It's Time to Debunk Debunking
In an era of widespread misinformation and myriad unknowns, “debunking” can feel deliciously powerful. Too bad it's often wrong.
Rebecca Armendariz is a clinical social worker and psychotherapy provider in Baltimore, MD.
In early May, Michael Hobbes, the researcher and co-host of the popular podcast If Books Could Kill, proclaimed (via Bluesky posts) that Bessel van der Kolk, MD, the psychiatrist and author of The Body Keeps the Score—a record-breaking best-seller that has become the de facto guide for understanding trauma and PTSD—is a “hack,” “insane,” and “an obvious crank.” Hobbes’s posts alerted me to his plan to analyze the book on the podcast, wherein he and lawyer Peter Shamshiri critique and ridicule bestsellers and pundits through a discussion of their arguments and the research behind them.
I’ve listened to many of the episodes since its launch in November 2022 and have enjoyed the act of comparing notes, indulging in my own sense of moral and intellectual rightness along with theirs. They’re smart media critics.
But as a psychotherapy provider maintaining certification in Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR), one of the more modern modalities van der Kolk champions in The Body Keeps the Score, trauma is the turf of my expertise, and the smug commentary of these co-hosts contributes nothing productive to the discourse. Not only are they not equipped to tackle such a complex topic, they’re feeding into a larger trend of people using scientific claims to foreclose endless unknowns and limit curiosity about our existence in the universe. It’s one thing to be skeptical of what we take as fact, it’s another to convince people that anything currently unprovable is therefore bunk.
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