Doesn't matter, suggestibility was correlated with trauma, which means they are likely to be suggestible to becoming miserable if you tell them they are.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30987544/ "These results suggest that high suggestibility confers vulnerability to dissociative states in individuals exposed to trauma and displaying an anxious attachment style."
> I had a look and I found one[0] (cw: child abuse) which agrees but the direction is wrong - they discovered trauma leads to suggestibility.
I never said that trauma comes from suggestibility. Even for traumatized people you can make things worse by using their suggestibility and saying they are miserable, they get more miserable, what you said agree with that.
That requires someone to tell them they are miserable rather than observing them to be miserable.
There’s a lot of historic terms to describe people suffering from traumatic experiences like shell shocked (WWI), soldier’s hart (US civil war), lost/bewildered (US Revolutionary War), etc going back literally thousands of years.
You need to separate physical trauma from psychological trauma. There's no debate that getting hit in the head or having explosives go off nearby can cause physical brain damage. That's empirically proven (at least in animal models) and so obvious that it's hard to argue against.
What I'm unclear on is the details: is physical trauma a necessary factor in shell shock as it was understood a century or more ago? Is that shell shock the same thing as the combat stress reaction and/or post-traumatic stress disorder? Is PTSD an amalgamation of two different things that aren't the same? To what extent does suggestion worsen the physical vs psychological sides of PTSD? Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.
> Is suggestion the only thing that causes shell shock, the CSR, and/or PTSD in the absence of physical damage? Etc.
I think you're venturing into denialism territory. There is a mountain of evidence supporting the fact that traumatic experiences have a negative impact on health. See for example the impact of stress on, say, cardiac issues, and even growing grey hair and/or going bald altogether.
I'm less saying "it definitely isn't" and more trying to show the complexity of understanding this and the paucity of evidence. Is long-term stress different from a one-off traumatic incident? How much stress does trauma cause? Is therapy effective at preventing stress caused by trauma? What part of therapy is effective: can you stick someone in a room with a nice doctor and no therapeutic plan and achieve a result? Does therapy make things worse for some patients? Which patients are those, and how do you tell?
My personal opinion is that trauma probably has an effect, it's a lot worse in sustained cases, many of the symptoms are mixed up with other conditions, treatment for it is effective (in that it hits statistical significance) but not particularly effective (in that the effect size is small), treating healthy people can make them worse, some traumatised patients probably also get worse after treatment, and the symptoms of e.g. ASR/CSR are so vague that some of them apply to most of the people who read them.
War is a useful lens because of the number of people in similar roles gives good data to work with and there’s institutions interested in how well people function.
People in long term overwhelmingly stressful situations suffered severe issues in WWII without any kind of physical trauma. Shipping across the Atlantic for example was horribly dangerous in terms of percentage of lives lost, but very binary with many ships surviving without ever being shot at. The language used to describe what’s going on isn’t necessarily sufficient for a modern diagnosis, but it’s clear something was wrong.
The constant treat of severe consequences was on its own damaging. Militaries cycle people out of war zones not just the front lines because they become less effective over time. Children growing up in traumatic environments rarely get that kind of reprieve.
That’s a common response by friends and family but it’s simply not the best cure. Often it makes things worse and can lead to suicide through feelings of alienation.
