Maine Humanities Council

Literature & Medicine‘s highly successful conference last November brought together some of the finest speakers in the literature and medicine world in talks and discussions about health care professionals and situations of trauma they treat and experience. Podcasts of their talks are now online.

“Two Heads and the Things They Carried” with Tim O’Brien

Tim O’Brien, author of Going After Cacciato, The Things They Carried, and In the Lake of the Woods, speaks as a veteran about the moral responsibility that veterans hold for their actions. Providers often tell veterans and others who have experienced traumatic acts that the haunting actions they committed were not their fault since they were merely doing what they were told to do. Instead, O’Brien recommends, providers should remember that these men and women have done and seen things for which they need to hold responsibility. Moral injury, he says, is more than simply moral responsibility; it is a wound that veterans will carry with them for life. And to O’Brien, from his own experience, this is a crucial means of keeping one’s humanity.

“Learning About Combat Trauma From Homer’s Iliad” with Dr. Jonathan Shay

Jonathan Shay, MD, PhD, clinical psychiatrist and author of Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character and Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, worked in the VA system treating combat veterans with severe PTSD.  Shay has written extensively on an interesting connection between literature and medicine: much of what he needed to know about the experience of combat he learned from The Iliad—both what the experience of combat is like and the effects on soldiers. Texts like The Iliad helped him develop an attitude that he found instrumental in treating soldiers. In this talk, Shay discusses specific problems that veterans experience and how such problems are present in stark detail in The Iliad and The Odyssey.

“The Bad News and the Good News” with Kate Braestrup

In this uplifting talk, Kate Braestrup, author of Here If You Need Me, speaks about death, death notification, and what she has witnessed about love, human connections, grief and human creativity through working intimately with sudden, unexpected death in her work as chaplain for the Maine Warden Service. In this talk, she explores the trauma of finding people in the wilderness, an acknowledgment of the difficult work she does as well as what caregivers do, and how she approaches both. To Braestrup, there is privilege in experiencing these painful yet very real moments with the family members of those lost in the wilderness, and also hope.

Dr. Jonathan Shay will be a keynote speaker at the MHC’s After Shock: Humanities Perspective on Trauma conference November 12 and 13 in Washington, DC. In light of that, we’d like to share a story about how Shay’s work affects Literature & Medicine programs, taken from remarks for a presentation about Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care® by Tim Richardson, MD, Chief of Staff, Togus, Maine Veterans Administration Medical Center, at Be the Change You Want to See: Seeing, Serving and Leading in New Ways Veterans Health Administration Senior Leadership Conference 2010 on August 24 through 26, 2010, Las Vegas, Nevada

by Tim Richardson

I have been a participant in the Literature & Medicine Program at Togus for the past nine years. I have personally found the program to be very rewarding, and I believe that it has had a positive effect on me as a health care worker caring for Veterans and as an administrator at Togus. I have also seen and heard the impact of the program on my colleagues and co-workers.

Most importantly for me, I believe that I have developed more empathy and understanding of Veterans with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other mental health disabilities, and of Veterans of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. I believe it has also improved my professional skills with Veterans for whom I normally care as a geriatrician, those facing difficult ethical dilemmas at the end-of-life, and Veterans facing progressive dementia and increasing physical disabilities.

True empathy is necessary for our Veteran patients, and it requires us as healthcare workers and administrators to see and feel ourselves in their suffering. Frank Ostaseki, Founding Director of the acclaimed Zen Hospice Project, speaks to this eloquently in his description of his precepts for caring for end-of-life patients, percepts that are applicable to all of health care. He asks us to “bring your whole self to the experience”, saying, “in the service of healing we draw on our strength and helplessness, our wounds and passion, to discover a meeting place with the other. … It is not our expertise, but the exploration of our own suffering that enables us to be of real assistance. That is what allows us to touch another human being’s pain with compassion instead of with fear and pity.”

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By Victoria Bonebakker

Literature & Medicine presents in Las Vegas (or is it Venice?), credit: Victoria Bonebakker

The Maine Humanities Council and Dr. Tim Richardson, Chief of Staff at the Togus (Maine) VA Medical Center, were invited to present two sessions on the Council’s program, Literature & Medicine: Humanities at the Heart of Health Care®, at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Leadership Conference in Las Vegas the end of August. It was a great honor to be invited to this conference, attended by approximately 2,500 senior staff from the VHA’ s 14,000 facilities across the country.

As the Council’s representative, I was impressed and somewhat awed by the enormity of the challenges faced by the VHA as an organization, and by the task and the high standards it has set for itself.  The theme of the conference, “Be the Change You Want to See,” suggests the level of its aspiration to provide a continuously improving level of care; it is gratifying that Literature & Medicine is considered a valuable partner in this effort.

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Tim Richardson, Chief of Staff at Togus Veterans Medical Center; Tammy Duckworth, Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary for Public and Intergovernmental Affairs; and MHC staff Victoria Bonebakker and Lizz Sinclair

MHC’s recent Literature & Medicine Training Institute in Chicago brought together 60 people from across the country to learn the ins and outs of organizing a successful Literature & Medicine program. These intensive trainings for facilitators, hospital organizers, and staff from partnering humanities councils who want to be involved in Literature & Medicine have been invaluable as a means of disseminating the program and ensuring that MHC’s goals and high standards for the program are met.

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