Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Authors Like Gabor Maté
Maté argues that trauma, not moral weakness or genetics alone, sits underneath most addiction, chronic illness, and developmental struggle. The eight writers below work the same trauma-informed territory: the neuroscience of how trauma lives in the body, the social and political dimensions of addiction, and the specific effects of childhood adversity on adult health.
By Lisanne Swart · 8 authors · Trauma · Addiction · Mind-Body Health · Updated August 2026 · ~7 min read
Quick answer
The closest match to Gabor Maté is Bessel van der Kolk, whose book The Body Keeps the Score covers the same trauma-and-the-body territory from a clinical neuroscience angle. For addiction specifically, read Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream or Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation.
Why trust this list: Every author below is one I’ve actually read, not a genre tag or algorithmic match. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
- The closest match — trauma and the body, from a leading researcher
- Somatic trauma therapy, from its founding clinician
- The foundational text of modern trauma theory
- Addiction examined through social and political isolation
- Addiction science, updated for the dopamine economy
- Childhood trauma and the developing brain
- Adverse childhood experiences, from a pediatrician
- Trauma passed down through generations and race
- Frequently asked questions
Bessel van der Kolk
Van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score synthesizes decades of research on how trauma is stored physically in the nervous system, and why talk therapy alone often fails to resolve it, drawing on neuroscience, developmental psychology, and clinical case studies.
The single closest match to Maté’s project — the same core argument, that trauma lives in the body rather than staying contained in memory, made with comparable clinical depth and reach.
Peter Levine
Levine developed Somatic Experiencing, a body-based trauma therapy approach, and his book Waking the Tiger argues that trauma symptoms result from incomplete physiological responses to threat, using animal behavior as a comparison point.
A more clinically technical companion to Maté’s work — where Maté makes the case for trauma’s role in illness broadly, Levine offers a specific therapeutic framework for resolving it in the body directly.
Judith Herman
Herman’s Trauma and Recovery, first published in 1992, is widely considered the foundational modern text on psychological trauma, connecting domestic abuse, sexual violence, and combat trauma under a shared clinical framework for the first time.
The theoretical ancestor much of the trauma-informed field, including Maté’s own work, builds on — essential for understanding where the framework he uses originally came from.
Johann Hari
Hari’s Chasing the Scream argues, based on years of international reporting, that the opposite of addiction isn’t sobriety but connection — that isolation, not the chemical properties of drugs alone, drives most severe addiction.
Shares Maté’s core argument about addiction and disconnection almost exactly, arrived at through journalism and reporting rather than clinical practice.
Anna Lembke
Lembke, a Stanford psychiatrist, examines addiction through the lens of modern dopamine-driven consumer culture in Dopamine Nation, arguing that constant access to pleasure has recalibrated the brain’s baseline for everyone, not just those clinically addicted.
A more contemporary, mechanism-focused companion to Maté’s trauma-centered addiction work, useful for readers who want the neurochemistry alongside the psychological story.
Bruce Perry
Perry’s The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog draws on his clinical work with severely traumatized children to explain how early adversity physically shapes brain development, using individual case studies to make the science accessible.
Extends Maté’s interest in childhood attachment and development into detailed clinical case studies specifically focused on children, rather than the adult outcomes Maté usually centers.
Nadine Burke Harris
A pediatrician, Burke Harris’s The Deepest Well examines Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) research, showing a direct, measurable link between childhood adversity and adult chronic disease — the same connection Maté makes, backed by large-scale epidemiological data.
The most data-driven companion on this list — where Maté argues from clinical experience and case studies, Burke Harris brings the population-level research that supports the same underlying claim.
Resmaa Menakem
Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands examines how racialized trauma is carried and passed down in the body across generations, applying a somatic trauma framework specifically to the experience of race in America.
Extends Maté and van der Kolk’s body-based trauma framework into territory neither addresses directly — the specific, generational, racialized dimension of how trauma is inherited and stored.
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