Traumatized

Part of speech: adjective

Definitions

1. Enduring significant emotional distress and mental anguish often due to exposure to traumatic events
2. Experiencing deep mental or emotional damage caused by distressing incidents
3. Suffering from intense psychological harm as a result of highly upsetting events

Etymology: "Traumatized" is the past participle of "traumatize", which English borrowed from French "traumatiser". The French verb was built from "traumatisme", itself taken from Greek "trauma" meaning "wound", combined with the verbal ending "-iser", which traces back through Late Latin "-izare" to Ancient Greek "-izein", a suffix used to turn nouns into verbs meaning "to make into" or "to treat with". So at its root the word describes a physical injury: a wound, the kind a body receives from a blow or a cut. The sense of the word as a mental injury came later, when the Greek-derived noun was extended from bodily harm to the lasting damage a shocking experience does to the mind. The adjective now describes a person carrying that psychological wound.

Synonyms: shocked, distressed

Antonyms: healed, comforted