Resilience is normal

But we may be becoming more fragile.

Post summary

• Psychologists used to think people weren’t inherently resilient.

• Then new research began to suggest a brighter picture.

• But now, cultural forces may be pushing us in the direction of less resilience.

• The good news: You can combat those forces.

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The post

Bad things happen. It’s part of life.

One study put it bluntly, “Most people are exposed to at least one violent or life-threatening situation during the course of their lives. (And) as people progress through the life cycle, they are also increasingly confronted with the deaths of close friends and relatives.”

For most of psychology’s history, scientists believed that bad life events inevitably led to prolonged mental suffering.

They thought humans weren’t inherently resilient—that is, not naturally equipped to stay positive and remain mentally well in the face of adversity.

But there were flaws in their thinking. For example:

• Research on how people respond to adverse events originated from clinical populations. That is, people seeking treatment or displaying significant symptoms after a bad life event. This is like trying to estimate how much the average person drinks by only surveying people at a bar—results will be skewed.

• Psychologists made some faulty assumptions. For example, bereavement researchers believed in an idea called “absent grief.” The idea was that if you didn’t show outward signs of grief, you were repressing, in denial, and needed therapy. Quite the catch-22.

But then a handful of scientists noticed something interesting among children.

Many children raised in chaotic, poverty-stricken environments ended up fine and thrived as adults. These kids were oftentimes better off than those raised in perfect homes with ample support and resources.

Psychologists realized they should study wider populations to understand how most of us fare after a bad life event.

What they found surprised them: Resilience wasn’t rare. It was common.

Examples abound¹:

• Roughly 80 percent of people whose lives were severely impacted by the LA riots had fewer than three distressing symptoms.

• More than 80 percent of people who get in a bad motor vehicle accident don’t meet the criteria for PTSD.

• The majority of Gulf War vets reported no significant distress after the war.

• Roughly half of people living in Manhattan when 9/11 happened reported zero symptoms of PTSD² a year later, despite being at Ground Zero.

• 61 percent of women undergoing treatment for breast cancer had no signs of depression.

The researchers wrote, “There is now compelling evidence that genuine resilience to potentially traumatic events is not rare but common and not a sign of exceptional strength or psychopathology but rather a fundamental feature of normal coping skills.”

Is resilience dropping today?

But as we’ve learned that humans are more likely to be resilient than not, cultural shifts may be undercutting resilience.

Over time, we began to widen what counts as a traumatic event that can lead to prolonged mental suffering, like PTSD.

Consider changes to editions of the DSM, the manual used to classify and diagnose mental disorders.

• In the DSM-III in 1980, PTSD was considered a reaction to extremely terrifying and rare events that fell “outside the range of usual human experience.” Think: war, rape, torture, natural disasters.

• By 1994, the line “outside the range of usual human experience” was removed from the DSM. PTSD began to include common negative events. For example, the death of a family member, a shitty boss, a breakup, etc.

• Later versions of the DSM also included far more disorders and relaxed the diagnostic criteria for many disorders.

What constitutes trauma and mental illness changed to capture more experiences that are part of life.

The psychologist Nick Haslam calls this trend “concept creep,” and says, “our concept of psychological harm continues to expand dramatically.”³

Why harm expanded

Researchers believe that there are several reasons why the concept of harm has expanded.

• Cultural shifts: We became more sensitive to harm.

• Decreases in real harm: As the world has become safer (fewer wars, violence, etc) we’ve continued to look for harms but are left with less severe events.

• The rise of psychology: Psychology tends to focus on the negative, and its practitioners view the life experience through a psychological lens.

• The rise of medication and medicalization: The more life experiences that can be diagnosed, the greater the opportunity for pharma companies and the medical industry to make money.

There are some possible upsides to this trend. It could get help to more people, capture overlooked harms, increase empathy, reduce stigma, and enable social change.

But there are also downsides.

Expanding definition = more fragility?

Some psychologists worry that we’re beginning to pathologize everyday experiences.

Categorizing more life experiences as potentially harmful may have led more people to think of their problems as a mental illness.

In one study, researchers surveyed groups in 2018 and 2020. Both groups read the same stories about people dealing with emotional stress.

By 2020, the participants were far more likely to label mild distress as mental illness.

Here’s why that’s important: Believing a life event will cause you psychological harm increases the odds you’ll be harmed by it.

In a Harvard study, 300 people were asked what they thought counted as trauma. This gave the scientists two groups:

• Group 1 had a narrow definition of trauma and believed trauma only includes severe events.

• Group 2 had a wider view of trauma and thought trauma can include everyday stressors like harsh words.

All participants then watched the same disturbing 7-minute film clip. A few days later, both groups were surveyed again.

The results were that group 2, those with broader definitions of trauma:

• Felt more negative emotions after the film.

• Were more likely to say the film was traumatic.

• Reported more PTSD-like symptoms days later.

• Scored higher on beliefs that words can cause emotional harm.

• Felt more vulnerable to trauma (both self and others).

Suffering, in other words, is shaped by beliefs. The scientists who conducted the study wrote⁴:

These personal concepts appear to be important, as individuals with broader personal definitions of trauma are more likely to experience negative emotional outcomes and intrusive symptoms after stressful events.

The psychologists continued, writing, “Emotional reactions to an event may partly depend on how the event is understood by the person experiencing it … This opens the possibility that events that could not have caused PTSD in the past can cause PTSD today.”

To make his point, he gave an extreme example: In ancient Rome, people used to be entertained by watching gladiators kill each other in the Colosseum. “Today,” he wrote, “witnessing such events would almost certainly result in PTSD for a nontrivial proportion of individuals.”

Again, it’s an extreme example, but it highlights the cultural nature of mental health and tracks with broader trends. For example, even as violence in the U.S. has declined precipitously, PTSD rates have not. And countries with more violence don’t always have more PTSD—for example, Canada has a higher PTSD rate than South Africa.

Final thoughts

Suffering and trauma are real. Many people need support and care.

But resilience is also real—and far more common than we think.

If we believe every struggle should result in severe mental distress, we’re more likely to break under weight that humans once carried easily and even used to get stronger.

There’s value in validating pain. But there’s also power in reminding people that life isn’t always perfect and that we’re built to come back stronger.

Have fun, don’t die, come back stronger,

-Michael

1. Bonanno GA. Loss, trauma, and human resilience: have we underestimated the human capacity to thrive after extremely aversive events? Am Psychol. 2004 Jan;59(1):20-8. doi: 10.1037/0003-066X.59.1.20. PMID: 14736317.

2. The current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is the manual used to classify mental disorders, classifies PTSD as a trauma- and stressor-related disorder. First of all—obviously—you have to be exposed to a traumatic event. And it has to be something legit. Here’s what counts:

From there, you must display a series of symptoms that cause distress and impair your life and meet eight criteria. And the symptoms have to last for at least one month.

3. Haslam Nick, Tse Jesse S. Y., De Deyne Simon; Concept Creep and Psychiatrization; Frontiers in Sociology, Volume 6 - 2021, DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2021.806147

4. Jones PJ, McNally RJ. Does broadening one's concept of trauma undermine resilience? Psychol Trauma. 2022 Apr;14(S1):S131-S139. doi: 10.1037/tra0001063. Epub 2021 Jul 1. PMID: 34197173.