The Unseen Army: Psychiatric Trauma and American Veterans of the Great War
The First World War left nearly 70,000 American soldiers with psychiatric wounds – so many, that the US Surgeon General ruled that the term “shell shock” was not a sufficient diagnosis to describe the men left mentally traumatized at the war’s end. Such patients engaged in complex and often frustrating negotiations about power over their own bodies and their own care, and voiced their concerns through written protests against a much more powerful state-medical partnership. But because neuropsychiatric wounds were socially uncomfortable and difficult to treat with conventional medicine, physicians tended to overlook the men in this category.
The overwhelming societal focus on other war wounds, and mentally wounded men’s lack of political capital in postwar America, further served to marginalize neuropsychiatric veterans, who one American psychiatrist called the “unseen army.” But fragments of their lives remain in the archives and in the surveys of psychiatrists who recorded their postwar fates. This talk aims to recover their voices and to show their continuous struggles to be heard within a postwar American society that was all too ready to move on from the war.
This Zoom program was originally hosted by the Chapman Museum on Wednesday, January 12th as part of our ongoing series, Conversations with the Past. Thank you to Dr. Evan Sullivan, an instructor at SUNY ADK, for his insightful talk.
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