What Hollywood Gets Wrong About Trauma and PTSD
Hollywood often portrays Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) in dramatized ways for the sake of storytelling. A character sees something that feels familiar, gasps suddenly, and their eyes widen. The scene cuts from the present to a flurried flashback of the character’s past, causing them to fall to the ground in a puddle of tears.
Actual PTSD affects people in smaller, everyday ways. While flashbacks are indeed a symptom of PTSD, they’re shown in movies to quickly explain a character’s backstory, not because they’re accurate to the PTSD experience.
PTSD can include a host of symptoms, such as:
Flashback sensations, from visuals to scents that last a few seconds, hours, or days
Repeated unwanted and distressing thoughts
Nightmares about the trauma
Feeling constantly on-edge or moments of intense fear
Negative thoughts about the self or others
Intense guilt or shame
Memory difficulties
Loss of interest in hobbies
Emotional numbness
Trouble keeping up with relationships
Self-destructive tendencies and substance abuse
Irregular sleeping patterns
Let’s break down how Hollywood misrepresents the condition.
Physical Injury Isn't Required for Trauma
Trauma doesn't always come from a physical injury. In the 1947 film High Wall, WWII veteran Steven Kenet gets accused (wrongly) of murdering his wife. Because his character suffered a head injury during war—a physical injury—his character’s “emotional changes” are more believable.
Today we know that simple exposure to traumatic events like wartime is enough to significantly alter brain patterns, no physical injury needed.
PTSD Doesn’t Make You Dangerous
Horror films and villain backstories often use trauma as a way to explain a character’s twisted interest in violence. However, the research is clear: trauma does not make a person more violent. In fact, trauma is more likely to cause a person to self-harm or limit personal growth rather than harm others.
Research overwhelmingly shows that most individuals with PTSD never engage in violence in their lives. One study even concluded that when controlling for alcohol misuse, people with PTSD were no more statistically likely to act out of violence than their non-PTSD counterparts.
More of Us Are Mentally Ill Than Film Suggests
One study revealed that only 2.1% of all speaking characters examined in the 100 top-grossing films of 2022 had a mental health condition, compared to 21% of all U.S. adults. This makes mental illness and trauma seem like a rarity, when in reality it’s closer to one-in-five of us.
While anxiety and PTSD were in the top three illnesses to be portrayed, the overwhelming majority of characters with these conditions were white. This erases a very real kind of PTSD BIPOC folks in particular can face—race-based traumatic stress (RBTS).
Recovery Doesn't Happen Overnight
Movies and TV shows follow the five parts of a story arc: introduction, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. This makes plots easy to follow and themes easy to digest, convincing audiences that one key interaction or event can suddenly override a person’s mental processing from traumatized to motivated.
In reality, mental wellness requires time, skill-building, lifestyle adjustments, and sometimes medication to improve. Convincing audiences that healing your trauma only takes the right conversation with the right person over a couple drinks is misleading and oversimplifies the healing journey.
While a support system is important when dealing with trauma and PTSD, the “power of love” is not enough to heal and reverse someone’s condition.
Film and TV often portray people in therapy as numb dead-enders going through the motions with no signs of improvement. We know from research the opposite is true, with some studies indicating a 60% reduction in PTSD symptoms and others showing over 90%.
So therapy is not like the movies—it’s the real deal. Are you ready to change your story? If you experienced trauma, reach out to learn more about EMDR or trauma therapy and how it can help you.