The Trouble with Trauma

The Trouble with Trauma is the story of how the idea of psychological trauma appeals to the human mind.

Trauma impacts many people psychologically, but the evidence on the long-term physical effect is incomplete. Theories that psychological trauma can permanently damage your brain, cause physical disease, and change your essential character have become staples of human thought worldwide.

Dr. Scheeringa explains how those theories are widely believed whilst not being true, and at the heart of the story is an explanation of how humans choose to ignore scientific evidence and practice self-deception based on heuristics for survival. Heuristics is a rapid and efficient method to make judgments about threatening situations, which may be especially relevant during an epidemic and the spread of misinformation.

But The Trouble with Trauma is more than a critique of social policy. This is a book for anyone who wants a better understanding on how groupthink and herd mentality works and improves our ability to understand scientific fact. Dr. Scheeringa sheds light on why we choose to ignore scientific evidence while engaging the reader in a lively conversation on how we come to believe.

Michael S. Scheeringa, MD, worked until 2022 as a tenured professor at Tulane University School of Medicine in New Orleans, LA as an endowed chair and the Vice Chair of Research. He was active as both a practicing clinician and a researcher for over thirty years as the principal investigator on five large, federally funded research projects on the topic of PTSD in children and adolescents. He has worked with over 500 patients and families with PTSD. Much of this work has been conducted with very young children, which has given him a unique developmental perspective. This work has led to more than one hundred scientific articles and more than 120 lectures and workshop trainings around the US and for international audiences. He has developed multiple assessment measures that have been translated into ten languages. His CBT manual and DIPA diagnostic interview have been distributed to over 1,000 clinicians in more than twenty countries. He has been a consultant to several national efforts, including the National Academy of Sciences and the DSM-5.