[lit-ideas] Re: Mop Rumpchuck


On Feb 27, 2008, at 11:54 PM, John McCreery wrote:


And now, those different wars different symptoms differences?



Let's start here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
The photo on the right hand side identifies the soldier with the "thousand yard stare" as someone suffering from shell-shock. Why? Because this is how victims of war stress were identified in Vietnam. In First World War records I have found no references to weird stares as indicators of shell-shock.
(While we're on the page I'll mention that the "large number" of shell-shock victims who were executed has to be a guesstimate, but I'd put it at less than a hundred. Is this a large number?)
I haven't looked at patient records from W.W.2. or later--they're still covered by secrecy laws, I believe--so I've only got film and second-hand reports to go on, but I haven't found references to peculiar gaits, spastic movements, any of the larger symptoms of shell-shock. Tics, yes. Exaggerated responses to small stimuli, yes. Confusion of all sorts, yes.
Other differences, from war to war, are to be found in who gets it and when. In W.W.2., the highest psychic casualty rates were in bomber crews. Psychiatrists reasoned that this was because bomber crews were, like soldiers in trenches in W.W.1., exposed to intense stress without any possibility of responding. You just got shot at and had to endure. They tied this piece of information with a sense that troops on the ground--and presumably in the navy (I don't know anything about psychic casualties in submarines, but I bet there were a good many) broke down when they had to endure too long or when their training or morale was weak, and came up with troop rotation as an answer. Expose the troops to only a limited amount of stress and you reduce the psychic casualty level...was the theory. Which held until the Six Day War, when the Israelis suffered the highest level of psychic casualties on Day One and in their best trained units. Perhaps this was because Day One was unusually intense, but consider that the definitions they were working with were largely Freudian--a minority view of First World War doctors--and you may agree that what they were looking for were the small outward signs of repression rather than say, the signs that a physical lesion had developed in someone's nervous system.
Alcohol and drug abuse are now considered symptoms of PTSD. Not so, shell-shock.
The talk I'm giving is titled, "What did shell-shock look like"? I'm not going to tackle the question that took me 474 pages to explain-- what shell-shock actually was. 

David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html

Other related posts: