Considering this book was published in 2014, it's incredible how so much of it is still relevant today. The psychiatrist and author of the book has done a lot of work with military veterans and victims of sexual assault. The first chapter in particular explores how when he was a medical student there were not a lot of effective treatments for veterans who were experiencing PTSD and depression. He explores the history of a lot of these treatments and changes in modalities that he witnessed firsthand. Additionally, the book explores some of the success the author has found with patients using some of these techniques. There was a significant improvement in quality of life for them. He contrasts this to more traditional therapy methods that particularly did not work for highly traumatized patients.

I think the strongest parts of the book are the application of research done on war veterans to sexual assault and rape victims. There is a lot of overlap there in terms of the anxiety level of patients as well as treatments like EMDR working for both. I appreciated the thorough explanation he gave about EMDR and how it was not the standard of trauma treatment until the 1980s. There is also a progressive lens he applies to the definition of trauma. For a long time, trauma was considered something that was only experienced in war settings. This book takes a more modern stance around what can be defined as trauma and backs it up.

I listened to the audiobook, and it was reasonably well produced. There is some controversy surrounding the author. I will link the Reddit thread that discusses this. He was fired from his more recent position due to mistreatment of women and the original poster for the thread discusses issues that they have with the author's work. They make a point about the author sympathizing with war criminals. I don't think the author at any point defends the actions of war criminals. My interpretation was that they analyzed the circumstances that led them to become awful people and what could be done within the field of psychology to help them recover from it. As far as the misconduct, I think it is unfortunate for the victims. It drives the point home that someone can make major contributions to a field and still cause harm within that field as well. Anyway, here is the link for future research:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ptsd/comments/plskph/warning_the_body_keeps_the_score_is_a/