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- Permanent Link:
- http://dpanther.fiu.edu/sobek/FI20070900/00001
Notes
- Biographical:
- Shad Meshad, a psychiatric social worker who served as a U.S. Army Medical Service Officer in Vietnam in 1970, is President of the National Veterans Foundation (NVF), which he founded in 1985. Meshad grew up in Birmingham, Alabama and enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps while he was an undergraduate at Spring Hill College in Mobile. There, as well as during graduate work at Florida State University in Tallahassee, and a brief stint working for the state of Georgia, Meshad explored a career in criminology, visiting jails and prisons and interviewing people who were incarcerated, including military veterans. After being sent for training at Fort Sam Houston in 1969, he was stationed at Fort Leavenworth Prison, where he offered counseling to men who had served in Vietnam and who identified as radical civil rights advocates. In Vietnam, Meshad provided care to individual service members and visited posts and hospitals to offer administrators guidance on mental health-related issues and questions. Upon returning to the United States, he worked for the Veterans Administration (VA) in Los Angeles, where he offered transient veterans counseling via so-called rap groups. His outreach methods and efforts helped shape the Vet Center program, an outpatient mental health initiative established by the VA in 1979. After serving as a leader in the Vet Center program, Meshad established the NVF, which advocates for veterans in a variety of ways, including by offering assistance with VA claims, as well as by providing financial and social support. This interview focuses on Meshad’s personal and professional path to the Army and VA, and his experiences working in both venues. For more on Meshad and the NVF, see https://nvf.org/author/shad/. For more information about the War and Health oral history project, contact jadler@fiu.edu.
- Citation/Reference:
- Shad Mehad, Oral History Interview with Jessica L. Adler, May 14, 2018, War and Health Collection, Florida International University Libraries, Florida International University, Miami, FL.
- Creation/Production Credits:
- Video excerpts composed and created by Rebecca Bakker and the FIU Digital Collections Center. Interview transcribed by Christopher Davis, Shadee Ramos, Martin Kass, and Rebecca Bakker.
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