Article: The Body Keeps the Score is Bullshit

[Chandelier]

The Body Keeps the Score is Bullshit

The popular book from the "world's most famous living psychiatrist" is riddled with blatant misrepresentations

josepheverettwil.substack.com

Dr. Michael Scheeringa, professor at Tulane University School of Medicine has a 29 year career researching and treating PTSD. Dr. Scheeringa expected that after The Body Keeps the Score hit the bestseller list following its publication in 2014, it would quickly lose all credibility and be banished to the bargain bin due to its many blatant scientific errors and grandiose narrative.

Instead, it maintained a streak of being the #1 ranked book in Psychiatry on Amazon.com for years.

Sufficiently shocked that no one had written a proper breakdown of all the glaring issues with the book, Dr. Scheeringa decided to write his own. He published The Body Does Not Keep the Score in 2023.

This book should be recommended alongside The Body Keeps the Score at all college campuses promoting Bessel van der Kolk’s theories.

 

[forestglip]

Interesting article! If the points in the article are correct, the science is shockingly bad in The Body Keeps the Score.

Some snippets:

The first change in the brain that van der Kolk discusses is “abnormal activation” of a region of the brain called the insula.

Almost every brain-imaging study of trauma patients finds abnormal activation of the insula.
—The Body Keeps the Score

・20/21 of the papers available on the insula were these snapshot studies, so we don’t know if the abnormal activation was present before the trauma or not.
・The studies clearly contradicted each other.
・One study directly proved van der Kolk wrong and provides strong evidence for the suspicion that he’s getting trauma completely backwards. The study that assessed insula activity before and after the trauma found that the insula activity was no different after the trauma.

Long after a traumatic experience is over, it [the brain] may be reactivated at the slightest hint of danger and mobilize disturbed circuits and secrete massive amounts of stress hormones.
—The Body Keeps the Score

Again, van der Kolk doesn’t cite any studies for this claim.

・1986 - First study on cortisol and PTSD. Cortisol levels were lower in PTSD.
・1989 - Cortisol levels were higher in PTSD.
・1989 - Cortisol levels were normal in PTSD.
・2007 - Meta-analysis of 37 studies on individuals with PTSD. The conclusion based on these 37 studies was that cortisol levels were normal in PTSD.
・2012 - another meta-analysis of 37 different studies. Conclusion: cortisol levels were not different between trauma-exposed and non-exposed indviduals.

Claims 1, 6, 8, 9, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30, 33, 34, 35, 40, 42
△For all 14 of these claims van der Kolk either didn’t bother to cite a study or the citation he listed couldn’t be found in the scientific literature.

Claims 3, 10, 26, 28, 29, 31, 32, 41,
△Van der Kolk completely misrepresents the study he cites in each of these claims.
For example:
・in Claim 3, van der Kolk says a certain part of the brain goes “offline” during a flashback. Van der Kolk cited a study which he said was designed to understand flashbacks. The complete lack of discussion of flashbacks reveals this was not the aim of the study. It mentioned “flashback” only once and that was simply referring to a different study.
・In Claim 26, van der Kolk claims that trauma damages the ability to literally feel touch on parts of the body. The paper van der Kolk cited made zero mentions of insensitivity to touch.

From the book which is a rebuttal to the book in question:

If it’s not ideology, a better explanation has not presented itself. It can’t be that he just doesn’t understand cross-sectional studies. He can’t be that naive. There were just as many cross-sectional studies that disagreed with his theory that he ignored.
—The Body Does Not Keep the Score

 

[Chandelier]

If the points in the article are correct, the science is shockingly bad in The Body Keeps the Score.

Indeed. This article reminded me of my reading of Rutger Bregman’s Humankind – A Hopeful History.
Bregman tears apart several very influential psychological studies, such as The Stanford Prison Experiment, The Milgram Experiment etc.
What van der Kolk and these other „scientists“ have in common is a thriller-like storytelling ability and an avoidance of facts… and truth seeking.

