I’m brain deep in domestic abuse and mental health literature as I track a path through what is already known. This reading will form the basis of my PhD “literature review”. I’ve read through the big reports from domestic abuse organisations like Women’s Aid Federation England (Birchall, 2021), AVA (Holly, 2017, p.14-17), and Safe Lives (2019). These reports are informed by the wider academic literature and seem take a very similar form:
- Challenge the pathologisation of women subjected to abuse.
- Bemoan abuse illiteracy amongst mental health services (who exist to pathologise women subjected to abuse).
- List the mental health diagnoses women subjected to abuse have, showing they are more likely to be mentally ill than the general population (legitimising diagnosing women).
- Pay lip service to a “trauma informed” way of working with women before quickly reverting to medicalised language and approaches.
- Insist mental health services need to become abuse literate (thereby legitimising mental health services as a key resource for women).
- Point to the importance of domestic abuse services’ therapeutic work (thereby legitimising counselling as the best resource for women).
- Bemoan the lack of funding for these services.
- Advocate that the solution is abuse literate mental health services and more funding for specialist domestic abuse services to do more counselling.
I hold to a form of feminism which fundamentally opposes the pathologisation of women; presuming that however unusual or uncommon a woman’s actions or behaviours, there will be an internal logic to them that makes sense when placed in the full socio-ecological context of her life. At its broadest, that context encompasses the full gamut of historic and current patriarchy, late-stage capitalism, post-colonial realities, and the fragmenting and complex realities of a techno-authoritarian world in which the old assumptions of stability, power and the social contract are imploding. At its most finite, this context includes her inner world and meaning making resources. Other levels include her interpersonal relationships, organisational and institutional realities, her wider community and her place within her nation.
Reading the current literature has been a bit crazy-making for me with the pathologised assumptions and an (almost totally) uncritical acceptance of “mental health” as an entity that exists and of “mental health” services as a Good Thing for women (if they had enough training and resource that is). It would be enough to send an anti-psychiatry feminist into a downwards mental health spiral; if only she could suspend her whole ideological position long enough.
And yet. As I followed the breadcrumbs of lip-service paid to “trauma informed” working and the brief nods to not pathologising women I came upon literature that offers a completely different perspective. It turns out that the first domestic abuse researchers, as they blazed a trail of understanding the mechanisms of power and control in men’s abuse of women, were all vehemently opposed to the pathologisation of women. So much so that they rejected the terminologues of women “healing” or “recovering” after being subjected to abuse as both had medicalised connotations (Kelly et al., 1996).
This wasn’t only about medicalisation as it related to health based interventions, but also about therapeutic work generally. In 1992, Dobash and Dobash (p.225) stated,
‘A narrow therapeutic focus means that the problems of individual women are not seen in the context of male domination, and the social problem of violence against women is reduced to the troubles of unique, deviant women, and not linked to the nature of the wider oppression and experiences of all women. Significantly the bulk of therapeutic discourses pay scant attention to male domination.’
I finally found my people! My favourite author so far from this period is Bonnie Burstow, whose brilliant book Radical Feminist Therapy (1992) should be compulsory reading for anyone interested in women and mental health.
I’m now trying to unpick how, in 30 years, strongly held non-pathologised approaches to women have morphed into an almost complete capture to psychiatric and pathologised approaches to women. Which brings me to watching the new documentary Traumality (2026) with my twenty year old son yesterday evening; the same evening that our part of the world was graced with a partial solar eclipse.
Traumality film
Traumality is the brainchild of content creator, turned filmmaker, Ton Mazzone and features an impressive range of trauma specialists. Utilising his own journey through mental health diagnosis and treatment, he takes the viewer on a journey to understanding the ways adult mental health issues are often rooted in childhood trauma. The film relies heavily on AI, all non-interview content (including most of the music) is AI created.
The film is a good introduction for those new to trauma science. The contributors provide accessible and engaging explanations on the development and use of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), what mental health medications do, and explains alternative, non-medicalised therapeutic approaches for distressed people. My son, who is studying cyber security, is in regular (quite passionate!) discussions with friends at university who are studying psychology. A year into their course and they haven’t had any teaching that isn’t highly affirming medicalised approaches to distress. They are the perfect audience for Traumality; it will give them an introduction to an alternative perspective and as such could be hugely valuable.
With the exception of acknowledging trauma related to the transatlantic slave trade, the film focusses almost exclusively on interpersonal harm. AI scenes of cartoon parents mistreating or neglecting their children don’t reference male violence towards women, but rather show generic parents hurting the generic children. The experts are keen to state that parents may harm their children unintentionally, with one section of the film inferring that people (of a non-specified sex) who perpetrate domestic abuse likely do so because of childhood trauma.
COVID and children’s screen use is briefly mentioned in relation to childhood diagnosis of ADHD, but beyond that childhood trauma is limited to parents deliberately or unintentionally harming their children, causing those children to become distressed adults who are met with pathologised and medicalised responses which make their lives worse, not better.
In the film, Scotland is held up as a shining example of a country committed to becoming a trauma informed, with Ton finishing the film by declaring that “a trauma informed society is prevention at the root” and a rousing question to politicians, will they be “the one remembered for generations to come as the person who helped change how a nation understands human suffering”.
Getting to the roots?
