I mean war always has been a part of our life since the first civilizations was established. I’m sure “shellshock” wasn’t only caused by artilery shots.
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Because WW1 was freaking terrifying.
While battles had happened before, they had taken hours or at most days. While sieges had happened before, they had been smaller scale and less intensive. So while PTSD had previously been explained away, as cowardice and other things that people viewed as moral failures, it was impossible to ignore the magnitude of PTSD during WW1 (in terms of how widespread it was and how severe the symptoms were). In WW1 soldiers were exposed to the full horror of industrialized warfare, and not just for days but for weeks and months of intense artillery barrages* and awful living conditions.
It wasn’t though until after Vietnam that PTSD emerged as a unified diagnosis for the psychological symptoms of having experienced trauma.
*Unless you’ve experienced an artillery barrage there is no way that you can understand how terrifying it is. The sudden and thumping shockwaves that you can feel in your lungs and gut. The primal terror of knowing that someone is trying to kill you. The helplessness in that there is nothing you can do about it except curl up in a ball (trying to maximize the protection of your helmet and body armor) and just hope that there isn’t a direct hit on whatever hole or cover you’re hiding in/behind. Also knowing that as soon as there is a lull you need to get up and either retreat or attack, or it’s going to repeat.
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