Beden Kayıt Tutar (The Body Keeps the Score) — Bessel van der Kolk (Book Review)

Bessel A. van der Kolk

Nobel Akademik Yayıncılık, 2018

Van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, researcher, and author who has worked in the field of trauma for more than 30 years. He is an educator whose contributions to the field have consistently broken new ground.

Van der Kolk’s book “Body keeps the score” was published in 2014 to great acclaim. It was also translated into Turkish under the title “Beden kayıt tutar,” with Associate Professor Dr. Önder Kavakcı and Specialist Psychologist Hayal Demirci serving as translation editors. In this book, the author begins by explaining how trauma is part of everyday life. He shows how breast cancer and autoimmune diseases kill more people in the United States than the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The book teaches us about the profound costs of neglect for an infant and how traumatic experiences cause damage and changes in our brains, bodies, and genes. We learn how much adverse childhood experiences increase the risk of developing conditions such as heart disease, cancer, and lung disease. The book also explains how the effects of trauma become embedded in our bodies and exact a lifelong toll.

Through the questions he asks and the case histories he recounts, van der Kolk both engages his readers in conversation and educates them. He reminds us that therapeutic work actually began as a search for a remedy for trauma, then shows how it moved away from addressing underlying causes and how today’s approach to psychiatry and psychotherapy came to focus on suppressing symptoms. We also learn that half a million children and adolescents in the United States alone take antipsychotic medication, and that antipsychotic use among children aged 2–5 doubled between 2000 and 2007. Beden kayıt tutar offers a powerful critique of the DSM approach, and we read the author’s firsthand account of how his years of work on etiology and his warnings have fallen on deaf ears.

Beden kayıt tutar also offers evidence of how the neuroscience revolution could change our approach to patients and illnesses, and how we might broaden the perspectives that limit conventional treatment options. In his view, our traumas determine our destiny, but that destiny can also be changed. By drawing attention to body-oriented psychotherapies, van der Kolk shows possible paths to healing. He also offers guidance on the steps toward creating a safer, more manageable, and more predictable world. It can be described as an important masterpiece that is essential reading not only for mental health professionals but also for all healthcare workers, teachers, administrators, and social workers.

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This article was originally published on the web portal of the journal Bilim ve Ütopya on April 8, 2019. As the portal has been taken offline, I am republishing the text here.