Abstract
Casualties of war are often difficult to calculate. For instance, statistics concerning soldiers that were killed or taken prisoner in the First World War can never be accurate. Reasons for that can be the lack of opportunities to record them statistically and the dimensions of the war that exceeded any war in the modern world hence giving the First World War its nickname as the Great War. The numbers are even less reliable when it comes to research concerning soldiers with mental health issues. To them, Mark Humphries fittingly refers to as “psychological war casualties”.[1] This can be mainly explained with the misconceptions concerning responses to trauma such as conditions identified as shell-shock[2] and war fatigue. Hence, the medical authority was reluctant to diagnose soldiers’ psychological and mental health issues after traumatic experiences as being caused by the war and rather attributed them to an individual failure to adhere to the standards of masculinity which will be explained further at a later part in this paper. Therefore, preconceived notions about gender vastly influenced doctors’ decisions about their diagnoses and soldiers’ acceptance, acknowledgment and experience of shell-shock and similar mental health issues related to their war experiences. This proved to be extremely problematic in terms of the future of veterans’ health and their treatment and standing in society.
In short, the societal construction of an ideal masculinity and the preconceived notions about the appointed roles for each gender contributed to the misdiagnosis of soldiers suffering from shell-shock. Rather than war, their condition was blamed on personal defects that prevented them from living up to the ideal of manhood. This resulted in a denial of access to support services. This research suggests, however, a discrepancy between how medical personnel directly involved in the war and medical personnel aside from the battlefields dealt with the matter of traumatised soldiers. Doctors and nurses in the war were much more likely to accept soldiers’ issues without questioning their manliness and sense of duty, something that is most apparent in their respective rhetoric.
[1] Mark Humphries, „War’s Long Shadow: Masculinity, Medicine and Gendered Experience of Trauma, 1914-1939,” The Canadian Historical Review, 91, 3 (September 2010): 512.
[2] Variations for spelling: “shell shock” or “shellshock”, depending on the preference of the authors I’m going to quote and refer to in the course of this paper. I personally prefer the spelling “shell-shock”.