Dr. Jonathan Shay talks about not seeking help for PTSD

Dr. Shay is a hero to me. He knows more about PTSD than anyone I can think of and believe me, I've read just about everything on PTSD since 1982. I contacted Dr. Shay after reading Achilles in Vietnam. I wasn't past the third chapter when I emailed him. I had to. He managed to make me cry because it was the first book I read that addressed what I was going through living with my own Vietnam vet husband. The other books were clinical, distant, while they did help me to understand PTSD, they authors were detached from all of it. Dr. Shay took a different approach and made it personal.

I wrote my own book on PTSD to show what people go through telling the story of my husband's PTSD getting worse and what it did to my family. I also wrote about healing. Dr. Shay read it and supported me while I was trying to get it published. He was amazing. I couldn't believe someone this important would take that kind of time with someone like me, but he did it with grace.

Long story short, 9-11 attacks came and I knew I had to rush to book out because of what was coming. Dr. Shay agreed with what my fear was, that it was about to get a whole lot worse for the Vietnam veterans and the rest of the military. I self published, which was the biggest mistake I could have made because no publisher saw the need of a book like mine. It's been online for about 4 years now for free. For the Love of Jack, His War/My Battle is about us, but more it's about what we knew and when we knew it, long before anyone else was talking about it.

The last time I talked to Dr. Shay we were involved in a dispute with someone questioning him on tanks in Vietnam. The "person" basically called him a liar. I sent Dr. Shay a link to the site with tanks in Vietnam and a few pictures. I couldn't believe anyone was questioning his honesty or knowledge.

There is no way I would ever come close to the way Dr. Shay writes or what he knows. I strongly suggest you pick up a copy of this book and listen very carefully to what he has to say.

Fewer than half of returning Vets suffering PTSD seek help, VA Doc says.
Written by Sherwood Ross

Veterans returning from the fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq are displaying many of the same post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms of troops that fought in Viet Nam, yet most do not seek treatment.

“I’m not an alarmist but I think this is a serious problem,” Dr. Matthew Friedman, executive director of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD), wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Referring to a 2004 study of 6,201 returned service members who had been on active duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, Friedman said most “apparently were afraid to seek assistance for fear that a scarlet P would doom their careers.”

Although one in eight veterans reported PTSD, the survey showed that “less than half of those with problems sought help, mostly out of fear of being stigmatized or hurting their careers,” the Associated Press reported.

“Once called shell shock or combat fatigue, PTSD can develop after witnessing or experiencing a traumatic event. Symptoms include flashbacks, nightmares, feelings of detachment, irritability, trouble concentrating and sleeplessness,” AP said.

Symptoms of major depression, anxiety or PTSD were reported by about 16 to 17 percent of though who served in Iraq.

Findings by the National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Survey showed 35.8 percent of male Vietnam combat veterans in the late 1980s suffered from PTSD at the time, almost 20 years after their war experience, said Dr. Jonathan Shay, a psychiatrist at the Department of Veterans Affairs Outpatient Clinic, Boston.

In an article in The Long Term View, the magazine of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover, Shay wrote that Vietnam combat veterans have been hospitalized for physical problems about six times more often than troops that did not fight in Vietnam and are three times more likely to have been “both homeless and vagrant” than their civilian counterparts.

Shay is a recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius” award for his work in this area.

“The supposedly traditional idea of honoring returning veterans ran afoul of deep divisions over the justice and wisdom of the war as a whole, making honor to the veterans seem an endorsement of the war policy,” Shay writes. Many veterans suffer from lingering doubts about the rightness of the war, causing some to feel deeply dishonored even as they accepted medals for bravery. Concern over the “rightness” of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan may be producing similar doubts among veterans today.
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Fewer than half of returning Vets suffering PTSD seek help