With profound empathy and meticulous research, a physician and post-traumatic stress disorder specialist shines a long-overdue light on the PTSD epidemic afflicting today’s fractured world.

“Highly recommended for a wide variety of readers, but especially to those who may have undergone trauma or the family members with whom they share their lives. . . . Told in a compassionate and humanistic manner that makes the pain of this condition come alive for the reader.”—New York Journal of Books

In 2007, Shaili Jain was a psychiatrist comfortably ensconced in private practice in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. During a spring road trip with her father, she stumbled upon the truth of what happened to his family during the 1947 Partition of India. Jain’s family legacy was one of tragic loss and terror, but it had been buried for decades. Her father’s testimony would eventually spur her on a new career path, committed to advancing the science of psychological trauma and unlocking the secrets of what fosters human resilience after surviving the unspeakable.

Today Dr. Jain is a PTSD specialist at one of America’s top VA hospitals and a trauma scientist at the National Center for PTSD, a consortium that is widely regarded as the world’s leading center of excellence on PTSD. In The Unspeakable Mind, she draws on the two decades she has spent caring for survivors of child abuse, rape, intimate partner violence, life-threatening accidents, and war, and lays bare PTSD’s roots, inner workings, and paths to healing.

At any given moment, more than six million Americans are suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD cuts to the heart of life, interfering with the capacity to love, create, and work—an incapacity brought on by a complex interplay between biology, genetics, and environment. Beyond the struggles of individuals, PTSD also leaves a tangible imprint on cultures and societies around the world. The twenty-first century has seen an enormous surge in the science of PTSD, a body of evidence that continues to grow exponentially. With new knowledge have come dramatic advances in the effective treatment of this condition. Drawing on a decade of her own clinical innovation and research, Jain argues for a paradigm shift in how PTSD should be approached in the new millennium, highlighting the myriad of ways PTSD care is being transformed to make it more accessible, acceptable, and available to sufferers.

Combining vividly recounted patient stories, cutting-edge neuroscience, interviews with some of the world’s top trauma scientists, and her own professional expertise from working on the frontlines of treatment and recovery, Jain offers a textured portrait of a widely misunderstood condition. Unrivaled in scope, The Unspeakable Mind journeys far beyond the horrors of war to illuminate why PTSD is an inescapable part of all our lives.