Trauma — The Science and the Story

Van der Kolk argues that trauma is not a psychological problem but a physiological one — the body stores it in places the talking cure cannot reach. The case studies are the devastation. The science is the hope. You will read this and understand your own reactions to things you thought were over.

Frankl survived four concentration camps including Auschwitz and wrote this account of logotherapy — the finding of meaning as a survival mechanism. The first half, the account of the camps, is one of the most austere pieces of witness literature in existence. The therapy section is the application of those observations to people who still have time to choose.

Eger was sixteen at Auschwitz and seventy-three when she finished her psychology training and published her memoir. The decades between are the subject — the work of not letting survival become sentence. She danced for Mengele; she built a life afterward; the two things are not separate.

Solomon spent a decade interviewing families raising children with conditions that set them apart — deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia. The book's argument is that identity is not a defect. Its achievement is making that argument through 700 pages of specific, devastating, gorgeous testimony.

Mate works with addicts in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and argues that addiction is not a choice but a response to trauma — the brain's desperate attempt to solve a pain it cannot name. His compassion is ferocious and his science is rigorous.

Lia Lee has epilepsy; her Hmong family believes the seizures are divine. Fadiman documents the collision of Western medicine and Hmong cosmology — two systems, each certain of its correctness, each failing the same child. There is no one to blame, which is the worst part.

Devine watched her partner drown and then spent years listening to the grief community tell her she needed to find a way through. Her argument — that some grief cannot and should not be resolved, only held — is a rebuke to every fixing impulse. The permission it grants is the most useful thing in the book.

Styron's account of his severe depression is still the best description of the disorder in literary form — not because it is scientific but because it renders the inside of it in language that non-sufferers can almost enter. The suicide attempt he does not make is described with more precision than most that are.

Jamison is one of the world's leading researchers on bipolar disorder and she has bipolar disorder. Her memoir of living inside the condition she studies professionally is the most illuminating account of mania and depression from both positions simultaneously. The suicide attempt is rendered without sentiment and without pride.

Saks is a law professor at USC and she has schizophrenia. Her memoir traces the diagnosis and the decades of managing it — the hospitalizations, the restraints, the medication regime, the refusal to be defined by it. The advocacy the book produced has changed how psychiatric patients are treated in California.