Bessel van der Kolk


Bessel van der Kolk is a psychiatrist, author, researcher and educator based in Boston, USA. Since the 1970s his research has been in the area of post-traumatic stress. He is the author of the New York Times best seller, The Body Keeps the Score. Van der Kolk served as a past president for the International Society for Traumatic stress Studies and former co-director of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. He is a professor of Psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine and president of the Trauma Research Foundation in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Van der Kolk has published over 150 peer reviewed scientific articles. His books include Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychological Trauma , Traumatic Stress and The Body Keeps the Score.

Early life

Van der Kolk was born in the Netherlands. He studied a pre-medical curriculum with a political science major at the University of Hawaii in 1965. He gained his M.D. at the Pritzker School of Medicine, University of Chicago, in 1970, and completed his psychiatric residency at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Harvard Medical School in 1974. After his training, he worked as a director of Boston State Hospital, followed by becoming a staff psychiatrist at the Boston VA Outpatient Clinic where he acquired his interest in studying traumatic stress.

Career

Van der Kolk started the Trauma Center in 1982 when he was working as a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Since then, the Trauma Center has conducted numerous trainings and clinical trials. . He did extensive studies on the nature of traumatic memory, and he took a leading role in the first studies on the psychopharmacological treatments of PTSD. He conducted some of the first studies on the biological substrates of PTSD and on stress induced analgesia. He was involved in the first neuroimaging studies of PTSD and of Dissociative Identity Disorder and he received the first grants from the National Institutes of Health to study EMDR and yoga He has a particular interest in developmental psychopathology, studying how trauma has a differential effect, depending on developmental stage and the security of the attachment system, and he coined the term Developmental Trauma Disorder for the complex range of psychological and biological reactions to trauma over the course of human development. In 1999 he initiated the creation of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, which, since then, has grown in to a Network of 150 sites specializing in treating traumatized children and their families around the US. He has advocated innovative treatments for traumatic stress in children and adults, such as trauma-sensitive yoga, embodied therapies, neurofeedback, and psychedelic therapies.
Since 1989, he has been course director of the annual Boston International Trauma Conference which brings together leading scientists and clinicians specializing in trauma, developmental psychopathology, attachment studies, body-oriented therapies, theater and expressive arts.
In 2017, van der Kolk was terminated from the parent organization of the Trauma Center, Justice Resource Institute, due to allegations of creating a hostile environment that allowed the then Executive Director of the Trauma Center to engage in abusive practices. Van der Kolk stated that the termination was an attempt by the Justice Resource Institute to mitigate its own legal responsibility for the alleged misconduct. The executive team of the Trauma Center unanimously protested this termination, and all senior members of the Trauma Center resigned. Van der Kolk filed a lawsuit against the Justice Resource Institute for several counts of action including misrepresentation and defamation. The suit was settled in van der Kolk's favor out of court. In 2020, the Trauma Center at the Justice Resource Institute permanently closed.
In May of 2018, van der Kolk used the funds won in his settlement with the Justice Resource Institute to found the 501c3 nonprofit, The Trauma Research Foundation.
Van der Kolk teaches within the United States and internationally, having taught all over Europe as well as in China, Japan, Australia, Indonesia, India, New Zealand, Egypt, Israel, the UAE, Turkey and South Africa.

Books