Trauma seriously impairs otherwise healthy, well-adjusted people. Distressing life events — like abuse, accidents, illnesses, and assaults — often lead to trauma. Events like these and others can happen to anyone at any time.

You can also experience trauma without becoming the victim of a traumatic event. For example, losing someone you love to tragedy or illness is traumatizing.

Even watching a complete stranger experience a sudden physical health event can have a profound impact. Witnessing something like a stroke, gun violence, or a grave injury from a car accident can affect your emotional and psychological well-being.

First responders, child abuse investigators, social workers, and other social services professionals can experience trauma. This is because of their ongoing exposure to disturbing events.

Read on to learn more about the impact of trauma and adversity on mental health.

How Can Trauma Impact Mental Health?

Childhood trauma and its impact on adult mental health is difficult to measure accurately. This is because how someone appears or behaves outwardly may not reflect how they're actually functioning or feeling.

The impact of trauma on mental health also varies from person to person. For example, childhood trauma can significantly impact adult mental health for one family member while barely registering for another.

If you’ve experienced a frightening or disturbing event, you know firsthand that the traumatic effects of it can linger for weeks, months, years, or even a lifetime.

When you initially experience a trauma, your body goes into fight-or-flight mode. Your heart rate rises and your breathing speeds up until the danger passes.

Experiencing symptoms in the hours and days that follow the trauma is also common. These symptoms can include:

• Anger
• Denial
• Fear
• Guilt
• Sadness
• Shame
• Shock

What Are the Mental Health Outcomes of Trauma?

Trauma can have a negative impact on mental health long after the traumatic experience itself is over. Trauma can cause long-term and even permanent mental health difficulties, including:

Anxiety disorders

Anxiety disorders occur when people have both physical and emotional symptoms that interfere with daily life. Examples include panic attacks, phobias, and generalized anxiety disorder.

Depression

The most common symptoms of depression include persistent sadness, low energy, sleep and appetite disturbances, and the inability to take pleasure in activities you once enjoyed.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

PTSD symptoms include feeling upset by reminders of what happened, having flashbacks, getting depressed, and feeling like you're always in danger. They can also include having nightmares, trouble sleeping, and difficulty keeping your mind focused.

These symptoms are common immediately following a trauma (called acute stress disorder). But PTSD is when they persist for months or years after the event. PTSD can also impact children differently than adults.

What Happens When Trauma Is Triggering?

Getting triggered or emotionally activated means you have an emotional reaction to a stimulus or situation. It gives you a feeling or reaction because you're reminded of a previous traumatic event.

Emotionally activating events often relate to your senses (sights, sounds, tastes, or smells). They can make you feel like you're reliving a traumatic experience all over again.

For example:

• You hear fireworks. You become agitated and flash back to a combat experience you had decades ago. You feel like you're in a different reality temporarily.
• You pass an accident where people have sustained injuries. You're paralyzed with fear as you think back to a serious automobile accident you were in as a teenager.
• You see a person in a crowd. They resemble someone who was abusive toward you in childhood. Your heart begins to race. You have an intense desire to run.
• You smell a certain antiseptic cleaning fluid. It makes you dizzy because it reminds you of visiting a family member in the hospital after they suffered a heart attack.
• You watch a program about drug abuse. Your palms begin to sweat, and you have a hard time catching your breath because you remember when you watched a friend overdose.

You may experience a number of physical sensations when trauma emotionally activates you. You can also experience anger, fear, regret, or sadness or become overwhelmed.

The physical and emotional sensations trauma causes are uncomfortable. Sometimes they're so uncomfortable that you feel the need to escape either literally or figuratively.

It's common for triggers to cause a fight-or-flight response. It's also common for you to shut down entirely.

Though you can't avoid emotionally activating events, you can get professional help to learn how to respond to them in constructive ways.

How Does Trauma Affect Coping Mechanisms?

The physical and emotional pain of trauma can cause sufferers to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms including:

Eating disorders

Eating disorders affect people of all ages, genders, and races. They compel you to overeat, undereat, purge, abuse laxatives, and experience obsessive and compulsive thoughts and behaviors.

They can cause long-term physical problems. They're among the deadliest of all mental illnesses.

Self-harm

Self-harm includes cutting, scratching, picking, burning, and other means of causing acute pain or damage to your body. The physical pain of self-harm distracts from the psychological pain of experiencing trauma. It creates a focus for the pain that's always there just beneath the surface.

Substance use disorder and addiction

Substance use disorder means you use substances including alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and illegal drugs. It can also mean you use prescription medicines and over-the-counter medicines in ways that can harm you or others. Another term for moderate to severe substance use disorder is addiction.

Self-destructive coping mechanisms attempt to manage the pain of unresolved traumas. They offer a temporary escape for trauma sufferers but result in more pain and damage in the long run.

These behaviors and patterns are harmful to the individuals themselves. But they also negatively impact their relationships and ability to function on a daily basis.

Help for Mental Health Difficulties Caused by Trauma

If you or someone you love has experienced a trauma, there's hope. Support groups, mental health professionals, and medication can help. You can find ways to cope and enjoy a full and productive life.