On a side note: There have been bullying accusations against van der Kolk.
He was fired from the institute he founded.
In the following news article he‘s trying to gaslight hard and gives the impression as if everything is super nebulous and doesn’t really make sense:

Famed trauma therapist responds to allegations of bullying: 'It's an outrageous story'

Last week, the Boston Globe reported that Bessel van der Kolk was fired by the Trauma Center’s umbrella organization, the Justice Resource Center, in January, following the removal of the center’s executive director, Joseph Spinazzola, over alleged mistreatment of female coworkers.

www.yahoo.com

 

[rvallee]

Dr. Michael Scheeringa, professor at Tulane University School of Medicine has a 29 year career researching and treating PTSD. Dr. Scheeringa expected that after The Body Keeps the Score hit the bestseller list following its publication in 2014, it would quickly lose all credibility and be banished to the bargain bin due to its many blatant scientific errors and grandiose narrative.

Instead, it maintained a streak of being the #1 ranked book in Psychiatry on Amazon.com for years.

The Secret was also a best-selling book. It's pretty much the same idea, but applied to wealth and success. It doesn't bother bundling up bad evidence, but it's not as if bad evidence matters.

All of this would be embarrassing enough if it wasn't for the fact that most of the people who should know better, people who study pseudoscience and why it sticks, why people still embrace beliefs after they have seen contradictory evidence, pretty much all fall for this junk, showing that it's all about belief in the end. They want this to be true, so they fall for all the same pitfalls.

When you don't have any of those beliefs and you look at all the evidence for psychosomatic ideology, it looks painfully mediocre and obviously a bunch of nonsense.

 

[Midnattsol]

Interesting article! If the points in the article are correct, the science is shockingly bad in The Body Keeps the Score.

Some snippets:








From the book which is a rebuttal to the book in question:

These claims are almost the same as what is being said about long covid in Norwegian media today, by the usual BPS suspects.

 

[Tia]

Finally! BVDK is a grifter, he was discredited once for poor and unethical practice and then still somehow managed to come back with this book. He's since been fired for bullying and yet still somehow sticks around. I think it's an attractive theory to many people so the scientific accuracy isn't questioned.

 

[Sean]

What van der Kolk and these other „scientists“ have in common is a thriller-like storytelling ability and an avoidance of facts… and truth seeking.

It's all about the narrative, init.

Spin a seductive enough of a story about an explanation of and solution to life's ills, and you will be rewarded with wealth, power, adulation, and invitations onto morning TV programs for fawning self-promoting chats about your Very Important Work.

Pretty much all of psych's long-standing shibboleths have been discredited, or at least proven to be on a much more shaky foundation that previously believed. Yet the flood of snake-oil merchants flogging endless meaningless variations of psych-based fairy-tales never ends.

 

[Chandelier]

It's all about the narrative, init.

Spin a seductive enough of a story about an explanation of and solution to life's ills, and you will be rewarded with wealth, power, adulation, and invitations onto morning TV programs for fawning self-promoting chats about your Very Important Work.

This, 100%.

One of the best examples I could find for that is this blog post by Gabor Maté.

Gabor Maté the healing force within

Gabor Maté the healing force within: Learning to say no. Health and the stress disease connection.

web.archive.org

It starts by picking all the right diseases, as if it was a parody:

I was struck by how consistently the lives of people with chronic illness are characterized by emotional shut down: the paralysis of “negative” emotions–in particular, the feeling and expression of anger. This pattern held true in a wide range of diseases from cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis to inflammatory bowel disorder, chronic fatigue syndrome and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Sufferers from asthma, psoriasis, migraines, fibromyalgia, endometriosis and a host of other conditions also exhibited similar inhibitions.

Then comes the main theme around which everything else must be bend:

People seemed incapable of considering their own emotional needs and were driven by a compulsive sense of responsibility for the needs of others. They all had difficulty saying no.

Enter the over-compassionate hero:

One of the terminally ill patients under my care was a middle-aged man, chief executive of a company that marketed shark cartilage as a treatment for cancer.

