difference clear, people speak of ‘complex trauma’ when it concerns severe early childhood trauma.

Fortunately, there is more attention for the consequences of early childhood adversity. There is growing recognition that traumatic events also have an impact on psychosis susceptibility. There is also consensus that attention is needed for the physical manifestations of trauma, which can be traced back to the survival strategies of the child who had to deal with it.

Read more on the page about complex trauma and C-PTSD.

In this chapter

• Complex trauma and C-PTSD
• The history of trauma and psychosis
• Psychosis and trauma
• What trauma can do to you
• The personal meaning of trauma
• The impact of trauma on body and mind
• Treatment for trauma

Do you need help now?

PsychosisNet offers information. We do not offer a chat, a helpline or crisis support. If you or someone else is in immediate danger, call the emergency number in your country. If you are thinking about suicide, or you need to talk to someone now, see Need help now? for helplines by country.

Prof. dr. Jim van Os, Chair Division Neuroscience, Utrecht University Medical Centre. Jim works at the interface of ‘hard’ brain science, health services research, art and subjective experiences of people with ‘lived experience’ in mental healthcare. 

Jim has been appearing on the Thomson-Reuter Web of Science list of ‘most influential scientific minds of our time’ since 2014. In 2014 he published his book ‘Beyond DSM-5‘, and in 2016 the book ‘Good Mental Health Care’. In 2026 he published 'Wat psychisch lijden is'.

Want to read more?

Blogs by Jim van Os can be read here

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