- Hardcover: 192 pages
- Publisher: Channel 4 Books; First Edition edition (23 Oct 1998)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 075222199X
- ISBN-13: 978-0752221991
- Product Dimensions: 23.1 x 15.5 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 681,424 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
Wendy Holden's Shell Shock is the companion to a major British television series on the psychological impact of modern warfare. Beginning, conventionally, with the well-known horrors of trench warfare in World War One, Holden plots the relation between war and psychiatry through the different conflicts which have helped to define understanding of military violence and its effects: the Second World War, Korea, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, the Falklands, the Gulf War, Bosnia. The two world wars dominate the book, and its discussion of the basic paradoxes of military psychiatry: How do you help men, and women, to choose the risk of mutilation and death? Is it "insane" to break down in the face of the carnage and threat of warfare? Using the case histories and painful testimony of numerous veterans and their doctors, Holden offers a broad survey of the war against madness which has become such a key element of modern military life. What emerges--too sketchily at times--is the history of a collision between human attachment to life and limb and the need to become a killing machine, a soldier, willing and able to inflict, as well as to sustain, the psychological and bodily damage of war. --Vicky Lebeau
Product Description
The terrible physical effects of sending men into battle have always been self-evident, but only in modern times have the psychological effects been examined. Killing, watching friends die, leading soldiers to their deaths - all have a profound effect on those involved in the front line of war. There is a limit to what a soldier can endure before he becomes the victim of shell shock, battle fatigue, PTSD, or whatever terminology is in vogue. In this book, linked to a Channel 4 television series, individual soldiers tell their own stories of horrors to which they have been exposed, and of events that pushed them to the brink of human endurance. The author also relates the history of military psychiatry and the scientists who have to balance the demands of the army to "cure" soldiers and return them to battle with the demands of the soldiers themselves, struggling to understand their condition.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The book focuses largely on the First World War, where the term shell shock originated and attempts were first made to understand the concept.
The book recounts, through many personal stories how the whole notion of mental suffering was often regarded as a form of cowardice, with many innocents suffering the ultimate punishment/shame, purely due to a lack of understanding of the mental and physical stress that war can cause, whilst authorities seemed incapable of showing compassion for fear of inducing a revolt in their own forces.
Distressingly, the author recounts how doctors working for the military were ordered to work with the sole intention of getting their patients well enough to be able to send them back to the frontline, where all the original triggers of shell shock awaited.
Incidents are reported of soldiers, who would have no reason to suffer mental illness in everday life, displaying the most bizarre symptoms after being exposed to the continuous horrors of war.
Holden goes on to detail how the understanding of Shell Shock evolved during the World Wars largely due to the perserverance and hard work of a number of doctors who often experimented with nothing more than trial and error methods.
It goes on to explain how further conflicts in the 20th Century have to some extent allowed the understanding of the stresses of war to become almost scientifically identified, to the point where it's now generally understood what sorts of conditions and how many hours of combat the average human can take in war.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
A fantasticly insightful book, packed with facts regarding war the effects on the human condition and the development of psychology and psychiatry. I learned a great deal from this book and would recommend it to anyone who was interested in the above. The most important message this book conveys is a genuine progression to understanding that lunacy is in fact an ilness, not the result of weak minded simpletons.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
2 reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
A compelling study of the effects of war on the human mind.
21 Feb 2002
Format:Hardcover
The book focuses largely on the First World War, where the term shell shock originated and and attempts were first made to understand it's concept.
The book recounts, through many personal stories how the whole notion of mental suffering was often regarded as a form of cowardice, with many innocents suffering the ultimate punishment/shame, purely due to a lack of understanding of the mental and physical stress that war can cause, whilst authorities seemed incapable of showing compassion for fear of inducing a revolt in their own forces.
Distressingly, the author recounts how doctors working for the military were ordered to work with the sole intention of getting their patients well enough to be able to send them back to the frontline, where all the original triggers of shell shock awaited.
Incidents are reported of soldiers, who would have no reason to suffer mental illness in everday life, displaying the most bizarre symptoms after being exposed to the continuous horrors of war.
Holden goes on to detail how the understanding of Shell Shock evolved during the World Wars largely due to the perserverance and hard work of a number of doctors who often experimented with nothing more than trial and error methods.
It goes on to explain how further conflicts in the 20th Century, ncluding Vietnam and the Gulf War have to some extent allowed the understanding of the stresses of war to become almost scientifically identified, to the point where it's now generally understood what sorts of conditions and how many hours of combat the average human can take in war.
Disturbing, enlightening, hard to put down.
19 Jan 2012
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I picked this up after chatting to an army doctor about shell-shock and this book has been impossible to put down. The history of shell-shock and its sometimes bizarre and exotic methods of treatment is far more interesting than I had ever imagined.
Worth getting. A great read.
Worth getting. A great read.
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