The dominant psychological framework for understanding trauma is inadequate when it comes to war refugees, particularly children displaced by the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
A new article published in the Annual Review of Critical Psychology critiques the dominant PTSD framework, arguing that it fails to capture the full scope of suffering experienced by refugees, particularly those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The authors, Pia Andreatta and Gianluca Crepaldi, draw on direct fieldwork in conflict zones to challenge the idea that trauma is simply an individual disorder. Instead, they argue, it must be understood as a process deeply embedded in social structures, unfolding across multiple stages—from pre-war stressors to displacement, resettlement, and the long-term uncertainty of refugee life.
“Individual pain is first and foremost part of a societal process,” they write. “The core of trauma is always social, and to this extent, the suffering of refugees is inseparable from the political structures that shape their experience.”
The study critiques the way PTSD has become the standard framework for trauma, despite its origins in research on Vietnam War veterans. That model, the authors argue, assumes trauma is a singular, past event rather than an ongoing experience. But for refugees, trauma does not end with war. Structural violence in host countries—legal limbo, economic precarity, and social exclusion—continues to shape psychological distress, complicating notions of recovery. A child who has escaped war may still live in precarious conditions, uncertain about their legal status, education, or future.
The authors propose an alternative model, drawing from David Becker’s concept of sequential traumatization. Rather than seeing trauma as an event with a clear beginning and end, they argue, it unfolds in a series of interrelated phases. In Ukraine, for example, war-related stressors predate the 2022 invasion, with years of political instability and economic hardship setting the stage for further psychological distress. The invasion itself marks a turning point, plunging families into acute terror and survival mode. Many endure direct threats to life, forced displacement, and separation from loved ones. But even after escaping immediate danger, they face prolonged uncertainty, often living in makeshift camps or struggling with legal barriers in host countries.
“The moment of traumatic collapse is difficult to identify. Chronification is a common further development of this sequence,” the authors write.
You've landed on a MIA journalism article that is funded by MIA supporters. To read the full article, sign up as a MIA Supporter. All active donors get full access to all MIA content, and free passes to all Mad in America events.
Current MIA supporters can log in below.(If you can't afford to support MIA in this way, email us at [email protected] and we will provide you with access to all donor-supported content.)
Your story is that the dominant psychological framework for dealing with trauma, or the ‘standard PTSD model’, which is nothing but a professional form of group think, fails war refugees in Ukraine. What is the actual that we need to understand? Obviously the actual psychological, emotional and behavioural/physiological trauma as it is and it’s relations to the actual social and physical environment as it is, and that s the whole field of the trauma, the psychology and the problems of life. Understanding of this terrain makes possible an intelligent human response to it. How does any kind of group-think formalised approach help us to do this? And how do we think psychologists and psychiatrists, whose psuedo-expertise is restricted only to the field of mind and brain respectively, are able to respond adequately to a whole problematic that embraces mind, life, emotional trauma and behavioural adaptations in the context of a social existence all these aspects forming one total dynamic interplay? No doctor either would be able to help with this so why do you think a psychologist or psychiatrist could? Only a true human being could, which is someone who cares to understand the actual problems of another human being struggling to live safely, and through freedom that care and understanding would, allowing for sufficient resources, provide intelligent assistance to that human being. We have not any hope at all that society or psychiatry is going to stumble on this obvious human truth in time before it destroys everything and makes all forms of medical and social care impossible anyway so you are all wasting your final days on useless and worthless distraction. You have to come up with better then this kind of technocratic piecemeal triviality which pails into insignificance compared to the broader problems destroying all our lives and word and threatening the stability and sanity of us all.
Report comment
One line of thinking goes that the larger geopolitical context of the Russian military operation is the 2014 American Rainbow Revolution / Maidan coup in Ukraine, which infringed upon Russia’s legitimate security interests. How can our leaders expect individual consumers of “services” provided by mental health ideology cultists to accept personal responsibility for our acts of interpersonal destruction when our military-industrial bureacratic synarchs don’t accept social responsibility for tyrannical acts of genocidal spycraft? Russia and Ukraine are only proxies for spiritual conflicts happening within the corrupt hearts of individual Americans, so is world war three another wave-phase of the Book of Enoch?
This is why I say there’s a twin-mountain on our backs and that mountain is cultural imperialism and that mountain is psychiatry. The angels Gabriel and Moroni want to help us smash that mountain.
Smedley Butler was an isolationist but he wrote an interesring essay called War Is A Racket. Who is ultimately responsible for the cycle of violence? It’s a question of who has the willpower to act upon the necessity for change. Whoever demonstrates himself capable of leading us all beyond this punctum saliens to a higher form of civilization on earth deserves to be president of a republic on Mars.
https://schillerinstitute.com/blog/2022/11/30/ten-principles-of-a-new-international-security-and-development-architecture/
Report comment
Thank you, Not Anonymous.
Your comment touches on an important aspect of a much larger point many others have tried to make about power and the dehumanizing business of war in pitting individual human beings and groups against one another. It’s what many of us have been taught to support and vote for, almost as a sacred duty.
There are other neglected aspects to this narrative as well, one of which centers on the cultural oppression and systemic violence inflicted on Russian-speaking Ukranian citizens —men, women and children— living in the Donbass during the 8 years prior to Russia’s invasion. And how many of the young Ukranian soldiers initially sent into these areas (before Russia invaded) abandoned their tanks and country, unwilling to participate in or commit *individual* acts of violence against their brothers and sisters.
