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.
In: Other
Shell shock refers to a unique form of PTSD. It’s not fair, strictly speaking, to think it’s a synonym for PTSD.
PTSD itself has been around and known about since prehistory. PTSD is only the latest in a line of labels we use to describe the effect on soldier’s minds of going to war. Battle fatigue, was I believe the term in WWII.
But the reason I posted this to begin with is, I think I can explain to you what shell shock actually is. See, for the first time in history we finally had really big guns, with really strong supply lines, with really well trained gunners, and a motivation to see what would happen if we turned them all up to 11.
Imagine you’re in a trench; muddy, wet, dirty, cold, scared, hungry, angry, and sad. And then the enemy guns open up. The noise is indescribably loud. To the point of pain. It’s like pressing your ear to a base drum while someone beats the other side. Like one of those big drums the high school band drummer plays.
And just like those drums, you can feel it in your belly. In your bones. But easily ten times worse. If it hits close enough the whole world tilts for a second. The earth shakes. What is firm and secure and safe, even, becomes mobile and fluid and dangerous.
But wait there’s more. Every once in a while, just often enough to mess up your head, an entire section of the trench, all the men and equipment in it, just get ‘unmade’. Plus plenty of screaming, gore, and horror.
Did you think we were done? We’re not. See…it doesn’t stop. Ever. It’s not like they fired for a few minutes, a few hours, a day or two. Sometimes those artillery shells fell for 40 days straight. Where every one booms in your ears, shakes your body, grabs you by the collar and screams in your face that it wants to horribly kill you.
There were some places along the Western front where 9 shells per square meter were fired. 9 artillery shells won’t fit into a square meter. It’s just days and days and days of the earth shaking, of the universe banging on your ear drums, of your body being hammered by constant percussion. Like “Chinese water torture” or your annoying little brother who copies a word or phrase and won’t stop saying it over and over again until you want to strangle him. But you can’t stop it. You don’t even know, other than vaguely, where it’s coming from. If it will hit you. It just goes on and on and on forever. When it stops you don’t know if it’s a lull or it’s stopping so the enemy can charge.
It doesn’t even have to hit anywhere near you to batter your sanity to it’s knees. To make you want to do something, anything, to get out of there, to make it stop, to end the torture. You can’t sleep. It’s almost impossible to eat, shower, use the latrine, have a conversation, think, or function. Because you can literally put your hand down on the ground in your trench (don’t because rats and water and bacteria; ew gross) and feel the earth shake and tremor with each impact.
This is true shell shock. It was such a problem that all other “battle fatigue” just got lumped into the same category, mostly by journalists, politicians, pop culture experts and other people who should never have the voice they do, but it makes sense.
There’s also some element of…you get concussions by battering your brain around in your skull, how much external shock waves can you take before that becomes an issue? But I don’t know as much about that element and or how much it was a factor. I know a few veterans or family members thereof blamed that for their problems. Whether it was or not I can’t say.
There are three key things to consider.
1. Pre-WWI, people simply did not die or get hurt as much. This is especially true for the victors.
2. Those who experience or witness a lot of suffering (mostly the losers) simply do not live to tell the tale. Civilians in raided/sacked settlements probably had more PTSD than soldiers because they usually don’t get killed unless there was also massacres involved (which isn’t entirely uncommon).
3. In WWI, individual soldiers feel much less like they have agency or control on their contribution to the fight due to the battlefield conditions and doctrine of the times. This, combined with the boom-boom-ness of modern armaments exacerbates fear and stress, contributing to increased likelihood of PTSD, or “shell shock”.
Now below is a more detailed explanation if you’re in for it:
In the wars of past age, you march for days/weeks/months, and duke it out with the enemy a few times, and the war is over one way or another. (An oversimplification, but this is ELI 5)
In those days, causing a rout was much more important than killing the enemy (killing comes after). Vast majority of field-battle deaths occur when either one side is completely surrounded and totally annihilated (very uncommon), or when one side routes and gets chased down by enemy cavalry (much more likely). In extreme cases of Ancient Greek phalanxes and derivatives there of, it was common for a clash between several hundreds from each side resulting in only a handful of deaths, if any, and the combination of bronze armor weighing troops down and general lack of cavalry meant that no more died even after the resolution of the battle.
This is also partly why the ‘300 Spartans’, even in real history, managed to delay the Persian army for as long as they did – people simply didn’t die as easily or dramatically as they’re often depicted in historical fictions.
As a result, those who keep heart and fight on, usually survive. And because they win with minimal casualties, there aren’t as much signs of PTSD, while those who would have gotten PTSD usually just end up dying. This dynamic really doesn’t change until muskets get involved – where people on the front lines die a lot, but still have to keep pushing without breaking because the dynamic of “first to break dies even more” stays true.
Overall, as ironic as it sounds, there was a reason to be brave, as keeping it together longer usually meant victory, which means better chance at survival. The old East Asian proverb of “Those who fight as if as though they shall die, shall live, while those who only act to survive, shall surely die” perfectly encapsules this phenomena.
This obviously is not how it works in modern warfare, which is dominated by ranged warfare. Ranged warfare is all about increasing your line of sight and fire while limiting your enemy’s. Bravery is largely considered stupid in front of sniper and machine gun fire. (This concept translates to pretty much every other concepts, such as stealth planes vs bigass bombers) Unfortunately, there wasn’t a better way to fight the stupid war until towards the very end, where technology created new variables that broke this dynamic. So people suffered.
