Trauma Is Apparently Contagious: The rise of “secondary traumatic stress” shows how far the concept has stretched—and that’s a problem for the patients most in need of care. (Christina Buttons, 9/26/26, City Journal)
Once trauma no longer required direct exposure, it became possible to describe the person hearing about another’s trauma as traumatized, too. In that context, psychologists Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman proposed the term “vicarious traumatization” in 1990 to describe changes in therapists who repeatedly encountered clients’ graphic stories of pain and stress.
From there, the number of people considered susceptible to secondary trauma expanded, and the concept has been invoked with increasing frequency. The National Child Traumatic Stress Network, a federally funded organization, now describes secondary traumatic stress as a “common occupational hazard” for professionals who work with traumatized children and warns that listening to their stories can compromise workers’ health and professional functioning.
The concept has also spread well beyond psychotherapists. Teachers can acquire secondary trauma from students. Journalists can experience vicarious trauma from reporting on suffering. In 2023, Time announced that “the whole world” was at risk of compassion fatigue because wars, mass shootings, disasters, and social media continually expose ordinary people to other people’s misery.