Listening to Aftershock: Humanities Perspectives on Trauma
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.
