The currency of trauma

The Scottish author Darren McGarvey’s story of childhood trauma, poverty and addiction was “rather ordinary” on the Glasgow housing estate where he grew up, he writes. What distinguished him was his decision to speak about these problems publicly, and his manner of doing so: first as a successful rapper working under the stage name Loki, and later in a crowdfunded book, Poverty Safari, a political polemic that won the 2018 Orwell prize. In the years since, he’s continued to use his own story to help illuminate wider social justice issues, through his music, live shows, podcasts, books, lectures and TV documentaries.

Now, however, he wonders what divulging his deepest traumas has done to him psychologically. Public disclosure once felt cathartic, but did it hinder his ability to recover? His third book, Trauma Industrial Complex, explores the personal and political costs of baring our wounds in an online culture that invites oversharing and is quick to co-opt individual sob stories to score political points. How does our reliance on emotive personal stories – over statistics and other evidence – shape our understanding of political issues, he asks. And how can we better protect those who share their traumatic experiences publicly, whether for social media validation or in hopes of informing and influencing journalists and policymakers?

McGarvey writes powerfully and poignantly about the unanticipated impact of becoming a poster boy for Scotland’s social ills, and the severe strain he came under as the gap between his public image and his self-understanding widened. Publicly, he was hailed as a success story and a bracingly honest “authentic” voice. Privately, his mental health was in freefall, and he was addicted to over-the-counter painkillers. He was tormented by knowing that he was “living a lie”.

As he astutely observes, healing after trauma often requires the ability to rewrite one’s personal story, but a story shared publicly remains fixed. Slowly, he learned that his initial accounts of his defining life traumas were not entirely accurate. A vivid memory of his mother, an alcoholic, holding a knife to him when he was five turned out to be misremembered: the knife had been wrestled off her quickly. With time, he learned to see his story with greater nuance: his mother did not hate him, she was simply too unwell to give him the care he deserved, and he had treated many people very badly himself. While it can be empowering to recognise one’s own victimhood – to understand that you were not to blame for your suffering – he realised that over-identifying as a victim is restrictive, causing a person to overlook their personal responsibility and capacity for change.

McGarvey found himself trapped by his public identity. He is frustrated that whenever he tries to move on from talking about his own experiences people seem to lose interest. And yet throughout the book I found myself wishing that he would start talking about someone other than himself. As he notes, individual stories are not representative, so why doesn’t he speak to others who have disclosed their defining traumas online? He recalls conducting an interview for the BBC with Leeann White, a mother who became a knife crime campaigner after her 12-year-old daughter, Ava, was stabbed to death. White’s “is the most severe case of untreated trauma I’ve ever encountered”, he writes, but he does not follow up with her afterwards to ask her about what it’s like to constantly relive this trauma in the public eye. He writes of watching a viral YouTube video by a man who survived a Golden Gate Bridge suicide jump, but does not speak to him about the psychological aftermath of his online notoriety. Instead, he devotes several pages to parsing a tweet from an account named the Wounded Healer that annoyed him; far too much of this book is written from the narrow perspective of someone who is terminally online.

His note that the book’s structure would shift form to mirror the “non-linear nature of recovery” also raises alarms, because arguments ought to be fully processed and properly ordered before they make it to print. And sure enough, McGarvey frequently contradicts himself. He rails against trigger warnings – describing them as “performance masquerading as care” – but includes two in his book. (That he acknowledges this “bizarre” hypocrisy and writes the content warning in a contemptuous, toughen-up-snowflake tone – “If you are distressed at any point… remember you are reading a book – some of these things actually happened to me” – does not prevent the reader from feeling he hasn’t fully made up his mind.) He cautions that having “lived experience” doesn’t automatically make a person an expert in policy or clinical care, and that there’s a risk of “flattering survivors into roles they’re not trained for”, but in his conclusion recommends that people with lived experience become leaders and decision-makers in the institutions that use their testimony. How does he propose striking the balance? If the commodification of trauma is a problem, surely turning the demonstration of personal trauma into a job requirement would only make things worse.

McGarvey dedicates much of the book to exploring how we may be mistaken about our own life stories and then does not detail how to balance that knowledge with his belief that storytellers should be given full agency over their stories. Journalists have a responsibility to ensure the testimony they rely on is true, which means independently verifying facts and retaining control over the final piece, such as deciding who else is interviewed and what wording is used. To do otherwise would undermine fact-based, independent journalism, and ethical journalists ensure that their interviewees are fully aware of this ahead of time and have thought through the many possible consequences of speaking out.

In another poorly thought through recommendation, McGarvey says people should be paid for their time and the emotional labour involved in telling their story, which is right in some contexts – such as public speaking engagements – but is problematic when it comes to speaking to the media. Paying for media interviews not only creates incentives for people to lie or embellish their stories for cash but also encourages people to share their trauma out of pure financial desperation, without thought for the consequences.

Over many years of interviewing people as part of my job, it has humbled and moved me beyond measure to witness the courage and generosity of those who shared their stories, experiences and expertise with me, and with the wider public, knowing how little I can offer them in return. I wish I had better ideas for how to repay this debt. I wish McGarvey did too.

Trauma Industrial Complex: How Oversharing Became a Product in a Digital World by Darren McGarvey is published by Ebury (£22). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £19.80. Delivery charges may apply

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Photography by Jack Cocker