The Trauma Economy

Everything is a trauma response, right?

Just like everything is a coping mechanism and everyone has ADHD. So it would seem in the 247-member ADHD group chat embedded in the largest mental health group on Facebook. They discuss study routines that don’t work and exchange medicines they were never prescribed. Because none of them were diagnosed with ADHD.

Elsewhere on the internet, “expressive” people bash “avoidants” for being “abusive”, not knowing that their own anxious attachment drives the hostility. This is the daily reality of the internet. 17% of Bangladeshi adults are in distress, and 92% do not seek help. Abandoned by infrastructure, they turn to social media to talk about their struggles.

On social media, a post announcing “I’m healing my inner child” travels further than one stating “I’m going to therapy twice a month”. Mental health content is relatable; the actual healing is not. The soft pastel carousel listing “Signs that your partner may be avoidant” describes common traits—wanting space, procrastinating, fearing rejection. It’s not faking; these people are in real distress. The performance lies in what pain is made to do: it becomes an identity, a justification, and currency.

For a young adult struggling to focus and failing their semester, “I have ADHD” turns moral failure into a medical condition. Belonging comes with the label, and the label starts to feel like belonging. That is where trouble begins: getting assessed is risky. A doctor might take the label away, and getting better means losing the community that understands you. The founding member of the chat was never diagnosed, but the label held the group together, so the name stayed.

When labels become belonging

The identity is for you; a verdict explains everyone else. You break up because “he was avoidant”. "She gaslit me" settles a friendship. The messy truth of incompatibility is replaced by a case file with one victim, one cause, and one pathology. Words like "narcissist," "toxic," and "trauma bond" do not sound like opinions; they carry authority because the group provides validation. Support becomes a sentence, and the comments section becomes a jury that has only heard one side.

Performative mental health is dangerous because disclosure brings moral immunity. If you announce your trauma, anyone who questions you is “triggering you”. Accountability becomes an attack; you are the victim of their abuse. Group admins broadcast crises publicly to shield against scrutiny. They avoid private channels and seek no real care, because the audience was the point.

This is the Trauma Economy, where attention is money and vulnerability is an asset. Whoever tells the saddest story gains social standing, while healing becomes a bad investment. The algorithm rewards staying broken, and the group subtly pushes you from treatment: “Therapy is a scam”, “they only give you meds”, “doctors don’t understand”.

How suffering becomes content

The choreography is now industrial. A celebrity confesses “debilitating” acne, which turns into a skincare campaign 72 hours later. Cultural critics call this “sadfishing”—an affective transaction masquerading as a cry for help. When a Bangladeshi content farm fabricates a weeping "forced marriage" video gathering 352,000 views before being debunked, the wound has ceased to be an injury.

The network enforces this performance. In 2017, researchers found plain sadness reduces online sharing by more than a quarter, while moralized outrage accelerates it. The feed treats unperformed grief as inert matter. To move across the network, suffering must submit to a transport protocol: moralized into an accusation, aestheticized into a mood board, or branded into an identity.

In our clinical files, the contrast is stark: a manufactured mental-health meme collects 679,000 reactions, while an authentic post from a woman confessing her tears have dried so completely she cannot weep gathers twenty-nine likes. Authentic collapse is marked by hesitation, shame, and retreat. The depressed patient conceals her pain; the sadfisher demands an auditorium.

The cost of an underfunded system

Underneath lies Bangladesh’s real ledger: 0.44% of the health budget allocated to mental health; six child psychiatrists for 170 million people; an adult treatment gap of 92.3%; an unframed 2018 Mental Health Act; and Section 309 of the Penal Code, which still threatens suicide survivors with prison. Meanwhile, posters after a doctor's death must censor suicide as “sui*cide” to evade platform bans. What cannot be spelled cannot be tracked; what is not budgeted cannot be treated.

Distress is not an identity. Suffering is not a moral achievement. Healing does not require an audience: it happens in confidential rooms, in accountability for one's cruelties, and in the unrecorded labor of repair. We have built a culture that worships the vocabulary of mental illness while despising its reality. We celebrate the influencer who curates her anxiety under studio lighting, but we have no beds for the catatonic adolescent in Pabna. We applaud the lover who weaponizes 'boundaries' to justify cruelty, while our laws still threaten the suicide survivor with handcuffs. True healing is not content. It does not generate clicks, it does not trend on feeds, and it will never fit inside a corporate HR newsletter. It is private, unglamorous, difficult, and quiet. Until we stop confusing the performance of pain with the labour of recovery, we will continue to produce what we see today: a generation that speaks fluent therapy, but has forgotten how to be human.

Dr Murtaza Zakiul Abrar is a Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, and subject matter expert in Conflict & Crisis intervention