Shell Shock To Ptsd

The application of psychiatry to war and terrorism is highly topical and a source of intense media interest. Shell Shock to PTSD explores the central issues involved in maintaining the mental health of the armed forces and treating those who succumb to the intense stress of combat. Drawing on historical records, recent findings and interviews with veterans and psychiatrists, Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely present a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of military psychiatry. The psychological disorders suffered by servicemen and women from 1900 to the present are discussed and related to contemporary medical priorities and health concerns. This book provides a thought-provoking evaluation of the history and practice of military psychiatry, and places its findings in the context of advancing medical knowledge and the developing technology of warfare. It will be of interest to practicing military psychiatrists and those studying psychiatry, military history, war studies or medical history.

The application of psychiatry to war and terrorism is highly topical and a source of intense media interest. Shell Shock to PTSD explores the central issues involved in maintaining the mental health of the armed forces and treating those who succumb to the intense stress of combat. Drawing on historical records, recent findings and interviews with veterans and psychiatrists, Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely present a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of military psychiatry. The psychological disorders suffered by servicemen and women from 1900 to the present are discussed and related to contemporary medical priorities and health concerns. This book provides a thought-provoking evaluation of the history and practice of military psychiatry, and places its findings in the context of advancing medical knowledge and the developing technology of warfare. It will be of interest to practicing military psychiatrists and those studying psychiatry, military history, war studies or medical history.

To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.

Recounts a psychiatrist's experiences in Iraq of treating soldiers who suffer from post traumatic stress disorder with a computer simulation of combat, discussing the advantages and limitations of the treatment.

This book provides a thought-provoking exploration into the diagnosis of shell-shock and medical culture in First World War Britain.

2012 Reprint of 1941 Edition. Exact facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Most PTSD authors agree that Abram Kardiner's "Traumatic Neuroses of War" is the seminal psychological work on PTSD. In this work Kardiner distilled much psychiatric thought on the traumatic syndrome resulting from World War II, with what he had termed "neurosis of war." The symptoms of this syndrome included features such as fixation on the trauma, constriction of personality functioning and atypical dream life. Kardiner provided powerful new insights in these classic texts on the phenomenology, nosology, and treatment of war-related stress, thereby anticipating virtually every aspect of contemporary research on PTSD. Although Kardiner had observed war neuroses since 1925, when he was attending specialist at the U.S. Veterans Hospital, he was only able to theorize them to his satisfaction after he had written "The Individual and His Society," which dealt with the problems of adaptation. He came to see that in the traumatic neurosis of the war the defensive maneuver to ward off the trauma sometimes destroyed the individual's adaptive capacity. Thus, the traumatic neurosis of war was the result of an adaptive failure, not a conflictual illness. So concluding, Kardiner re-introduced the concept of traumatic neurosis into psychoanalytic theory.

PTSD is in no way an easy diagnosis for the patient, the provider, or the therapist. It is a diagnosis developed at the border of our capacity to handle extreme stress, a marker diagnosis denoting the limits of our capacity for functioning in the stress of this modern world. For both individuals and society, PTSD marks the limits of our available compassion and our capacity to protect ourselves from the dangers of the environment and other humans. PTSD is often a chronic disease, forming at a place where mind sometimes no longer equals the brain, a point at which individual patient requirements often trump theory and belief. There are treatments for PTSD that work, and many that do not. This book presents evidence, rather than theory, anecdote, or case report. Psychological approaches including prolonged exposure, imagery rehearsal therapy and EMDR have a greater than 75% positive short-term response when used to treat PTSD. Yet these treatments vary markedly and have different, even contradictory underlying theory and objectives for treatment. Medications, rarely indicated as primary therapy, can be used to treat symptoms and address comorbid PTSD diagnoses. Treatment of sleep apnea in the PTSD population produces a positive effect on symptoms and a reduction in morbidity and mortality across the span of life. Complementary treatments offer the many individuals chronically affected by PTSD assistance in coping with symptoms and opportunities to attempt to functionally integrate their experience of trauma.