Psychological trauma is a type of damage to the human mind occurs as a result of a severely distressing event that completely overwhelm the individual’s ability to cope or integrate the ideas and emotions involved with that experience. A traumatic event involves a single experience, or an enduring or repeating event or events. It can lead to serious long-term negative consequences that are often overlooked .
Experience of trauma includes violation of the person’s familiar ideas about the world and of their human rights, putting the person in a state of extreme confusion and insecurity.
Causes : harassment , sexual abuse, employment discrimination, police brutality, bullying, domestic violence etc.; catastrophic events such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, war or other mass violence ; long-term exposure to situations such as extreme poverty or milder forms of abuse, such as verbal abuse, can be traumatic.
Psychological trauma may accompany physical trauma or exist independently of it. However, different people will react differently to similar events. One person may experience an event as traumatic while another person might not. In other words, not all people who experience a potentially traumatic event will actually become psychologically traumatized Witnessing somebody in serious distress, some traumatic scenes on T.V. (serials on crime etc.), reading horrified news and seeing picture in the newspaper may also have a long lasting negative impact on somebody’s mind and person may get traumatized .