Social science & medicine (1982)

'The only way out is through': The flexibility and limits of trauma discourse in psychedelic contexts.

Social science & medicine (1982) October 10, 2026 Guy Simon, Shlomo Guzmen-Carmeli, Michal Pagis

"Trauma" has become a widely circulating cultural framework for making suffering intelligible. Sociological research has documented its institutional expansion but paid less attention to how people use it to organize experiences that disrupt orientation to body, self, and world. This article examines that situated process in non-clinical psychedelic contexts. Drawing on 48 in-depth interviews...