The Body DOESN'T Keep The Score: Psychiatry's Biggest Lie | Dr. Michael Scheeringa, MD
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How did The Body Keeps the Score become the dominant trauma narrative?
This book, The Body Keeps the Score, almost certainly would have had a massive episode on Oprah of her having to say to her audience, I'm so sorry, this entire thing was fake.
It would be if that's the way truth works.
Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score, just got offered a $10 million deal for a sequel. He's the world's most famous living psychiatrist. And you say that the entire idea that trauma is stored in the body is a scam.
The body does not keep the score. Bessel van der Kolk wants people to think he just looked at the science and then came up with the conclusion. He followed the data. It's backwards. He had a conclusion that he started with, I believe, and then cherry picked the data to fit it.
For years, one book, The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk, has dominated the conversation on trauma. With more than 4 million copies sold, it's recommended by therapists, taught in classrooms, and revered as gospel. Van der Kolk is the most famous living psychiatrist. His message? Your body remembers everything. There's just one problem. It's all complete BS, made up, fake science. This should be one of the biggest news headlines dominating right now, except nobody wants to touch it. That is no one except my guest today. Dr. Michael Scaringa has spent nearly three decades researching PTSD. And he believes that the idea that trauma is literally stored in the body, an idea that has reshaped modern psychology, may be built on evidence that doesn't actually prove what people think it proves.
He's a child psychiatrist and has been doing this for decades. This is an episode that you need to share with anyone who has uttered the phrase, the body keeps score, claims to be suffering from trauma, or is in an endless therapy loop. Watch on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please leave us a five-star review to support the show. Please welcome psychiatrist Dr. Scaringa to Culture Apothecary. Bessel van der Kolk, who wrote the New York Times bestseller, The Body Keeps the Score, just got offered a $10 million deal for a sequel to that book. He's the world's most famous living psychiatrist, but you're also a psychiatrist. And you say that the entire idea that trauma is stored in the body is a scam.
Yeah, I wrote a whole book to debunk The Body Keeps the Score. It's called The Body Does Not Keep the Score. And in that, I went through 122 claims from his book and debunked them based on the research. 49 of those claims are about the neuroscience. There's another like 59 claims about his treatment ideas and then another 30 or so claims about other things he gets into like child development. So it's a pretty thorough investigation of that popular book.
Every single headline out there says that there is this unprecedented mental health epidemic and crisis. But you actually don't think that the evidence supports that.
I do not. In fact, I'm writing a review paper on it right now. The issue is they're saying, Dr. Jonathan Haidt mainly is saying, and a lot of other people are saying it, that social media has caused a mental health disorder crisis. And what I'm saying is it's not disorder. And when you look at the evidence that they use to support that, they're using self-report surveys that kids fill out mostly, as opposed to an interview, which is like the gold standard in psychiatry for validity. And when you just look at the self-report interviews, which is like 99.9% of the data, they're filled with false positives. Rates on those self-report questionnaires have gone up, but it's not disorders. It's kids who are unhappy or discontented.
He talks about you can get disorder just by kind of like hanging around social media like it's a virus or something that you catch. Mental disorders don't happen that way.
If you ask 100 Americans today whether trauma permanently changes the brain, how many do you think would say yes?
99, probably.
99.
I mean, everybody I've worked with clinically and where I used to work, they believe the body keeps the score, or at least they think it's possible.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
How did The Body Keeps the Score become the dominant trauma narrative?
0:00β7:38
2
What evidence does Dr. Michael Scheeringa use to claim 'the body does not keep the score'?
7:38β26:14
3
How do prospective pre-trauma brain studies challenge trauma-caused brain changes?
26:14β45:31
4
Which parts of Van der Kolk's neuroscience and treatment claims are misrepresented?
45:31β50:23
Speakers
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