Traumality is a film I should be enthused about. After spending far too long in literature which legitimises pathologising women, the film should be a breath of fresh air. But instead I’m left feeling troubled. By starting with trauma itself, the film doesn’t get to the roots of anything, instead it stops with the branches of the tree. These branches include sadness, dissociation, hearing voices, sleeplessness and exhaustion, compulsive cleaning and counting, rage, fear, shame, panic, paranoia, self-harm, suicidality, inability to trust. The branches may also include physical health problems like heart disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, rheumatoid arthritis, IBS or other digestive issues, or autoimmune disorders. At present the first set of branches are characterised as “mental health disorders” and the second as “physical health problems” and the film is right to demand that these be recategorized as normal and explainable responses to distress. Naming them as trauma may enable better and more effective responses. Yet, these are not the roots of the problem.
Instead the roots are whatever caused the distress that led someone to have these responses (or as the medical model would call them “symptoms”). This may include, but will never be limited to interpersonal injury perpetrated solely by a generic parent of unspecified sex to their child, who is also of an unspecified sex.
I often work to build literacy about the brilliant Power Threat Meaning Framework (2018), particularly in using the framework to support women subjected to abuse by men. It’s interesting that those who position themselves as “trauma specialists” are often resistant to me naming men as the perpetrators of abuse and of me insisting that such men are driven by beliefs of ownership and entitlement. They insist that their trauma-informed practice is driven by empathy and that my approach is not empathic towards perpetrators of abuse. They would be correct. My emotional labour is entirely and unapologetically reserved for the women and children hurt by those men. What I discovered is there’s quite a few people who are keen to use the Power Threat Meaning Framework without interrogating systems of power or analysing their meaning-making systems for flaws or failures.
I’m also keen to shout loudly about the Resilience Portfolio (Hamby, 2025); a brilliant model which seeks to identify which are the most important resources to enable us all to build flourishing lives. They have identified four domains of strengths within the portfolio, which all of us can invest in if we are to have the best chance at getting to our biggest and most beautiful lives. These domains are:
- Interpersonal – relationships, community, connection, pets.
- Environmental – blue and green spaces, hugging trees, safe places.
- Regulatory – breathing, meditation/prayer, exercise, healthy food, finding rhythm.
- Meaning making – making sense of what we’ve endured, a sense of purpose, a big story we see ourselves as part of.
What is most striking about the Resilience Portfolio research is that on all the evidence, most traumatised people do not remain traumatised! I’m going to say it a bit louder for those at the back: MOST TRAUMATISED PEOPLE DO NOT REMAIN TRAUMATISED (Hamby, 2026, p.26-27). They do not need therapy or a trauma informed framework, they just need to have enough bits and pieces in their resilience portfolio!
A total eclipse of the roots?
It’s curious that we watched Traumality just after a solar eclipse, for this provides a striking metaphor for way Traumality says so much important stuff, but also misses the point.
The roots of the problem are not trauma. The roots of the problem sit within a toxic soil of power systems; patriarchy, white supremacy, unregulated capitalism, techno-authoritarianism. Within a Christian theological framework, we would call all these systems “principalities and powers” (Ephesians 6:12. Wink, 1992). And in this soil, the roots of harm abound; men perpetrate all manner of direct harm on women and children, racist systems and individuals perpetrate direct harm on black and racially minoritised humans, children and adults become compulsive consumers (of pornography, junk food, beautification, influencing); fuelled by that consumption and corporate greed, the climate crisis destroys lives and livelihoods.[1] For more on the ways children particularly are harmed outside of interpersonal relationship, see Jim Wild’s 2013 book, Exploiting Childhood.
Just as the moon eclipsed the sun yesterday, so the concept of “trauma” eclipses the true cause of the harms people are facing. It’s not that trauma informed work is unimportant or that the film is wrong as such, it simply fails to explore the bright ball of fire from which all the issues it raises stem.
This is particularly important given that the film purports to offer solutions to the problems traumatised people face. These solutions are generally therapeutic and sit between the regulatory and meaning making domains. The film helps build literacy about the various physiological systems which become dysregulated when we are traumatised and offers examples of therapies and actions individuals can take to resolve these. The main therapy examined is Internal Family Systems therapy, which enables people to see their responses and distress with compassion. The person’s core Self is invited to listen and care for hurt parts within the person, to bring about an integrated whole.
What is notable about the meaning making on offer in these sorts of therapies is that it is internal to the person and does not engage with the wider systems of power (the soil of the tree). Which brings us back to the feminist writings of the 1980s and 1990s. Their commitment was to making visible and then challenging systems of power. For them, the roots of the problem were explicitly found in a soil of systematic oppression and materially informed what men did to women and children. It was in this political form of meaning making that women were equipped to understand themselves and work to remake the world in liberated and liberative ways, always cognisant of these systems (most notably patriarchy) and how this impacted every part of all of our lives. They were vigilant to any diluting of that patriarchal context, for they saw that it would inevitably lead towards pathologisation, medicalisation and individualising of what is a collective and systematic problem.
That diluting seemed to come anyway, as the more recent research and reports about domestic abuse and mental health attest to. I suspect the “trauma revolution” which was hugely escalated by the ACEs study of 1998 (Felitti et al.) has had a big part to play in that dilution. Suspicions are no good however in a literature review! And so I’m keen to hear reflections about how we’ve got to where we are and to learn of any research or writings which will help me make sense of the journey from feminist research being completely non-pathologised, to a situation where “mental health” is the dominant lens through which women’s distress is now understood.
- You can watch Traumality and make up your own mind about the film HERE.
- You can get a PDF of Bonnie Burstow’s brilliant book HERE.
- Own My Life have as exciting free event with Sherry Hamby which you can book into HERE.
[1] It is primarily the traumatising reality of the climate crisis which has most troubled me about Traumality’s reliance on AI, given the ways AI is hugely destructive of the environment. More generally, the heavy use of AI in the film is one of many ways the film seems to approach trauma without considering the wider systems of power in which people become traumatised.