"overwhelming event" is correct and usable in written English.
You can use it when referring to an event that was particularly difficult or intense. For example, "The unexpected death of her grandmother was an overwhelming event for her."
Jeannette writes in her foreword that "discovering Beckett... was for Dick an overwhelming event, a kind of intellectual explosion.
September 11 was such an overwhelming event that many people have been open to the wilder accounts of what lay behind it.
The overwhelming event of the Boyajians' life has been the death of their son, Johnny, in the Persian Gulf war 12 years before.
But many of the blowups surrounding Mr. Bloomberg's statements have been of a piece, reflecting his seeming inability to empathize with the difficulties faced by New Yorkers, whether from an overwhelming event like 9/11 or a more mundane challenge like moving the car after a snowstorm.
The report, significant parts of which were obtained by The New York Times, acknowledges that the terrorist attack, in which thousands of people were trapped by fires in two of the world's tallest buildings, was an overwhelming event that required an unusual level of coordination.
An overwhelming event of rupture at adjacent apical membrane resulting in flooding of bile into these hepatocytes might ensue.
And when that external shared journey is full of overwhelming events, well you get overwhelmed.
Just as Murray urges his students to take delight in the "can-do" spirit of movie recreations of car crashes (surely a reference to another quintessential outsider, JG Ballard), so DeLillo invites us to enjoy Jack Gladney's attempts to escape overwhelming events like the airborne toxic event, and his own death.
Disturbing, sometimes overwhelming, events demands your attention.
It is defined as an '… adaptive strategy to protect against overwhelming events and feelings' (Vos and de Haes, 2007) and a very important and frequent coping strategy in the illness experience.
PTSD is a condition in which an overwhelming traumatic event results in intense fear, helplessness, horror, and avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma [13].
