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.

A comprehensive history of PTSD. Post-traumatic stress disorder—and its predecessor diagnoses, including soldier’s heart, railroad spine, and shell shock—was recognized as a psychiatric disorder in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The psychic impacts of train crashes, wars, and sexual shocks among children first drew psychiatric attention. Later, enormous numbers of soldiers suffering from battlefield traumas returned from the world wars. It was not until the 1980s that PTSD became a formal diagnosis, in part to recognize the intense psychic suffering of Vietnam War veterans and women with trauma-related personality disorders. PTSD now occupies a dominant place in not only the mental health professions but also major social institutions and mainstream culture, making it the signature mental disorder of the early twenty-first century. In PTSD, Allan V. Horwitz traces the fluctuations in definitions of and responses to traumatic psychic conditions. Arguing that PTSD, perhaps more than any other diagnostic category, is a lens for showing major historical changes in conceptions of mental illness, he surveys the conditions most likely to produce traumas, the results of those traumas, and how to evaluate the claims of trauma victims. Illuminating a number of central issues about psychic disturbances more generally—including the relative importance of external stressors and internal vulnerabilities in causing mental illness, the benefits and costs of mental illness labels, and the influence of gender on expressions of mental disturbance—PTSD is a compact yet comprehensive survey. The book will appeal to diverse audiences, including the educated public, students across the psychological and social sciences, and trauma victims who are interested in socio-historical approaches to their condition. Praise for Allan V. Horwitz’s Anxiety: A Short History “The definitive overview of the history of anxiety.”—Bulletin of the History of Medicine “A lucid, erudite and brisk intellectual history driven by a clear and persuasive central argument.”—Social History of Medicine “An enlightening tour of anxiety, set at a sensible pace, with an exceptional scholar and writer leading the way.”—Library Journal

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.

Culture and PTSD examines the applicability of PTSD to cultural contexts beyond Europe and North America and details local responses to trauma and how they vary from PTSD as defined by the American Psychiatric Association.