Tuesday, December 10, 2019

Mental Health in World War Two


Watching the documentaries on D-Day made me wonder about what the mental health of the soldiers that fought in the war was like. I remember that World War I developed the concept of shell shock (now often considered PTSD) due to the traumatic stress of fighting in the trenches. Mental health of soldiers was a growing concern in World War II.

Soldiers tended to receive a lot more psychiatric attention. Starting from the draft, soldiers had to be screened for the war to make sure that they were fit to serve. One such criteria of this was the screening process of Harry Stack Sullivan, which prevented around 12% of 15 million men examined from joining the war. Reasons for exclusion included mental illnesses and neurosis. Notably, this included homosexuality, as it was highly stigmatized at the time. However, these screening processes largely failed, as war neurosis increased from World War I. Furthermore, when this screening process was eventually abolished in the middle of the war, many of the soldiers performed well in war.

World War II called on many psychiatrists and psychologists to help treat soldiers coming back from war. This led to psychologists developing an early version of the DSM, or a manual to describe the psychological nomenclature relating to mental disorders. Education in the field of psychology, especially clinical psychology, grew extremely fast. 

Treatments for mental disorders in World War II included some outdated practices, such as lobotomies, but there were also approaches developed that are still being used today. Over a million soldiers suffered from psychiatric problems, so the need to treat them was extremely pressing. 1930 veterans were lobotomized after World War II, but its prevalence started to decrease afterwards. 

One new area of development in psychology was Carl Rogers. He created humanistic psychology and the related client-centered therapy. Carl Rogers helped treat some soldiers with his new approach. The new approach involved creating a close and trusting relationship between the therapist and the client.



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4 comments:

  1. I thought that this was very interesting because I did not know about all of the treatments of mental illnesses in World War II. I found out about a 1946 film called Let There Be Light. Director John Houston interviewed soldiers to investigate the psychological effects of WWII in this highly controversial documentary. These interviews were unscripted, so the viewer had an uncensored look into the effects of war. Let There Be Light is about what is today known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but at the time, it was labeled psychoneurosis. Due to the bloodiness and terror of World War II, this film gave haunting insights into the soldier's mental health at the end of the war.

    Source:
    https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/let-there-be-light-1946

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  2. I found this post addressing lesser known effects of WWII very engaging. Something I wanted to look more into was Carl Rogers' practices in mental health and his innovations. Rogers' primary development wast "human" or "patient" centered therapy. This therapy was useful in treating more internally based conditions such as schizophrenia. These treatments focused more on the individual worth rather than their worth in relation to other things, such as his theory of the "actualizing tendency" and "force of life" theory.

    https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-and-psychopathology/201311/humanistic-intervention-in-psychosis

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  3. I found this post very interesting and compelling. I had no idea where many psychological treatments/practices originated from. It's also interesting to learn what catalyzed the growth in education in psychology, a field that is very competitive today. I saw that you touched upon treatment for homosexuality as a mental illness, and I wanted to explore this some more because I think this past mindset is horrible. In an article I read, I learned that officials were particularly interested in detecting homosexuality because they thought that it would bring down combat effectiveness and morale. I don't know where their logic came from, but as you said, homosexuality was extremely stigmatized in that era.

    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2089086/

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  4. I found this post extremely interesting because it discusses that way soldiers had not only combat their surroundings and the enemy, but the stress and the fear that they had to face when they risked their lives on the battlefield. Fighting in a war is something that can truly change a persons life, and soldiers often carry that traumatic experiences that they keep when on the battlefield. I found more statistics that show the extent that the soldiers suffered through while fighting. 25% of soldiers suffer from trauma after the war, and 50% suffer if they were fighting for a longer period of time.

    https://historyofptsd.wordpress.com/world-war-ii/

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