Also, the level and type of trauma is different with WWI. It is the first major war where you could constantly, at any given moment, get killed by someone you can’t really see.
You can’t see enemy artillery or snipers. Even when you go over the top, you’d be lucky to even see the enemy trench before dying at machine gun fire. Not being able to see where you’re being attacked from, or who’s attacking you has serious impact on morale due to the fear of potentially dying at any time without having any agency to do something about it.
The history of trauma was consistently learned, and then subsequently forgotten, throughout our history. Often, this research was pursued on account of some kind of political or social movement, or a war, and when these social movements died out, so too did interest in understanding trauma and trauma related disorders.
In the late 1800s, Pierre Janet and Freud worked a great deal trying to understand the affliction of ‘hysteria’ during one of the early feminist movements in France . In one paper, Freud wrote about how he believed childhood sexual abuse was at the core of the ‘hysteria’ diagnosis. Unfortunately, this didn’t sit well with him, nor with the public at that time, as it implied incest was not only common, but was occurring in the homes of powerful individuals, and individuals Freud himself was friends with. As a result he abandoned this line of thinking, and instead started chasing his ridiculous ideas that early childhood sexual abuse wasn’t real, and that the women who talked about it instead secretly wanted it. The feminist movement eventually died out, and people mostly lost interest in the hysteria diagnosis and trauma in general.
After WW1, interest in trauma again spiked. The new brutality of modern warfare and trench warfare was being discovered and experienced en masse for the first time, and as a result, this war was much more devastating psychologically, relative to earlier points in human history. At this point, many soldiers who succumbed to shellshock were labeled as being somehow ‘less’ than their untraumatized comrades. Less strong; less manly; less stoic. Again, after the war ended, interest in trauma waned.
The cycle repeats itself for WW2, and eventually culminates in the research that occurs in the 70s and 80s after Vietnam, the anti-war movements, and the feminist movements of these time periods bring renewed interest into trauma of combat, trauma of sexual violence, and trauma of childhood abuse and childhood sexual abuse. Eventually, in the 80s, we create the formal PTSD diagnosis. Since these times, our understanding and research into trauma has thankfully not been forgotten, and we seem to be making great strides into becoming more informed on the effects of trauma, neurobiologically, and developmentally.
However, we knew and understood about trauma and even ‘shellshock’ and the effects of war on soldiers, long before the shellshock diagnosis. WW1 just made the effects of combat trauma far more widespread, common, and devastating.
You should definitely read The body keeps the score by Bessel Van Der Kolk if you are interested in learning more about this
Basically it was a matter of timing, the fact it was so many countries participating, and that there were so many survivors. Many of whom who were suffering from PTSD. Then, add on the new horrors that WW1 brought. Artillery, mustard gas, flame throwers, etc. It made war a bit more incomprehensible for people and that just made it worse.
So, the prevalence of the fighting, the number of people suffering from it, and the scale of the conflict all combined to make the public drastically aware of this being a thing. People’s knowledge of mental health and how Psychology was in its infancy at the time… There was no real idea of what it really was, and even how to treat it.
The idea of seeing something so horrific you were permanently damaged mentally from it could probably be imagined in a vague way by people who had gone through something like that. But most people would never really understand how that could happen. Or the sheer extent of how it would impact people.
So the natural assumption was that it was caused by some kind of concussive injury to the brain from artillery shells going off near people, but not close enough to actually kill them. The term PTSD wasn’t even ratified until 1980 in the third iteration of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders).
The Revolutionary / Napoleonic / Civil Wars definitely had cannon fire and trauma, but WW1 had hundreds of thousands of troops in close proximity taking on thousands and thousands of even larger shells in short proximity day in and day out. At points it sounded like a drumroll for hours. It was more extreme on every level, basically. So it resulted in more frequent and widespread trauma.
It was just called that then. We now call it PTSD. George Carlin did a really good routine on it.
PTSD has existed since the dawn of civilization. Berserkers for example, known for “fighting in a trance-like fury” might just be combat veterans whose trauma manifests as violent rage. There are also what appear to be post-combat rituals in the Old Testament that may have had the effect or intent of mitigating combat-induced trauma.
A lot of people are talking about the trauma of battle being as old as battle itself, which is true. But there is also absolutely measurable brain damage that occurs when you’re near lots of explosions, so as our use of explosives in battle ramped up, so did that brain damage.
When a bomb, mortar, or really big gun goes off near you, the shockwave travels through your brain and causes damage. WW1 had plenty of that.
It’s more than just the artillery shells. The loud sound is just the reminder of everything they had experienced.
The bombardments.
The mustard gas that would cause you to drown in your own blood if you inhale it. Even if you don’t, the gas would burn your skin and blind you on contact.
The trenches full of dead and wounded.
The huge rats gourging themselves on the aforementioned dead and wounded.
The trenches that are so full of water that you cannot dry your feet, causing them to rot.
You were surrounded by death, or being extremely close to death, before you even think of poking your head over the top of the trench.
When you do, it’s almost guaranteed death from machine gun fire, sniper fire, barbed wire and landmines.
It’s criminal that those that were fucked up by what they experienced were branded as cowards and shot.
Latest Answers