Topic
Shell shock
About: Shell shock is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 267 publications have been published within this topic receiving 4184 citations.
Papers published on a yearly basis
Papers
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD, including a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years.
Abstract: As far back as we know, there have been individuals inca-pacitated by memories that have filled them with sadness and remorse, fright and horror, or a sense of irreparable loss. Only recently, however, have people tormented with such recollections been diagnosed as suffering from "post-traumatic stress disorder". Here Allan Young traces this malady, particularly as it is suffered by Vietnam veterans, to its beginnings in the emergence of ideas about the unconscious mind and to earlier manifestations of traumatic memory like shell shock or traumatic hysteria. In Young's view PTSD is not a timeless or universal phenomemon newly discovered. Rather, it is a "harmony of illusions, a cultural product gradually put together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which it is diagnosed, studied, and treated and by the various interests, institutions, and moral arguments mobilising these efforts. This book is part history and part ethnography, and it includes a detailed account of everyday life in a psychiatric unit specialising in the treatment of Vietnam veterans with PTSD. To illustrate his points, Young presents a number of fascinating transcripts of the group therapy and diagnostic sessions that he observed firsthand over a period of two years. Through his comments and the tran-scripts themselves, the reader becomes familiar with the individual hospital personnel and clients and their struggle to make sense of life after a tragic war. One observes that everyone on the unit is heavily invested in the PTSD diagnosis: boundaries between therapist and patient are as unclear as were the distinctions between victim and victimizer in the jungles of Southeast Asia.
1,099 citations
TL;DR: How the immediate and chronic consequences of psychological trauma made their way into medical literature, and how concepts of diagnosis and treatment evolved over time are described.
Abstract: The term posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has become a household name since its first appearance in 1980 in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-lll) purblished by the American Psychiatric Association, In the collective mind, this diagnosis is associated with the legacy of the Vietnam War disaster. Earlier conflicts had given birth to terms, such as "soldier's heart, " "shell shock," and "war neurosis." The latter diagnosis was equivalent to the nevrose de guerre and Kriegsneurose of French and German scientific literature. This article describes how the immediate and chronic consequences of psychological trauma made their way into medical literature, and how concepts of diagnosis and treatment evolved over time.
253 citations
TL;DR: Both during and after the 1914-18 war, shell-shocked men joined others labelled as deviants in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as discussed by the authors, and stereotypes were available to cope with an avalanc...
Abstract: Both during and after the 1914–18 war, shell-shocked men joined others labelled as deviants in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Stereotypes were available to cope with an avalanc...
111 citations
Book•
1 Jan 2002TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a survey of the history of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, focusing on the role of women in the armed forces during the war.
Abstract: Preface Acknowledgements Introduction PART I: DISCOVERIES Shocking Modernity: Hysteria, Technology and Warfare Casualties: On the Western Front PART II: WARTIME Enlistment: Army Policy, Politics and the Press Treatment: On the Home Front Patients: The Other Ranks Patients: The Officer Ranks PART II: LEGACIES Demobilization: On Returning Home Veterans: War Neurotic Ex-Servicemen Recall: The Great War in the Twentieth Century Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
111 citations
TL;DR: The First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies.
Abstract: T First World War continues to loom large in the historiography of twentieth-century masculinity, providing a further example of how gender studies have tended to work within, rather than to recast, established topics and chronologies. Debate has focused on trench warfare in particular, and how far it contributed to a reassessment of Edwardian concepts of manliness. The question of whether or not heroic ideals were buried in the mud of Flanders figures in histories of public schools and youth organizations; in literary studies of interwar imaginative writing; as well as in research directly inspired by gender history, on topics as diverse as men’s bodies, sexuality, and domesticity. Shell shock, and its effect on medical and military ideas of manliness, has been at the forefront of the discussion. Despite this relatively developed historiography, there is little agreement. During the 1980s, building on the work of authors such as Paul Fussell, who had argued that the chivalric language of the prewar was found hopelessly wanting in the trenches, scholars pointed to the impact of the war in the reassessment of heroic ideals. In a still-influential essay published in 1987, Elaine Showalter argued that shell shock was nothing less than “the body language of masculine complaint, a disguised male protest not only against the war but against the concept of ‘manliness’ itself.” Young subaltern officers, socialized through their public school education
107 citations
Related Topics (5)
Performance Metrics
| Year | Papers |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 8 |
| 2020 | 7 |
| 2019 | 6 |
| 2018 | 13 |
| 2017 | 14 |
| 2016 | 15 |