Trauma Industrial Complex: Oversharing in the Age of Lived Experience

Today, trauma is everywhere, and everybody has it. Trauma shapes public debates on education, criminal justice and healthcare. It’s cited as a root cause of addiction, mental health issues, and relationship breakdowns. It permeates media - from music and television to films and books.

While the increasing openness is welcome, this rise has been accompanied by a parallel explosion of disinformation and created a poorly regulated marketplace - powered by social media’s financial incentives - of confusing and sometimes harmful guidance about how to deal with personal trauma. Every day, trauma-related content drives billions of views online. Across the Western world, millions are adopting narratives of their own fragility based on ideas they’ve acquired from under-informed content creators.

As trauma is rapidly commodified, our stories of lived experience have become largely dislocated from their original social and political value: to defend the vulnerable and leverage for social change. Now, trauma stories are less about spotlighting injustice, and more about monetizing self-help for affluent people.

How did we get here?

In this revealing and deeply personal book, Orwell Prize-winning author Darren McGarvey pulls back the curtain on the trauma industrial complex, tipping the sacred cows of lived experience, and sharing the hard-won wisdom gained from the calamitous events brought on by telling his own story.

Darren McGarvey grew up in Pollok, Glasgow. He is a writer, hip-hop artist, broadcaster and campaigner. His bestselling and acclaimed first book Poverty Safari was awarded the Orwell Prize for political writing in 2018.