“I have no political message but just know that even though we have been talking about this conflict for just a week, it has been going on for 8 years . . . I don’t take sides, and I don’t defend Putin.” ~ Anne-Laure Bonnel, French journalist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8j0tJsKltg
Bearing witness and telling the stories of individuals and groups who would otherwise be without a voice matters. Individuals on all sides are suffering, in this and many other conflicts and wars.
Report comment
Thanks for your enormously insightful posturing, your sincerity touches my heart. I will watch the documentary and I do appreciate the extra context despite my bitter sarcasm.
Friendingly, Fruit aka Putin Simp
Report comment
Hi,
Sorry, I perhaps wrongly assumed that you were mocking me for my stated position. I have started the documentary you suggested and it appears much worse than I realized. I’ll finish it today, it’s very heartbreaking so far. Let me know if you have any others to recommend.
Not Anonymous
Report comment
I wasn’t mocking you, Not Anonymous.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwZApPCFXIc
https://thegrayzone.com/?s=Max+Blumenthal+Ukraine
You might also find this link interesting related to sanctions and people-centered human rights:
https://blackagendareport.com/people-centered-human-rights-and-black-radical-tradition-0
I don’t vote. How could I and live with my conscience.
Report comment
The effects of war can last generations. Anyone who can’t understand that is short-sided fool.
Report comment
The effects of war can last generations but it isn’t necessary that they do. Perhaps empathogens have a place in highly-regulated contexts to relieve the associated traumas. Reparations to Pyongyang from USA and Japan is a good start. Also if someone establishes a non-profit religious organization to recognize Friendly Father Kim Jong-Un as The Living Buddha Maitteya in a patriotic ceremony, that’s a wonderful gesture for peace.
https://youtu.be/Ja6VlFkEoWQ?si=7QgjBfsyggWTR7A9
Report comment
I’m confused, it sounds like the authors of the paper are describing complex PTSD which was initially defined by Judith Herman as chronic, compounded, interpersonal trauma. I assumed that was clearly applicable to living through social and political upheaval, war and displacement.
I also am pretty sure that Herman in fact contextualised trauma very firmly in political and social conditions.
Interesting, but not surprising, that the authors identify a tendency to medicalise and decontextualise trauma – I thought by definition this would not be possible.
Great explanations of how trauma is a disruption of the individual-social , not just individual, in the paper.
I wonder if it is, not that the concept of PTS(D) depoliticises trauma, but that the people who use the concept as a diagnosis depoliticise it?
How can we ensure that any concept does not become commodified and individualised in a psychiatric industry that consumes every concept and shapes it to fits its own medical model?
Report comment
“How can we ensure that any concept does not become commodified and individualised in a psychiatric industry that consumes every concept and shapes it to fit its own medical model?”
The answer is you can’t. Why? Because you can’t separate commodification from industry.
Report comment
You know who has unsuccessfully attempted to separate industry from commodification? The fabian anarchists of the United States post-industrial society service-economy war machine, with their economic sanctions against DPRC and their media malignity, which have failed to break the steel-spirits of Coreans in the northern half of the peninsula. Inspiring! Heartwarming! I can learn a lot from the benevolence and mercy of Friendly Father Kim Jong Un if I read about his heroism instead of filling my head with liberal propaganda. I can learn a lot from the fraternity of the Coreans under Son of the Corean People KJU.
End cultural imperialism! Bosintang is Corean heritage! End the persecution of bosintang eaters in Corea!
Signed, Blastoise
Report comment
The concept of Han from Korea comes to mind.
Report comment
Interesting. Say more.
There’s a Charlie Brown comic and the text says “if you want to get any joy out of being depressed you have to put your head down and sulk like this.” I tried to find the original but the search engine really wants me to know that it’s not ok to be a whiney sadboye when you’re a grown ass man, but I’m sure someone else can locate it more easily.
Perhaps culturally the psychosocial effects of trauma from events like the invasions of Corea or Vietnam are macrocosmic similitudes of the kind of cyclical suffering which results when one person inflicts traumatic stress on another person. Diane Sare wrote that perhaps the invasion of Vietnam was not about Vietnam at all, but about getting America to do something so evil that no amount of miracles will wash the white wool clean. In that sense it’s similar to how Lyndon LaRouche described Adolf Hitler as a Dionysian. The Apples of Apollo as I remember it has an interesting exploration of the Dionysian perspective on Christianity.
I used to want to write a book called America: A Case Study in State Narcissism.
Americans really need to be taught the works of Ho Chi Minh to understand how French imperialism destroyed Vietnam and why the American reaction against their independence was criminal rather than heroic. IIRC Anthony Bourdain wrote anecdotally that Ho Chi Minh was a cook in Escoffier’s kitchen, which is fascinating if true.
https://flpress.storenvy.com/products/34355857-selected-works-of-ho-chi-minh-volume-1
Report comment
There’s a controversial CBC show called Kim’s Convenience (pro-Israel propaganda) and the father says that Corea used to be spelled with a ‘C’ and now it’s spelled with a ‘K’ because of Japanese imperialism.
So now I spell it with a ‘C’ because I think the original Mean Girls is a very funny and true movie.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/36/61/85/3661856916c12fc8821c017b3de08098.jpg
This is what liberal media does to poison kid’s minds.
Report comment
Many years ago, I was in an online PTSD group. Because of the narrow diagnostic criteria of PTSD it was made up of male war vets and female SA vets. Yet all of us had major childhood and adult trauma unrelated to the ‘event’ that was supposed to be the only significant issue. One thing might push a person over the edge but there is a world of steps leading to the plummet.
Report comment