“I realized I was hearing the story of Achilles over and over again." Dr. Jonathan Shay on PTSD

Open Focus: Shelburne’s Jonathan Shay increased awareness of PTSD, ‘moral injury’

Greenfield Recorder
By RICHIE DAVIS
For the Recorder
Published: 1/12/2020

Shay, who moved to Franklin County from Newton nearly a decade ago, is a Harvard-trained doctor with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania whose medical work shifted from neuropathology to treating combat veterans at the Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Boston. There, he says, “the veterans simply kidnapped me” with their compelling accounts of battle.

Shelburne resident Jonathan Shay holds a copy of his 1994 book, “Achilles in Vietnam.” For the Recorder/Richie Davis

It wasn’t until he was in his 40s that Jonathan Shay began reading ancient Greek author Homer’s landmark classics, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey.”

Just a few years later, as a psychiatrist for the Veterans Administration in Boston, he heard the horrendous Vietnam War experiences of his clients as hauntingly similar to those of Homer’s characters Achilles and Odysseus.

“I realized I was hearing the story of Achilles over and over again,” the 78-year-old retired Shelburne psychiatrist recalls. “The Iliad is about the enduring themes of what really happens to soldiers in war.”

Even though Homer’s Greek tragedies were written 2,700 years ago, they reflect perfectly the moral and social world that today’s soldiers live through, Shay says

An audio version of Shay’s 1994 landmark book, “Achilles in Vietnam,” has been released, narrated by Academy Award nominee (“Good Night and Good Luck”) David Strathairn, while his 2002 sequel, “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming,” has already been recorded by Strathairn — both of them at Armadillo Audio Group Studio in Pelham.

Shay, who moved to Franklin County from Newton nearly a decade ago, is a Harvard-trained doctor with a doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania whose medical work shifted from neuropathology to treating combat veterans at the Veterans Affairs outpatient clinic in Boston. There, he says, “the veterans simply kidnapped me” with their compelling accounts of battle.

The 2010 recipient of the Salem Award for Human Rights and Social Justice, for building acceptance of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a serious, bona fide war injury, the former psychiatrist disputes the label of PTSD as an illness, disease or sickness. Instead, he argues, saying those veterans have suffered a severe injury as serious as any physical wound from the battlefield.
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