Trauma: The Invisible Epidemic : How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It

Decent book. Conti is clearly very smart, especially when heard in live discussion. He brings in interesting tid-bits and the book is at its best when he discusses his clinical experiences or the science of trauma. That said, he too often ventures into the political sphere, where he becomes blinded by his biases. While he calls for open-mindedness as an “antidote” to trauma, he often fails to practice such open-mindedness in his book. For instance, he focuses on African-American trauma stemming from police brutality (a legitimate issue in this country). However, he pays no attention to the flip side of that equation. Namely, that African-Americans are statistically the most violent ethnic subgroup in the country (~15% of the population accounting for ~50% of the nation’s homicides, for example). These statistics lead to the reasonable inference that police have often been the subject of violence at the hands of the African-American community, leading to a legitimate fear and resulting trauma, which in turn lead them to be more reactive and violent toward the community as a fear-response. To be clear, police have often and for decades brutalized the African-American community (and likely were the original brutalizers, many decades ago) resulting in similar fear and trauma on that community. It truly is a perpetual cycle. But Conti’s refusal to acknowledge the likely trauma that many police officers (who were not around in the 1950s and before, when police began this cycle of brutality) experience indicates a bias that brings his credibility into question, especially since one of the central themes of his book his how we must be open to acknowledge how trauma arises from all sources. This is one of a few examples where Conti’s bias gets in the way of his objectivity. That said, if one takes these soliloquies with a grain of salt, they can learn enough from his discussions on the science of trauma to make this a worthwhile read.

There are some useful insights provided in the book regarding the damage caused by trauma, especially childhood trauma, but the author digresses into “social” topics unrelated to the true subject matter. Trauma is individual and personal. While events obviously affect other events to a degree, this book overstates the interconnectivity of entities. The book has an undercurrent of leftist philosophy, stressing collective victimhood , group-think, and conformity. We are more than mere pinballs being bounced around a pinball machine having no control over our destiny, but the book seems to suggest that we are little more than that. Trauma is not a cause of, nor an excuse for, mass social pathology.

Dr. Paul Conti is an incredibly smart man and you can learn a lot from him but I would not recommend learning from this book. Go watch him on YouTube which has so much less of his political views. They take away from the importance of trauma and its effects.