Shell Shock
According to Samuel Hynes, the war “added a new scale of violence and destruction to what was possible—it changed reality.
“Shellshock has become the emblematic disorder of the First World War. It has been included in imaginings of the war ever since the armistice, but there is also a thoroughly modern fascination with trauma which informs recent historical fiction such as Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy (1991–1995) or Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1993). Since 1918, narratives of psychological pain as a timeless truth of combat experience have assumed an ever-more important place in our accounts of the war, whether literary, historical, or journalistic. Shellshock has most often been located within a “genealogy of trauma,” and identified as an important marker in the gradual recognition of the psychological afflictions caused by combat. In recent years, shell shock has increasingly been viewed as a powerful emblem of the suffering of war. These included headaches, nightmares, hallucinations, and distressing and intrusive memories – all symptoms we associate with war trauma today. But ‘shell-shock’ also included hysterical disorders, such as mutism and paralysis, amnesia, and even ‘personality loss’, as in the case of one man who seemed to develop an entirely new identity, including a different accent, after he had been hit by a shell. Victims of ‘shell-shock’ might have very little in common, except that they had been damaged in some way by the war.” Shellshock is a mental disruption that is triggered by continued exposure to active warfare, especially being under assault.
Pedroso, J. L., Linden, S. C., Barsottini, O. G., Filho, P. M., & Lees, A. J. (2017). The relationship between the First World War and neurology: 100 years of “shell shock.” Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, 75(5), 317–319. https://doi-org.york.ezproxy.cuny.edu/10.1590/0004-282×20170046
Tracey Loughran; Shell Shock, Trauma, and the First World War: The Making of a Diagnosis and Its Histories, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Volume 67, Issue 1, 1 January 2012, Pages 94–119, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrq052
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[…] Shellshock was a mental illness that was not diagnosed during this time after World War I. At this time, clinical professionals believed repression was something that was perceived to be effective in the contribution to the behaviors of the soldier after the war; thus, the doctors do not know how to treat it. As a relates to Septimus, he used repression after experiencing and observing the deaths of the people around him; including his very close friend, Evans. Septimus did not notice anything; his repression keeps all of the past observations Inside, unable to be released and expressed. “For she could stand it no longer. She cannot sit beside him when he stared so into not see her and made everything terrible; sky and tree, children, playing, dragging carts, blowing whistles, and falling down; all were terrible” (Woolf 33). Rezia Could not stand it when her husband used his repression to keep himself from expressing the beauty of nature; what he is observing now it’s been affected and tainted by the memories of him being in the war. As state in the Repression of the War Experience, “Rivers was a pioneer in this field. Here, he writes about how the repression of traumatic war experiences only delays an individual’s recovery. Doctors were generally inexperienced in dealing with this new form of mental distress, and commonly believed that repression was effective ‘as a definite course of treatment’, as Rivers puts it.” […]