Be prepared for the heart break:

He continued to eat shark cartilage almost to the day of his death, but not because he any longer believed in its value. It smelled foul–the offensive stench was noticeable even at some distance away– and I could only imagine what it tasted like. “I hate it,” he told me, “but my business partner would be so disappointed if I stopped.”

It’s not a strategy to avoid considering the fact that he scammed terminally ill cancer patients as CEO of that company. No, instead he couldn’t possibly disappoint his business partner by saying no.

Short interjection back to reality about why we’re doing the whole bending

As a workaholic physician, needing the whole world to love and admire me—and, above all, to need me–I also found it impossible to say no. No matter how busy I was, I always accepted one more patient, one more counseling client, one more difficult case. As I did so, there was less and less space for myself in my own life. The result was chronic back pain and a constant, low-grade depression. It was when my own difficulties finally dragged me into therapy–kicking and screaming in resistance, of course–that I began to recognize the same traits in others.

He continues with a long block of good old facts dropping narrative:

In several studies in a number of different countries psychologists interviewing thousands of patients have been able to predict with overwhelming certainty who would and who would not develop cancer based simply on the degree to which an individual suppressed their feeling and expression of anger. Long term studies of medical students at Johns Hopkins and of Harvard undergraduates have confirmed that certain emotional traits in youth tend to be associated with illness later in life, quite apart from lifestyle influences such as smoking or drinking or exercise habits.

To then come back to the good old days, remember?

Prior to the development of powerful medications, instruments and diagnostic tools in the past century, physicians had to rely on awakening the healing forces within the patient if treatments were to succeed. That meant having to know people as individuals, cultivating a relationship with them, becoming acquainted with their lives.

Here comes the grand finale:

Finally, at the heart of the denial is the desperate fear humans have of being blamed for their own troubles.
…
The issue is responsibility without blame. All of us dread being blamed, but we would all would wish to be more responsible–to have the ability to respond with awareness to our circumstances, rather than just reacting.
…
Any one of us might succumb at any time, but the more we can learn about ourselves, the less prone we are to become passive victims.

Now, this might come as a shock to you, but did you know that Gabor Maté‘s son, Aaron Maté, demonstrates a relentless impulse of getting in front of microphones to preach to people about things many highschoolers are better informed about?

Jimmy Doré: So, you know, I'm again, you are not an economist. I'm not an economist, but it seems contradictory when they say that the bond yields are going up.
So that does that mean like if you buy a US Treasury that you're going to get a higher interest rate? You're going to get more money if you invest that would seem to be a good thing.
But of course that signals that the bond market's cratering. I don't Do you understand that?


Aaron Maté: Yeah, this gets into territory that I just I don't understand.
But according according to the Fox News guy, the bond market was cratering and that's what triggered the panic that led to Trump reversing course.

Doré: And you know, when I have on Ed um Ed Dowed, uh he always makes the point that that guy on Fox News made that uh the bond markets will let you know if this is a good uh way to go or not.
The bond markets are the the bellweather and the the canary in the coal mine.
And uh so apparently that was it. That that's what made Trump uh reverse course was is the bond market. So, okay. Uh, more even more important than the stock market.
That's that's we're all learning something, I guess. Source:

 

[rvallee]

Pretty much all of psych's long-standing shibboleths have been discredited, or at least proven to be on a much more shaky foundation that previously believed. Yet the flood of snake-oil merchants flogging endless meaningless variations of psych-based fairy-tales never ends.

I mentioned this a few times previously, but this is in stark contrast with most 'forensics science'. Most of it has been discredited, especially the magical mind-reading stuff like polygraphs, and its use has correspondingly fallen because justice systems want to avoid convicting innocent people on false evidence. Also because it tends to be expensive when the error is corrected.

But not only have there been zero consequences for the same problem in psychology, and especially its disastrous application to medicine, its use has actually gone up, and for all the wrong reasons. In comparison with forensics science, it would literally be because it makes it easier to convict innocent people. Which is immensely immoral, something that fair justice systems frown upon.

Not in health care. It's celebrated. Awarded. Very disturbing stuff.