The Body Keeps the Score
Aug. 22nd, 2015 01:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightreadsThe Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
3/5. Survey of the history of trauma treatment and current state of research.
First off, if you want a book on trauma – I mean a really good book on trauma that imparts an understanding of what it can feel like – go with Herman's Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
. It's dated in terms of treatment modalities, but it is still incredibly relevant and useful.
This book, on the other hand. It's not bad. It gives a lot of good historical background, gathered first hand throughout the author's career. And it makes a compelling and passionate case that the PTSD diagnosis is inappropriate and inaccurate as applied to what he instead calls Developmental Trauma Syndrome or the experience of trauma in childhood. It's a really important argument with a lot of implications for education, the criminal justice system, and family law.
But.
But I cannot respect a mental health professional who has so much disdain for disabled identities. He goes on at length about how important it is to establish the Developmental Trauma Syndrome diagnostic label, discusses how labels become part of our discourse about ourselves, and then condemns anyone who adopts their diagnosis as part of their identity. Putting aside all the reasons why people do, like self-respect, and community-building, and I don't know, the part where many diagnoses are life long. He is just so repulsed by the idea of psychological disability that he rejects it as a valid identity. He's like one of those parents who refuses to tell their child the child is disabled. You know the ones – they'll get the child treatment, but they won't ever, ever talk about the disability with the kid because they don't want the kid to "feel different." Spoiler: kid feels different. Kid also knows parents are ashamed and repulsed by part of kid's self. Pretty sure victims of trauma are just as good at picking up on that kind of ablism.
3/5. Survey of the history of trauma treatment and current state of research.
First off, if you want a book on trauma – I mean a really good book on trauma that imparts an understanding of what it can feel like – go with Herman's Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
. It's dated in terms of treatment modalities, but it is still incredibly relevant and useful.This book, on the other hand. It's not bad. It gives a lot of good historical background, gathered first hand throughout the author's career. And it makes a compelling and passionate case that the PTSD diagnosis is inappropriate and inaccurate as applied to what he instead calls Developmental Trauma Syndrome or the experience of trauma in childhood. It's a really important argument with a lot of implications for education, the criminal justice system, and family law.
But.
But I cannot respect a mental health professional who has so much disdain for disabled identities. He goes on at length about how important it is to establish the Developmental Trauma Syndrome diagnostic label, discusses how labels become part of our discourse about ourselves, and then condemns anyone who adopts their diagnosis as part of their identity. Putting aside all the reasons why people do, like self-respect, and community-building, and I don't know, the part where many diagnoses are life long. He is just so repulsed by the idea of psychological disability that he rejects it as a valid identity. He's like one of those parents who refuses to tell their child the child is disabled. You know the ones – they'll get the child treatment, but they won't ever, ever talk about the disability with the kid because they don't want the kid to "feel different." Spoiler: kid feels different. Kid also knows parents are ashamed and repulsed by part of kid's self. Pretty sure victims of trauma are just as good at picking up on that kind of ablism.