I'm listening to the audiobook version of it and have learned so much about psychology, psychological history, trauma, etc. The author himself is Bessel van der Kolk, and has done groundbreaking work as a psychiatrist on trauma for decades.

Some highlights:

Earlier in the book, he describes with detail nuances within pharmacological practices and use of psychiatric substances, including the corruption behind popularly prescribed drugs and takes a strong stance that pharmacology fails at addressing the underlying causes and impacts of trauma.

I'm currently on chapter 10, and the author is describing this study that was done in the 1980s by Trickett and Putnam on the impact of incest abuse on female development. The researchers looked at peer relationships, reproductive hormones, cognitive development, dating life, mental health symptoms, and other physiological factors, comparing 84 girls who were abused and matching them with a control group of girls who weren't abused (and who's race, socioeconomic status, age, familial constellation, etc. matched). The study followed these girls for twenty years, and was of the first of it's kind to do so. Here it is: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23786689/

There were some unsurprising results, but some of the effects of childhood sexual abuse that they found which I wasn't aware of was a greater likelihood for obesity later in life and earlier onset puberty.

Earlier in the book, the author describes the corruption behind the several mental health labels slapped onto traumatized children (sometimes many at a a time) such as oppositional defiant disorder, ADHD, bipolar disorder, BPD - many of these which follow kids throughout their lives and carry stigma, and are often incorrect. He and other researchers attempted to introduce a more encompassing diagnostic criteria called "Developmental Trauma Disorder" (DTD) [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6352932/] which initially showed promise and strong support to be introduced into the DSM-5, but he then received a letter by - I think it was someone in the APA - who stated it would not be introduced.

I'm at the part currently in which the author is detailing how the American Journal of Psychiatry published findings that the DSM lacked scientific validity prior to the DSM-5 ever being rolled out. There was a universal consensus among researchers in psychology and psychiatry that it provided no improvement from previous diagnostic systems, but that it was published anyways potentially due to the APA obtaining 1.1 million dollars off of the DSM-4 due to mental health practitioners and many lawyers being obliged to purchase latest editions. His perspective seems to be that diagnostic reliability is treated as an abstract issue in psychology, and that a mislabeled patient is often a mistreated patient. He goes on to explain that after much protest from leaders in the American Psychological Association and American scholars and researchers, the British Psychological Society went on to complain in a released statement to the APA "that the sources of psychological suffering in the DSM-5 were identified as located within individuals and underlooked the undeniable social causation of many such problems".

Bessel van der Kolk then asks, "Why are relationships - or social conditions - left out? If you pay attention to only faulty biology and defective genes as the cause of mental problems, and ignore abandonment, abuse, and deprivation, you are likely to run into as many dead ends as previous generations did blaming it all on terrible mothers".