Child psychiatrist. Conservative. Trying to see what is difficult to see. Four books on trauma. Trauma Dispatch posts.
Joined December 2014
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2 Sep 2022
“Self-inflation is the rule in life,” wrote Robert Trivers; hence his conclusion that we fool ourselves so as better to fool others. This explains a lot of why smart folks truly believe in toxic stress, ACEs, and complex PTSD despite the obvious lack of scientific evidence.
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NEW review of PTSD treatments for young children (open-access link below).
Among the many interventions examined, the authors highlighted Preschool PTSD Treatment as "an exemplar for treating trauma in preschoolers" and the only preschool-specific treatment shown effective across diverse trauma types.
It's gratifying to see hard work recognized in an independent review.
Fads fade. Evidence endures.
acamh.onlinelibrary.wiley.co…
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Michael Scheeringa, MD retweeted
Your reminder that global trends for anxiety and mental health have largely been static. Same with suicide data. There's no global crisis of mental health among young people. Even in countries where suicide was high (and not just among young people) like the US, those numbers are improving.
Beware the moral panic clickbait.
"There's a global crisis for mental health amongst young people."
@EthanZohn from @GrassrootSoccer shares more on the incredible work the organization will be doing around this summer's World Cup 👏
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Most mainstream discussions about teen depression reduce everything to “society,” “screens,” or oppression narratives.
Reality is more complicated.
I recently joined a 15-year-old podcast host on Positive World, Positive People to discuss:
· clinical depression vs ordinary unhappiness
· the major role of genetics in clinical disorder
· the role of moral status and identity development in normative unhappiness
· how AI might help
· how counseling can help
Impressive interviewer. Smart questions. Serious conversation.
27 minutes
podcasts.apple.com/na/podcas…
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Can you get a letter to the editor published in a psychology journal if it challenges the field’s dominant politics?
After 45 researchers published an editorial attacking Trump science policies, I submitted a different perspective. Eight months and five revisions later, the psychology journal finally published it. Apparently viewpoint diversity still requires endurance.
Scientific openness means little if only one political perspective passes peer review comfortably.
Link to open access:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.…
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Appearance on The Resiliency podcast (Mission 22) also available on Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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Recent guest appearance on The Resiliency podcast from Mission 22. We unpacked trauma science gone wrong: the myths of “the body keeps the score” and Complex PTSD, resilience vs genetic vulnerability, the failures of cross-sectional research, and how researchers’ worldviews fuel false—and harmful—trauma narratives.
open.spotify.com/episode/5Dq…
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Just got my favorite email: a trainee realized their grad program was teaching nonsense.
Goes rogue.
Found my work on PTSD treatment in young kids. Course-corrected.
Saving the world, one skeptical student at a time.
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Michael Scheeringa, MD retweeted
Apr 25
States that do not mandate universal school mental health screening are not in the clear. At least one-third of districts nationwide are already doing this.
States must PROHIBIT universal school mental health screening.
Apr 24
Virginia is quietly setting up to mandate all 6-12th graders be screened for mental conditions annually—will push HUGE numbers of kids toward to mis- and overdiagnosis.
@ALegalProcess —who spots more scary details in legalese than anyone else—writes how bad it is. @CityJournal
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New study of 221 Ukraine youth (Skinner et al 2026) finds no association between cortisol and PTSD. This isn’t new—it reinforces decades of inconsistent evidence.
Meta-analyses (2007, 2012, 2017) repeatedly show no reliable cortisol–PTSD link: most studies find no difference, and results that do are inconsistent. Decades of negative cortisol findings make broad claims about toxic stress causing permanent neurobiological damage hard to defend.
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I appreciated reading Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy. We’re both trying to rid progressive wokeism from our fields. A common denominator to the woke projects of the last decade is untethered empathy.
16 Oct 2025
My book which deals with related issues: The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits
Sinofempathy.com
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Do you not understand the purpose of the DSM? It's purpose is reliable communication for research and clinical work. Straw manning the DSM for not explaining disorders is like disapproving cars for not flying.
Apr 16
Spicy Take: the DSM is often merely a cluster of symptoms named with a thesaurus. Describing a cluster of behaviours in Greek doesn't explain it. Naming is not understanding. We've confused the two for fifty years and called it progress.
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Wow. This video is great. Cool graphics get the points across. I appreciate you citing my book.
-Your therapist's favorite book is bullshit
-The Body Keeps the Score created the obsession with trauma
-It's HUGE- more Amazon reviews (80k) than A Game of Thrones
-Led to a $10,000,000 2nd book deal
-...it's bullshit - absolutely filled with shockingly bad scientific errors
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"Extinction-level" rhetoric is hyperbole. Focusing on NIH, the electorate voted for woke research to be defunded. This is good news for conservatives. Even if the cut is made (which it won't; it's a negotiation opening), the U.S. research budget is still more than double that of the five largest western nations combined.
NEWS: Massive budget cuts for US science proposed again by Trump administration
"It's an extinction-level event for science".
The US government is proposing massive cuts to almost every branch of science, from NASA to the National Institutes of Health. NSF would completely eliminate the social, economic and behavioral sciences directorate.
This would decimate the world's leading scientific system.
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
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Trauma Researchers Assure World That After 204 Factor Analysis Studies of PTSD, Factor Analysis #205 Will Finally Reveal The Secret Structure.
(a parody).
With the world riveted in anticipation, the new analysis was published last month. They found a 7-factor model fit slightly better than 4- and 6-factor models!
This was, however, unsurprising considering that in prior studies the model with the most factors fits best 87% of the time because the ’best fit’ is a mathematical fit rather than a measure of construct validity.
Everyone, relax, the authors said. Despite validity concerns, the 7-factor model still “may have theoretical and psychometric value in capturing nuanced PTSD symptom dimensions.”
At press time, those values had not been disclosed.
Hidalgo JE, Burt KB, Davidson TM, Ruggiero KJ, Andrews AR, Contractor AA, Peck K, McGinnis EW, Ha J, Noble NC, Kim JN, Ramirez V, Price M. Posttraumatic stress disorder factor structure in hurricane-affected Puerto Ricans: A PTSD Checklist for DSM-5 comparison with non-Latiné White individuals. J Trauma Stress. 2026 Feb;39(1):44-56.
More fun facts in my review below:
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"Van der Kolk has fabricated an alternative reality for you."
Mar 30
The Body Keeps The Score has cooked so many brains. Truly a world-historical work of pseudoscience.
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My second appearance on this podcast with two therapists who talk like normal guys (no hype) about clinical issues and trauma. Also available on Spotify.
podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
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This is good news.
We are pulling the plug on med school DEI and making us all healthier as a result foxnews.com/opinion/we-pulli… #FoxNews
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