From Aeon:
Every month or so, I see a patient called Fraser in my primary care clinic, a soldier who was deployed in Afghanistan. Fifteen years after coming home, he is still haunted by flashbacks of burning buildings and sniper fire. He doesn’t work, rarely goes out, sleeps poorly, and to relieve his emotional anguish he sometimes slices at his own forearms. Since leaving the army, he has never had a girlfriend. Fraser was once thickly muscled, but weight has fallen off him: self-neglect has robbed him of strength and self-confidence. Prescription drugs fail to fully quieten the terror that trembles in his mind. Whenever I used to see him in clinic, he’d sit on the edge of his seat, shakily mopping sweat from his forehead and temples. I’d listen to his stories, tweak his medications, and tentatively offer advice.
When Fraser began coming to see me, I was reading Redeployment (2014) by Phil Klay – short stories about US military operations, not in Afghanistan, but in Iraq. No book can substitute for direct experience, but Klay’s stories gave me a way to start talking about what Fraser was going through; when I finished the book, I offered it to him. He found reassurance in what I’d found illuminating; our conversations took new directions as we discussed aspects of the book. His road will be a long one, but I’m convinced those stories have played a part, however modest, in his recovery.
It’s said that literature helps us to explore ways of being human, grants glimpses of lives beyond our own, aids empathy with others, alleviates distress, and widens our circle of awareness. The same could be said of clinical practice in all of its manifestations: nursing to surgery, psychotherapy to physiotherapy. An awareness of literature can aid the practice of medicine, just as clinical experience certainly helps me in the writing of my books. I’ve come to see the two disciplines as having more parallels than differences, and I’d like to argue they share a kind of synergy.
Patients spend more time with a writer than they can ever spend with their physician, and the hours it takes someone to read and reflect on a book can be time well-spent. Redeployment might have eased some of Fraser’s bewilderment and isolation, but by breaking down a boundary of experience it also helped me to understand a little more of what he had been through. There are numberless other books that do the same. William Styron’s Darkness Visible (1990) offers an eloquent testimony of how it feels to suffer severe depression, and I’ve seen it give sufferers a promise and an encouragement that they, like Styron, might find a way back to the light. The list of books I’ve discussed with patients over the years is as plural as the humanity that pours through the clinic: Ray Robinson’s Electricity (2006) when talking about life with severe epilepsy; Annie Dillard’s The Abundance(2016) while exploring the place of wonder in sustaining our lives; Andrew Solomon’s Far from the Tree (2014) on the challenges of caring for a disabled child; Ben Okri’s poem ‘To an English Friend in Africa’ (1992) in a discussion of the trials and rewards of NGO work.
Link to the rest at Aeon
Different kind of book, but… Dr. Jonathan Shay’s Homeric cycle: ‘Achilles in Vietnam’ and ‘Odysseus in America’. Although they can hit below flotation, be warned.
Take care.
Romance and mystery novels, s.f. and fantasy, as well as the more traditional literary novels, sometimes feature plots involving loss, pain, disability and redemption.
Recently, I re-edited and reissued Twin Surprise, my romance about a woman badly scarred in an auto accident. The hero turns out to have his own painful issue: he’s a police officer diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, which he’s hiding from everyone except his superiors (since he couldn’t continue to work on patrol).
In The Family Next Door, which I’ll be reissuing soon, the heroine’s husband was killed in crossfire from a gang shooting. Just when she and her daughter are recovering, the holdout juror who let the killer go free moves into the house next to theirs, with his own troubled daughter.
I hope trauma victims will be encouraged to read books with positive themes, regardless of the genre. I’ve been told of readers who were able to re-engage with the world after reading one of my novels. Having undergone my own losses and tragedies, I’m grateful for the chance to help others.
One of the threads of my debut novel is a deep undertanding of the experience of disability by a main character – disabled characters are often bridesmaids, rarely brides. It is very much for the purpose of allowing another set of people to see themselves in literature, as well as for non-disabled people to understand what it’s really like – without making it the main point of a story, or being ‘inspiration p0rn’ in any way. Just part of life, folks.