Waking up to shell shock: psychiatry in the US military during World War II

During World War I, military officers encountered a new and puzzling phenomenon: soldiers emerged from the trenches stuttering, crying, trembling and at times were even paralysed and blind. Those in charge were convinced these soldiers were cowards or malingerers who deserved stern discipline or to be court-martialled. A number of physicians, by contrast, initially assumed that these alarming symptoms resulted from close exposure to explosions and called it shell shock. Later, they realized that it was a psychological reaction and came up with psychotherapeutic treatments. But it was only in World War II that military psychiatrists, particularly those in the USA, began to implement treatment methods for this phenomenon in a systematic way. Their thinking and the treatments they devised had significant consequences for the future of American psychiatry, which in turn influenced the development of psychiatry and military psychiatry world-wide.