That's both mildly surprising, given that "shell shock" was coined way back in WW1, and also sort-of not surprising, knowing how CYA institutions tend to be.
It's possible I'm being ignorant here, but I'm convinced that, while modern PTSD and the broad class of phenomena known as "shell shock" do have a lot of overlap, there was also something qualitatively different, something physical, to do with the brute force of pressure waves that hit soldiers in WW1, that, say, Gulf War vets didn't usually experience (though of course, sometimes they did). You can find videos of the poor bastards who came home from WW1; they seemed to suffer not just from a kind of mood and anxiety disorder, but from some kind of full-on nerve- or brain- damage -- Parkinson's type stuff. Like, it was well known (but seldom said out loud) that the pressure waves would destroy men's testicles. That's serious. Now think about what a concussion does to your brain, or the slurred speech of a heavyweight boxer (or the more recent NFL concussion scandals, which seem to have been forgotten). I have a feeling that not all "PTSD" is the same -- that, on the one hand, there's chronic adrenaline overdose, and on the other, there's actual concussive damage. But hopefully I never have to develop any real expertise in this subject.
Sounds like this is the sort of thing your book recommendation would elucidate. Thanks for that.
It's possible I'm being ignorant here, but I'm convinced that, while modern PTSD and the broad class of phenomena known as "shell shock" do have a lot of overlap, there was also something qualitatively different, something physical, to do with the brute force of pressure waves that hit soldiers in WW1, that, say, Gulf War vets didn't usually experience (though of course, sometimes they did). You can find videos of the poor bastards who came home from WW1; they seemed to suffer not just from a kind of mood and anxiety disorder, but from some kind of full-on nerve- or brain- damage -- Parkinson's type stuff. Like, it was well known (but seldom said out loud) that the pressure waves would destroy men's testicles. That's serious. Now think about what a concussion does to your brain, or the slurred speech of a heavyweight boxer (or the more recent NFL concussion scandals, which seem to have been forgotten). I have a feeling that not all "PTSD" is the same -- that, on the one hand, there's chronic adrenaline overdose, and on the other, there's actual concussive damage. But hopefully I never have to develop any real expertise in this subject.
Sounds like this is the sort of thing your book recommendation would elucidate. Thanks for that.