Shellshock was the blanket term applied by contemporaries to those soldiers who broke down under the strain of war. The pace and intensity of industrialized warfare had profound effects on the human mind and body that were not related to wounds or physical injury.
Poorly understood at the time and for many years afterwards, the crying, fear, paralysis, or insanity of soldiers exposed to the stress and horror of the trenches was often held by medical professionals to be the result of physical damage to the brain by the shock of exploding shells. Military authorities often saw its symptoms as expressions of cowardice or lack of moral character.
Its true cause, prolonged exposure to the stress of combat, would not be fully understood or effectively treated during the war. This can include war or combat, serious accidents, natural disasters, terrorism, or violent personal assaults, such as rape. People with the disorder may experience PTSD symptoms such as frequent fear, stress, and anxiety stemming from the traumatic event. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares and have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to the event.
They sometimes avoid people, places and situations that remind them of the trauma. They may also experience increased arousal and reactive symptoms, such as feeling jumpy startling easy , having problems concentrating or sleeping, being easily angered or irritated and engaging in reckless or self-destructive behavior.
People with PTSD continue to produce high amounts of these hormones outside of dangerous situations and their amygdala—the part of the brain that handles fear and emotion—is more active than people without PTSD. Over time, PTSD changes the brain, including by causing the part of the brain that handles memory the hippocampus to shrink.
Long before the dawn of modern psychiatry, people and situations depicting PTSD may have been recorded in early works of literature. For example, in the Epic of Gilgamesh , the earliest surviving major work of literature dating back to B. Later, in a B. This blindness, brought on by fright and not a physical wound, persisted over many years. Other ancient works, such as those by Hippocrates , describe soldiers who experienced frightening battle dreams.
In the Indian epic poem Ramayana , likely composed around 2, years ago, the demon Marrich experiences PTSD-like symptoms, including hyper-arousal, reliving trauma, and avoidance behavior, after nearly being killed by an arrow. Marrich also gave up his natural duty of harassing monks and became a meditating recluse. In the last several hundred years, medical doctors have described a few PTSD-like illnesses, particularly in soldiers who experienced combat. In the late s, Swiss physician Dr. Around the same time, German, French and Spanish doctors described similar illnesses in their military patients.
In , Austrian physician Josef Leopold Auenbrugger wrote about nostalgia in trauma-stricken soldiers in his book Inventum Novum. The soldiers, he reported, became listless and solitary, among other things, and efforts could do little to help them out of their torpor.
Civil War — In fact, nostalgia became a common medical diagnosis that spread throughout camps. While nostalgia described changes in veterans from a psychological perspective, other models took a physiological approach. After the Civil War, U. Animals Wild Cities Morocco has 3 million stray dogs. Meet the people trying to help. Animals Whales eat three times more than previously thought.
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