Bessel van der kolk biography of martin

Dutch psychiatrist, researcher and educator (born 1943)

Bessel van der Kolk (born July 1943) is a Boston-based psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator. Since the 1970s his research has been in the area of post-traumatic stress. He is the author of four books, including The New York Times best seller, The Body Keeps the Score.

Van der Kolk formerly served as president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies and is a former co-director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. He is a professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and president of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Early life and education

Van der Kolk was born in the Netherlands in July 1943.The Hague was occupied by the Nazis at the time and his father was sent to a workcamp. He was the middle child of five. His mother taught her children to play musical instruments. Bessel played piano and cello and was taught six languages.

He studied a pre-medical curriculum with a political science major at the University of Hawaii in 1965. As an undergraduate, he was active in Students for a Democratic Society and was influenced by R.D. Laing and other thinkers in the anti-psychiatry movement. He gained his M.D. at the Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, in 1970, and completed his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School, in 1974.

Career

After his training, van der Kolk worked as a director of Boston State Hospital. He became a staff psychiatrist at the Boston Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic. Van der Kolk developed an interest in studying traumatic stress in 1978 while working with Vietnam war veterans suffering from PTSD and serving on the Harvard Medical School faculty. He was a member of the PTSD committee of the 1980 and 1994 edition

This remains one of my favorite books for trauma recovery. I read it right after CPTSD: Surviving to Thriving, so close that they seemed like one big book. I finally had a chance to re-read it almost a year later. Those wait times at the public library are intense, but I guess I’m glad so many people are reading this kind of book, especially during COVID. This book currently lives in my top 5 list for therapy books, and I highly recommend reading them together like I did, as they are very complementary. This post is very long because this book is very full of important ideas. I hope you stick with it.

Bessel van der Kolk is a very accomplished and experienced psychiatrist and researcher in the area of trauma. He started working with Vietnam veterans in the 1970s (before PTSD was a known diagnosis) and has been instrumental in hundred of studies and research projects to better understand the impact of both single traumatic events and long term traumatic exposure. His work with war veterans led him to understand how childhood trauma was both similar and different from combat trauma, and he has been vital to the understanding of CPTSD. He is an expert the experts defer to. “The Body” was published in 2014, so it’s fairly up to date as far as technology and research techniques described.

This post is so much longer than other book reviews because the book itself covers so much. It tells the history of understanding and treatment of trauma. It explains the scientific studies used to advance that understanding and treatment. It addresses the social, political, and economic barriers to the study, understanding, and treatment. It shares case studies of individuals suffering from and recovering from trauma. It shares statistics of the staggering number of people who have been traumatized in one way or another in life. It addresses the critical link between “mind, brain, and body” in how trauma affects us and how we heal from it. And it looks into a ra

2014 book by Bessel van der Kolk

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma is a 2014 book by Bessel van der Kolk about the purported effects of psychological trauma. The book describes van der Kolk's research and experiences on how people are affected by traumatic stress, including its effects on the mind and body.

Scientists have criticized the book for promoting pseudoscientific claims about trauma, memory, brains, and development.

The Body Keeps the Score has been published in 36 languages. As of July 2021, it had spent more than 141 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction, 27 of them in the No. 1 position.

Publication history

The book is based on van der Kolk’s 1994 Harvard Review of Psychiatry article "The body keeps the score: memory and the evolving psychobiology of posttraumatic stress".

Overview

In the book, van der Kolk focuses on the central role of the attachment system and social environment to protect against developing trauma related disorders. Where trauma does occur, he discusses the effects and possible forms of healing, including a large variety of interventions to recover from the impacts of traumatic experiences. These include EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), yoga, and limbic system therapy.

Reception

The Body Keeps the Score was well-received, including a starred review from Library Journal. Reviewing the book for New Scientist magazine, Shaoni Bhattacharya wrote that "[p]acked with science and human stories, the book is an intense read that can get technical. Stay with it, though: van der Kolk has a lot to say, and the struggle and resilience of his patients is very moving."

In 2019, The Body Keeps the Score was ranked second i