A look at “The impact of trauma and how to intervene: a narrative review of psychotraumatology over the past 15 years” by Miranda Olff, Irma Hein and 21 colleagues (2025)
A gentle note: this post discusses trauma in general terms.
To celebrate its 15th birthday, the European Journal of Psychotraumatology asked its editors, a who’s who of international trauma researchers, to sum up what we’ve learned about trauma since 2010. The result is a mammoth review (over 30,000 words!), which we’ll attempt to condense into a few hundred. Wish us luck.
What it covers
Trauma is common, and complicated. Most people worldwide will experience at least one potentially traumatic event. But what counts as “traumatic” isn’t always straightforward or universal, and it varies across cultures and individuals.
It’s not just PTSD. Trauma can lead to a wide range of mental and physical health effects, including depression, anxiety, substance use, physical illness and complex PTSD. Complex PTSD, now recognised in the WHO’s ICD-11, adds difficulties with emotions, self-worth and relationships to the core PTSD picture.
Context matters. How trauma affects someone depends on age and developmental stage, sex and gender, culture, environment and wider social and political forces. Childhood adversity can have particularly lasting effects. The authors also note that common measures such as “ACE scores” are blunt tools that treat all adversities as equal.
Biology is part of the story. Research on genetics, brain function and stress hormones is helping to explain why some people are more vulnerable and others more resilient.
Early help may prevent problems. Support in the hours and weeks after trauma shows promise for stopping acute reactions from becoming PTSD, though research here is still limited.
Effective treatments exist. There are several well-established psychological therapies for PTSD, such as trauma-focused CBT and EMDR, as well as medications and complementary approaches. Newer formats, including online and app-based delivery, are making help more accessible. Some newer approaches, including psychedelic-assisted therapies, remain experimental.
Beyond the WEIRD. The authors call for research beyond Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic countries, and for more attention to the very young, older people and diverse communities.
A grain of glitter ✨
With 23 leading experts at the helm, this is an authoritative overview. But it’s a narrative review, so the authors chose what to highlight, and many of them are prominent researchers summarising, in part, their own fields and work. It’s also a broad sweep rather than a detailed appraisal of any one topic.
Of particular note for this blog: LGBTQIA+ experiences get only a few passing references, mostly in relation to minority stress, and autism and neurodivergence aren’t mentioned at all. That’s a significant gap, given the evidence that both groups face elevated trauma exposure (see “‘Hate the Sin, Love the Sinner’: Religious Trauma and Queer Resilience” and “Mapping the Hurt: What 199 Studies Say About Autism and Trauma”).
Why this matters
If you’ve been through trauma, this review offers genuine hope. We understand trauma far better than we did 15 years ago, and there are effective, evidence-based therapies that can help. Recovery is possible. If you’re LGBTQIA+ or neurodivergent, look for a trauma therapist who understands your identity and adapts their approach, because the mainstream research hasn’t fully caught up with you yet.
Fifteen years of science, condensed by a unicorn: trauma is real, it’s common, and healing is absolutely possible.