Trauma Industrial Complex by Darren McGarvey review: 'honest, sympathetic and compelling'

McGarvey explored his own experience of trauma in his Orwell Prize-winning 2017 book Poverty Safari, and he has also encouraged others to do likewise, often with beneficial results. He has, however, become aware that this can develop into a familiar performance, a party piece. Also, following the success of his first book he experienced a crash followed by weeks in rehab, and this happened while he was the poster-boy for this sort of storytelling therapy.

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Of course the talking and storytelling treatment is not new - alcoholics Anonymous has practised it for almost a hundred years. But AA has always insisted that telling your story is only a first step to recovery, the beginning of a 12-step process. Many retired and sober alcoholics, perhaps most, never get that far, some stopping at the storytelling stage, which may indeed be an effective stopping point. The same, McGarvey suggests, may also be the case with people telling their stories as they seek to recover from trauma.

McGarvey has also learned since the days of his early success that the digital age, more insidious with every passing year, threatens to corrupt the stories we try to tell, as well as opening the speakers up to verbal abuse on their screens.

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McGarvey's message is for people who have suffered severely and are in acute pain. He is less interested in the great many people whose chief interest seems to be their "mental health" but who, having apparently suffered no significant trauma, may seem to others self-indulgent and indeed damaging in their self-pity. To what extent, he wonders, is this fashion the consequence of the desirable and generally admirable attention now given to people who have endured really horrible trauma? I have known recovered alcoholics contemptuous of men and women who turned up at AA even though they had - in the veterans' view - been no more than wee tipplers. But I suppose there is always some sort of poor health and trauma snobbery.

Some parts of this book are slow going, but McGarvey is always interesting. He speaks to and for people whose lives have been near-broken by misfortune, cruelty, poverty and addiction, and he holds out the prospect - if not the promise - of recovery. He is honest about his own struggles, and sympathetic to other sufferers - indeed, this is a very honest book. Sometimes he regrettably displays an inverse snobbery, writing as if trauma was reserved for members of the working class, but surely it can strike at any level of society. Even the aristocratic Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, foreign secretary from 1812-1822, suffered such mental anguish that he cut his throat.

Trauma Industrial Complex, by Darren McGarvey, Ebury Press, £22.

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