Traumatic Stress Quotes

“Unlike other forms of psychological disorders, the core issue in trauma is reality.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“The scientific study of suffering inevitably raises questions of causation, and with these, issues of blame and responsibility. Historically, doctors have highlighted predisposing vulnerability factors for developing PTSD, at the expense of recognizing the reality of their patients' experiences… This search for predisposing factors probably had its origins in the need to deny that all people can be stressed beyond endurance, rather than in solid scientific data; until recently such data were simply not available… When the issue of causation becomes a legitimate area of investigation, one is inevitably confronted with issues of man's inhumanity to man, with carelessness and callousness, with abrogation of responsibility, with manipulation and with failures to protect.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Victims are members of society whose problems represent the memory of suffering, rage, and pain in a world that longs to forget.”
― Bessel A. van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“In important ways, an experience does not really exist until it can be named and placed into larger categories.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Essentially, the introduction of the PTSD diagnosis has opened a door to the scientific investigation of the nature of human suffering. Although much of human art and religion has always focused on expressing and understanding man’s afflictions, science has paid scant attention to suffering as an object of study. Hitherto, science has generally categorized people’s problems as discrete psychological or biological disorders — diseases without context, largely independent of the personal histories of the patients, their temperaments, or their environments. PTSD, then, serves as a model for correcting the decontextualized aspects of today’s psychiatric nomenclature. It refocuses attention back on the living person instead of our overly concrete definitions of mental “disorders” as “things” in and of themselves, bringing us back to people’s own experiences and the meaning which they assign to it.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“Essentially, the introduction of the PTSD diagnosis has opened a door to the scientific investigation of the nature of human suffering. Although much of human art and religion has always focused on expressing and understanding man’s afflictions, science has paid scant attention to suffering as an object of study. Hitherto, science has generally categorized people’s problems as discrete psychological or biological disorders — diseases without context, largely independent of the personal histories of the patients, their temperaments, or their environments. PTSD, then, serves as a model for correcting the decontextualized aspects of today’s psychiatric nomenclature. It refocuses attention back on the living person instead of our overly concrete definitions of
mental “disorders” as “things” in and of themselves, bringing us back to people’s own experiences and the meaning which they assign to it.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society

“[T]he study of trauma has become the soul of psychiatry: The development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a diagnosis has created an organized framework for understanding how people’s biology, conceptions of the world, and personalities are inextricably intertwined and shaped by experience. The PTSD diagnosis has reintroduced the notion that many “neurotic" symptoms are not the
results of some mysterious, well-nigh inexplicable, genetically based irrationality, but of people’s inability to come to terms with real experiences that have overwhelmed their capacity to cope.”
― Bessel van der Kolk, Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society