"The assault on people who had been traumatised has been relentless – to this day, almost, you’re not allowed to tell the truth about the horrible things that people do to each other.”

Van Der Kolk

"European and American psychiatry have an obsession with analysis and pharmaceuticals, which is partly...about monetisation, with research grants flowing to the most profitable and established fields. Van der Kolk is keenly aware of inequality as a factor in untreated PTSD, and no great fan of capitalism generally. “I’m not sure that the fall of the Berlin Wall was the best thing that ever happened to us,” he says, gnomically, but I get the drift. Part of the commercial imperative...has been the drive to find one thing that works for everyone: a Fordist factory-line approach to the brain that has seen millions spent on figuring out, for instance, what works best between pharmaceuticals and talking therapies, or between one therapy and another".