[3] He continued to advocate for Vietnam veterans and other victims of war, trauma and natural and manmade disasters.
He founded the Vietnam Veterans Working Group[5] with several colleagues, including Robert 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 on workers' compensation cases, and William G. Niederland, who had initiated the study of reactions in concentration camp survivors with Henry Krystal.
Shatan's work foregrounded the concept that would later be termed vicarious trauma; in a 1973 article he wrote: “[Mental health professionals] should be forewarned .
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.