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Chaim F. Shatan (September 1, 1924 – August 17, 2001) was aJewish-Canadianpsychiatrist born inWłocławek,Poland.[1]
Shatan's parents moved to Canada when he was two. He received his MDCM degree fromMcGill University inMontreal, Quebec, Canada. In 1949, he moved toNew York City and founded a private practice in psychiatry in the early 1950s. He came from a Yiddish-speaking family; his mother's first language was Yiddish. Shatan wasethnically Jewish and not religiously observant.[2]
Shatan had a longtime interest in war and trauma and became deeply involved withVietnam veterans in the late 1960s, responding to an invitation by one of the founders ofVietnam Veterans Against the War, Jan Crumb (later known as Jan Barry), to form "rap groups" for veterans to speak about their emerging reactions. His article "Post-Vietnam Syndrome" was printed on the Op-Ed page ofThe New York Times on May 6, 1972.[3] He continued to advocate for Vietnam veterans and other victims of war, trauma and natural and manmade disasters. In 1974, Shatan found out that "gross stress reaction", previously used to diagnose post-traumatic syndromes, had been eliminated[4] from theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is used to delineatepsychological disorders. He founded the Vietnam Veterans Working Group[5] with several colleagues, includingRobert Jay Lifton, Sarah Haley, Jack Smith and Arthur Egendorf. They relentlessly pursued the issue, and reached out to Mardi J. Horowitz, the pioneer of experimental research in traumatic stress response, Harley Shands, Chief of Psychiatry at Roosevelt Hospital, who was working onworkers' compensation cases, andWilliam G. Niederland, who had initiated the study of reactions in concentration camp survivors with Henry Krystal. The group was successful in returning the diagnosis to the next edition of the book, DSM-III, under the new name "post-traumatic stress disorder", a term which evolved from discussions between Shatan and the Working Group withNancy Andreasen.
Shatan's work foregrounded the concept that would later be termedvicarious trauma; in a 1973 article he wrote: “[Mental health professionals] should be forewarned . . . We, too, may have nightmares; we, too, may be unable to sleep, unable to talk normally to other people for days or weeks. Once we professionals admit the knowledge of the veterans into our awareness, we are changed in fundamental ways.”[6] This concept was further explored and refined by clinical psychologists Karen Saakvitne and Laurie Anne Pearlman, who wrote about the transfer of trauma to those treating survivors of incest from their patients.[7]
Shatan was also a founding member of the Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, now called theInternational Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.