Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!
From the article, they have objective evidence from studying the brains of deceased servicemembers:
"It was not chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., which is found in football players and other athletes who have been repeatedly hit in the head. It was something new.
The lab’s research team started looking for similar damage in other brains. In civilians’ brains, they did not find it. Nor was it in the brains of veterans who had been exposed to a single powerful explosion like a roadside bomb. But in veterans exposed repeatedly to blasts, they found it again and again."
It seems that all that's needed as a counterargument are soldiers with the same set of symptoms that remained married. Additionally, we could compare the divorced who were never exposed to such explosions and see how suicide rates compare.
In other words, data is always a better choice than narratives.
Those words were spoken almost exactly 100 years ago
"Shell shock" is a made up term. Other than on hearing the effects of
high impulse on a human are long-term, complex and still an areas of
research.
In WW1, in Northfields hospital they started to define PTSD in ways
that didn't quite add up. Some soldiers had never been under
bombardment but had the same symptoms.
Nonetheless, the term remained in use because
1) "Shell shock" was deemed curable with rest, and the main objective
was to get soldiers patched up and back to the front.
2) It was a way to avoid getting shot for desertion. A decent officer
would not order traumatised men disciplined but send them on to
hospital with "shell shock".
Artillery was around for 500 years and shell shock was hugely discussed for past 100 years.
There is much better corellation with divorce. Soldiers returns home with PTSD, only to have their house, children, savings and pension stollen. Because they were not around to guard it! And they may get thrown into prison for being too poor!
Shell shock is very convinient excuse, when victims do not get proper recovery!