or a fearful attachment style, may sensitise to events involving humiliation). Thus, we can devise notions of matching of event to vulnerability.
We hope that having a more sophisticated framework for estimating negative life events will mark a new phase for life events in psychological research and related clinical practice. Much like the ongoing debate between a dimensional rather than categorical approach to mental health, perhaps a better understanding of the complex features of life events on a continuum of negativity – rather than as discrete identical categories – would further our understanding of how environments impact individuals. It may also serve to avert stigmatising inferences of weakness in relation to mental health. Let’s seek to better understand the true extent of the damage inflicted by life’s ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’.
- Ruth Spence, Lisa Kagan and Antonia Bifulco are at the Centre for Abuse and Trauma Studies, Middlesex University
Illustration: Dominique Duong
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