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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Psychologist here. There is a huge psychological difference between fire weapons and swords etc. Trauma means you perceive a situation as life threatening (for you or others). At the same time you can’t do anything about it. Our primal instincts make us show a fight, flight or freeze reaction.
In a sword fight you usually fight back. You have a way to influence the outcome of the situation. You can’t fight back on a bomb or a gun. You are helpless. So you can’t run away or fight, running away might be even more dangerous because you might be seen and shot. So you freeze. People staid in that position for several days. Traumatic experiences have an impact on your primal parts of the brain because it’s important for evolution to be able to react on life threatening situations (brain function is a lot more complicated of course). So the traumatic event goes on and on and on and people stopped working normally and shut down to work on that freeze instinct. In a sword fight you keep moving. Movement (sports etc. after a traumatic event seems to be a huge protective factor against ptsd by the way).
Shellshock is not ptsd, its an acute reaction to trauma. Peoples brains needed time to and different stimulation to be able to to function normally again. A situation that couldn’t be influenced and felt like it could not be ended suddenly ended.
PTSD is more likely to occur if a traumatic event lasts longer, you perceive yourself as defeatless, the time an event lasts and the more ‘ dangerous’ it is ( e.g. being raped when the raping person has a gun is more likely to lead to ptsd than without a gun, depending on the perception of the raped person as threatening). So PTSD was a lot more often in WW one and two than in wars before.
Sorry for my English, I’m not native
Slightly off topic but I think anyone who gets the time should read ‘Johnny got his gun’. It’s probably the most effective anti-war material to exist. The book is completely gut wrenching
The Great War is an incredible documentary. There’s also a pc game that is very well done.
it was caused by shells making your comrade next to you explode, dying by sword you can imagine is kinda honorable, but exploding like youre nothing when you least expect, thats fucked up
There’s this ancient greek adage: “War seems sweet to those who haven’t tasted it but once known it takes man’s heart and wastes it”. People always knew that war causes trauma (even if they didn’t call it that) but what sparked interest to study that trauma was that shellshock was completely devastating and debilitating. Men were becoming catatonic and some couldn’t control their body movements. Trauma could no longer be excused as cowardice or “being sad” since it was clearly somatic and overcoming the person.
There are references to soldier trauma(shell shock/ptsd) in ancient greek texts, medieval references, etc.
WW1 was just the first major war in modern times where it became obvious to non-soldiers and people at learge, so people wanted to know.
Basically for most of human history war was something that took time. It took way more time to gather men, train them, and then march them to a battle that unless it was a siege would last a few days at most. After the battle was over men had time to decompress from what they saw with the men they served with. Meanwhile with the industrialization of war it became something constant. You constantly had to worry about what was going to kill you and oftentimes had to deal with enemies you never even saw
I think that there’s another aspect that people are forgetting. The bodies, everywhere. Your friend who got blown up two years ago is still sitting out there on the fucking barbed wire, rotting away. Bob who got killed last week, well they tried to bury him in the trench, but the shelling knocked him loose and now his rotting hand is reaching out from the trench.
That shit would take a toll on anyone.
We started talking about shellshock in WW1 because that was the first war where nearly every soldier was close enough to experience nearly constant danger and exposure to artillery shells, which of course are loud and dangerous and highly traumatizing.
We’ve always known that war is hell and changes people. Ancient Assyrians recorded how warriors had a hard time reintegrating after service. Achilles falls into a stupor during the long passive years during the siege of Troy. Shakespeare describes a returned soldier having night terrors in Henry I.
In the civil war it was known as soldier’s heart because the soldiers developed anxiety, during railroad accidents they would say you got “railway Spine” to explain the anxiety and sleeplessness. They were more or less all looking to put a physical cause down to explain what we now call PTSD, but it wasn’t until the Vietnam War when we started looking at it as a mental health condition caused by exposure to stress that rewires a person’s behavior, rather than a physical injury that causes bad signals to be sent between body parts.
The scale of that war was also unprecedented. The prolonged artillery fire, the intensity of it and the scale made it something that soldiers had not experienced prior as well. On top of what everyone mentioned already.
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