Review of Orla T.Muldoon's The Social Psychology of Trauma: Connecting the Personal and Political. Cambridge University Press, 2024. 222 pp.

Orla T. Muldoon's book “The Social Psychology of Trauma: Connecting the Personal and Political” offers a deep and vivid analysis of the psychological, social, and political processes that occur both before and after traumatic experiences. It features a personal, at times autobiographic, narrative that is weaved together with academic literature and poetry, thereby crafting a much needed societal approach to the understanding of trauma. It combines scientific insights from different disciplines to understand the trauma process, including clinical psychology, social and political psychology, sociology, and political science. The personally relatable content and flowing writing style allow the seven chapters of the book to be appreciated by a large and diverse audience, including students and researchers, victims and their families, as well as practitioners. This book has several highlights. The book opens with a definitional overview of trauma and traumatic experiences, characterized by the DSM-5 as “exposure to death, threatened death, actual or threatened serious injury, or actual or threatened sexual violence”. Muldoon, however, takes this definition a step further by looking at trauma as a fundamentally social process, forcefully highlighting the structural and political forces that precede and make traumatic experiences possible or probable. She also examines how different types of traumas (e.g., individual or collective, resulting from intentional or non-intentional actions) are associated with a complex web of both negative and potentially positive responses to trauma. Muldoon shifts away from the traditional focus on “post-traumatic stress disorder” (PTSD) and instead uses “post-traumatic stress” (PTS) to describe the most common (individual) response to traumatic experiences. She argues that labelling victims of traumatic experiences as “disordered” (and thus defined by an “unusual” or “exceptional” mental health problem) following traumatic exposure is a “political act” in itself because it detracts from the social and political conditions that give rise to the trauma, thereby putting the onus on individual symptoms, suffering and deficiency. She fleshes out the broader social and economic costs of trauma, in addition to its better known personal mental and physical health costs, showing, for example, how stigmatizing traumatic experiences enhance social divisions and undermine trust. Trauma may also exacerbate existing economic inequalities, contributing to poverty, unemployment, and forced migration for example. One of the premises of the work is that trauma is common and can happen to anyone anywhere and is thus of concern to everyone. According to recent estimates, over 70% of the global population will experience a traumatic event during their lifetime (WHO, 2024).1 While armed conflict, accidents, natural disasters, or sexual violence are (relatively) rare examples of traumatic events, over the life course, most people will have—personally or vicariously—a range of aversive experiences such as an untimely death of a loved one, a bitter break-up, or getting diagnosed for a serious illness. Post-traumatic stress and various other mental health outcomes and social consequences are likely to result from such experiences. Muldoon analyses the social, economic, and political conditions that precede traumatic experiences, showing that they are not randomly distributed across populations. She powerfully demonstrates how and why traumatic experience is “patterned” by poverty and privilege. Indeed, misfortune and trauma are disproportionately more common in subordinate minority groups, compared to privileged majority groups. Such structural antecedents to trauma exposure consist of political acts and events (armed conflicts, political violence, and political stigmatization), socioeconomic conditions (poverty and precariousness), and gender (e.g., men and women experience different types and levels of sexual violence). This patterned nature of trauma exposure explains why trauma cannot and should not be analyzed as an individual “problem.” Instead, the book offers a more general analysis of the psychological implications of trauma exposure by embedding it in social inequality, deprivation, and enduring political conflict. Traumatic experiences and responses to them are traced back to gender and ethnic inequality, suggesting that in many cases the trauma process is rooted in asymmetric intergroup relations between majority and minority groups. In this analysis, the boundaries between specific traumatic events (e.g., accidents, assaults, violent incidents, and natural disasters) become blurred with repeated and chronic exposure to trauma (domestic violence and other misfortunes are for example more common in disadvantaged and deprived living conditions). The book is highly reflexive and intimate as Muldoon uses her own abundant personal experiences to exemplify her arguments. Using disclosure of personal, political, and family-related traumatic events as a narrative strategy is a courageous and unconventional approach in a field that praises itself of its rigor and objectivity. Yet, such personal examples normalize common life experiences and reduce the distance between the reader and the author. These personal experiences are contextualized with numerous references to social and cultural norms prevailing in the social environment in which the traumatic experience occurs. Through this contextualizing approach, the reader learns, for example, a lot about the Northern Ireland conflict (“The Troubles”) and how the historical division between Catholics and Protestants, Nationalists and Unionists, or between Northerners and Southerners, continues to shape social life in Ireland. As the book was written in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is also situated in a contemporary historical context. Moreover, each chapter starts with a piece of poetry that is later analyzed from a social psychological perspective and integrated into the narrative. Analyzing the trauma process through poetic referencing connects readers to the topic and conveys in sometimes subtle ways the profoundly social psychological nature of trauma. Muldoon's work is also a master class of the social identity approach to mental health. Broadly speaking, the book is part of the “social cure” school that emphasizes the positive and empowering role of identification with social groups for (mental) health. There is by now an extensive literature that demonstrates the robustness of this association, but also the numerous caveats and limiting conditions that may thwart the positive effects of groups. The book applies the social cure reasoning to trauma and takes it a step further by systematically considering structural inequality and political context that condition the prevalence of trauma and the reactions to it. Of particular interest is the idea that trauma in itself creates social categories—widows, victims, or refugees for example—each with their own normative significance and associated intergroup behavior. Developed on the basis of the Social Identity Model of Traumatic Identity Change (SIMTIC), a final highlight of the book is the idea that trauma can, under certain conditions, have positive and beneficial (long-term) effects. This novel theoretical approach describes two basic social identity processes that underlie such positive effects. On the one hand, a process of identity revalorization proposes that the value of social identities may be reappreciated following trauma, opening up opportunities for beneficial psychological developments and fostering personal post-traumatic growth. On the other hand, identity empowerment puts forward the idea that trauma can unleash collective energy and agency. Trauma may thus become the basis for solidarity, empowering social identities, and collective action. Overall, Muldoon masterfully articulates different levels of analysis, from the clinical and psychological dimensions of trauma to its social, structural and political components referring to research conducted around the world, and not only the “Global North.” Drawing on a reflexively developed intergroup approach, she reveals to the reader a highly complex and intriguing view of the trauma process, thereby demonstrating how a social and political psychological approach is able to eschew and go beyond accounts that reduce trauma to an essentially individual mental health issue.