Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: trauma

  • Heartache and complicated grief

    Laurie Elise GordonNew York, New York, United States “To whom shall I tell this heartache?” – Old Russian song Medicine is haunted by grief. In tense silences we may sense the specter. Grieving is a normal developmental process, but in some it gets interrupted. A grieving patient calls upon the physician’s most highly attuned empathy.…

  • Trauma stewardship

    Laura LipskyConnie BurkSeattle, Washington, United States This article was excerpted and adapted from Trauma Stewardship: An Everyday Guide to Caring for Self While Caring for Others © 2009 Laura van Dernoot Lipsky. For more information about the book and this work, please visit the Trauma Stewardship website. “Are you sure all this trauma work hasn’t…

  • Personal magic – creativity and Shamanic ways for wellbeing

    Kate HawkesPortland, Oregon, United States The key to healing and wellness is, most agree, a combination of mind-body dynamics and, perhaps spirit. How the three interact and what happens when they do is the subject of studies and surmise, hard fact and anecdote. I have no doubt that when an individual is actively engaged in…

  • The truth in facts is a derelict ruin: Forging a self through fiction

    Sara BakerAthens, Georgia, United States In his June 2, 2014 New Yorker article Inheritance,1 Ian Parker explores the connection between British novelist Edward St. Aubyn’s early traumatic life and his fiction. When we think of healing through writing, we usually think first of memoir and then perhaps of lyric poetry. Yet fiction offers advantages that…

  • Suffering and empathy in the stories of Anton Chekhov and their relevance to healthcare today

    Peter McCannLondon Throughout his life, Anton Chekhov was often faced with the reality of suffering in human existence. His family’s bankruptcy and life of poverty in Moscow influenced young Anton’s thoughts about suffering and degradation in society, and his brief period of medical practice in Moscow provided him with enough experience to write over 150…

  • Capturing recovery from trauma on canvas

    Eliette MarkhbeinNew York, United States Her biography I came to painting as a result of trauma. A journalist covering arts and culture for European and American magazines for 25 years, I suffered a traumatic brain and spine injury in 2004, the consequence of being struck by a speeding car. I picked up brushes a year…

  • Peleliu as a paradigm for PTSD: The two thousand yard stare

    Gregory RuteckiCleveland, Ohio, United States “I noticed a tattered marine…staring stiffly at nothing. His mind had crumbled in battle…his eyes were like two black empty holes in his head…Last evening he came down out of the hills. Told to get some sleep, he found a shell crater and slumped into it…First light has given his…

  • Normal – Hang in There – The Monster and other work

    Monika Filipiak Peszek About two years after my daughter was born, I was depressed. I didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything. I could feel myself growing heavier and heavier, and angrier and angrier. I was mad at my husband all the time. I blamed him for the way I was feeling. I was…