Trauma

​The noun trauma comes unchanged to English in the 1690s from Greek and Latin trauma (a physical wound, a hurt; a defeat). Trauma in ancient times meant the same as it does today—physical suffering.
 
The adjective traumatic, from the 1650s, is from Latin traumaticus and Greek traumatikos (pertaining to a physical wound). The verb ‘to traumatize’, in reference to physical wounds, is from 1893.
 
The word trauma has its origins in Proto-Indo-European (PIE) trau, from the PIE root tere- (to rub, to turn; also, related to words meaning twisting, boring, drilling, piercing; and, to the rubbing of cereal grain to remove the husks).
 
The use of the word trauma, used to describe a psychological condition, is relatively recent; e.g., a ‘traumatic’ experience (1889); ‘to traumatize’ (1893). Trauma, in the sense of a psychic wound or unpleasant experience which causes abnormal mental stress and resulting illness or damage to the physical body, is from 1894.
 
Before the word trauma came into common use, doctors working with physically wounded soldiers in the US Civil War of the 1860s used the term ‘nostalgia’ to describe forms of psychological trauma now known by terms such as shell shock, war neuroses, battle fatigue, PTSD, and so on. For example, during the Civil War doctors reported 2,588 cases of nostalgia and 13 deaths attributed to ‘nostalgia’ (https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=nostalgia).
 
The word nostalgia, from 1726, was first defined as the distress related to a morbid longing to return to one’s home or native country. In contrast, the word sonastalgia, coined in 2002, refers to the mental distress experienced when realizing that for whatever reasons you cannot return your home or to ‘the way things used to be’( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solastalgia). Both nostalgia and sonastalgia can be considered as forms of psychological trauma.
 
Another example: The American Psychological Association (APA) suggests that climate change can be a cause of trauma (https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2017/03/mental-health-climate.pdf); e.g., general anxieties about climate change or actually dealing with the specific effects of flooding, hurricanes, or other phenomena can affect a person’s physical health.
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
Self, W. (2021, December). A posthumous shock: How everything became trauma. Harper’s Magazine, 343 (2059), 23 – 35.