Shell Shock

[Chris Boonzaier]

Interesting article...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/shellshock_01.shtml

[peter monahan]

Very! Just wading through the badly edited - by his son - account of a sniper from Northern Ontario who served 4 years in France. He set up a sniper/scout/observer section in his own battalion, which idea was stolen and used by the whole division and corps, though he got no credit. He sounds like a cross between John Wayne and Alvin York for his sniping exploits and even calims authorship of some of the verses from 'Mademoisell from Armeniteres'. His account also claims credit for his section inventing the plotting table and sound ranging gear.

All that aside, he speaks with great honesty of his own breakdown, after 18 months of non-stop nightly raids and patrols. He says he would wake up in 'convulsions' of shivering which lasted 30-40 minutes, that while on patrol he's have to 'sit down' [read 'take cover'] periodically and so on. He caps it by saying that his old CO, who he loved, returned to the unit and asked this guy to take on a dangerous scout, which the author refused. The CO later did the same in another unit and when no one would go went himself and was shot dead, after telling the others that 'No one in my old unit ever said no.' Clearly this haunted the author, though despite his obvious bragging he had done enough that he had no need to feel he was slacking.

And what percentage of the poor buggers who got shot for desertion were PTSD cases? I found the figure in the article of 1 in 7 casualties being shell shock to be surprising but quite believable.

Thanks for sharing, Chris.

[alexanderhistorical]

Thanks - that was a great story.

For those who haven't seen it already, some footage of shell-shock victims. Quite disturbing.

[rhines]

Shell shock during the Great War has proved a historically interesting topic. Prior to the War the concept of mental fatigue, or even break down due to combat did not exist. The Great War saw the inception of neurological treatment for traumatic stress disorders. It is interesting to note the difference (at least in military jargon of the time) between "neurasthenia" and "shell shock".

If you are looking for another source for first hand information on shell shock, or combat fatigue in general, a particularly interesting author is Will R. Bird. Bird was a Canadian soldier, and his accounts in "Ghosts Have Warm Hands" demonstrate the effects of prolonged combat. Bird speaks openly of hallucinations, but also of the more physical manifestations which presented themselves after combat. In the mentioned work Bird provides an especially interesting, and poignant, account of his first time sniping which left him a little distraught mentally.

Some soldiers dealt with the strain better than others, some even revelled in combat.

books which deal with combat fatigue, their inception, effects, or lack of effects:

Ghosts Have Warm Hands - Will R. Bird (Excellent work in general, but the author demonstrates a number of stress related symptoms and is quite candid in describing them)

There's a Devil in the Drum - J. F. Lucy (This work, in my opinion, demonstrates the effects of PROLONGED exposure to combat, and the tone of the author demonstrates the effects of stress over time)

Under Fire - Henri Barbusse (Fictio, but written by a veteran)

Generals Die in Bed - Charles Yale Harrison (Nominally fiction, but written by a veteran)

Copse 125 - Ernst Junger (A quasi philosophical work, but a good example of a soldier coping with combat stress)

-R. H. Hines

[Chris Boonzaier]

Would I be correct in thinking the Germans had the most "modern" or advanced approach to Shell Shock?

[rhines]

Well, that's an interesting query. The English, in my opinion, tended to ignore combat fatigue until later in the war. The French army, as we know, suffered heavily from combat fatigue as the war progressed leading ultimately to the mutinies seen later in the war. The Germans could not have suffered any less than the French or the English.

I suppose that the point I am attempting to make is that all sides during the Great War had no concept of combat fatigue until its inception, and so all sides had to innovate treatments as the issue became apparent. As doctors are want to do, the medical services of the respective armies attempted to treat the symptoms. This ranged from rest and relaxation to shock therapy in some cases.

To say that the Germans had the most "modern" approach is a bit of a stretch, and I think that the nature of shell shock is such that different patients respond differently to different treatments. The last remaining British soldier suffering from incurable shock due to combat fatigue only died quite recently (late 2000's), and even in the face of every modern medical advancement remained incurable until his death.

I don't feel that any of the warring parties had an effective treatment for the condition.

The Great War was such an indescribably horrific event that the medical knowledge of the time was simply incapable of dealing with the problem at hand.

There is an incredible account to be found in the BBC's Great War documentary in which a German soldier who was stuck in a dugout for the entirety of the pre-Somme bombardment claimed that even the rats stuck in his dugout went insane.

[peter monahan]

I believe that. I suspect that if you put a rat in a steel drum and pounded on it with a pipe for 2-3 days the rat would not emerge 'normal', for whatever normal means to a rat. I've owned two adopted small dogs, each with mild 'neuroses' from their earlier lives. Nothing serious and neither was systematically abused, but I've seen animals who were and they're never fully 'normal' again.

And the longer I live the more I believe that we are products of our cumulative life experience and that our intellect is often a poor tool for overcoming the emotional and psychological 'scars', large and small, of life. I didn't know there were shell shock cases still in treatment that late but, on reflection, it doesn't really surprise me.

What a morbid topic for what is, here, a lovely sunny day!

[Tony]

There was an officer’s hospital in Scotland where Dr William Halse Rivers pioneered a new kind of treatment in the second half of 1916, this new treatment involved the men talking about their illness.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Rivers/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1484566/

http://www.firstworldwar.com/features/rivers1.htm

From http://pb.rcpsych.org/content/24/6/225.full

Important practitioners working along psychotherapeutic lines included Rivers, William McDougall, Charles Myers and William Brown, all of whom later became well-known in the field of academic psychology. Their principles of treatment are very similar to current ideas about how post-traumatic problems should be tackled.

1. Prompt treatment (preferably close to the front line).

2. The necessity to re-experience and/or go over the events (i.e. to acknowledge them, bring them into awareness).

3. An emphasis on the meaning to the individual - based on an individual psychological analysis.

4. The use of cognitive restructuring (see particularly Rivers's ( 1918a) own examples in The Repression of War Experience).

5. A collaborative approach between therapist and patient (the importance of a therapeutic alliance).

6. The importance of previous experience in determining whether and in what way a person might break down.

[peter monahan]

A number of years ago I read and have been haunted by the novel Regeneration, written in 1991 by Pat Barker and a Booker Prize winner. It deals with the effects of and treatments for shell shock and is based on the writings of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, a military doctor who specialized in nerve damage and shell shock. The follow-up novel, The Eye in the Door, deals with the persecution of gays and conscientious objectors in GB during the war. It is set in a prison - hence the 'eye' and in the Scottish military hospital where sigfried Sassoon was snet, as clearly anyone who wrote the kind of poetry he did about the war was not sane!

Both are superbly written and very informative as to the social and military mind set around anyone not 100% 'behind the war effort'. In one of the two is a truly horrific scene with a British patient who is literally starving himself to death because of an incident in which he threw himself into a shell hole and landed face down in a German corpse, some of which went into his mouth. He has been unable to ingest food since and is being forcibly fed to preserve his life. An image which will stick in my head forever!

Well worth the read, both od them, and I understand there is a third volume.

[Tony]

I was checking some silver war badge numbers and came across a soldier whose cause of discharge was mental deficiency and wondered if it may have been shell shock.

Tony

Ooops, forgot to add the scan.

Edited February 20, 2014 by Tony

[peter monahan]

Tony

I suspect you're right. Not a very sympathetic description, but certainly not out of line with much of the official thinking on the subject, at least in the non-medical branches of the Militaruy. At least it wasn't 'LMF' or 'Lack of Moral Fibre' which some MOs used in WWII apparently with, for example, bomber crew who'd done 40-50 missions and asked to be taken off flying duties!

Peter