Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score

Link: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/11/12/book-review-the-body-keeps-the-score/

I.

The Body Keeps The Score is a book about post-traumatic stress disorder.

The author, Bessel van der Kolk, helped discover the condition and lobby for its inclusion in the DSM, and the brief forays into that history are the best part of the book. Like so many things, PTSD feels self-evident once you know about it. But this took decades of conceptual work by people like van der Kolk, crystallizing some ideas and hacking away at others until they ended up with something legible to the Establishment. Before that there was nothing. It was absolutely shocking how much nothing there was. As soon as the APA officialy recognized PTSD as a diagnosis in 1980, Bessel and his friends applied for a grant from the VA to study it. The grant was rejected on the grounds that (actual quote from the rejection letter) "it has never been shown that PTSD is relevant to the mission of the Veterans Administration". So the first step in raising awareness of PTSD was – amazingly – convincing the US military that some people might get PTSD from combat.

After the military relented, the next step was convincing everyone else. PTSD was temporarily pigeonholed as "the thing veterans get when they come back from a war". The next push was convincing people that civilian trauma could have similar effects. It was simple to extend the theory to sudden disasters like fires or violent crimes. But van der Kolk and his colleagues started noticing that a history of child abuse, and especially childhood sexual abuse, correlated with a lot of psychiatric problems later on.