This chapter reviews the history of war trauma and war-induced neuroses. A neurosis is the stress induced when a single stimulus evokes two or more responses. As a mental disorder, a neurosis is associated with a less distorted perception of reality than the distortion associated with a psychosis.
The initial review in this chapter considers the general experience of war trauma and neuroses. The following review considers war trauma and neuroses in relation to African Americans.
The term "exposure to war" refers to the stressors inherent to the experience of war. Thus, the terms refers to experience with the actual conditions of war, such as being in the target area of a bombing attack or an artillery barrage, being in close combat conditions, living in an area where the dead and wounded from battle are returning from the front while other combatants are headed to the front, and so forth. The concept that exposure to war, one of the most stressful events experienced by human beings, can lead to the development in some persons of a form of mental illness is not new (Talbott, 1996).
An early manifestation of the psychological response to exposure to war was shell shock. The first published account of shell shock was that of Smith and Pear (1917) in the United Kingdom. Milne (1918), Marr (1919), Mott (1919) were other early contributors to the shell shock literature. The term "shell shock" was in use, however, before it appeared in the literature.
Shell-shock was in use from 1915 onward among British forces in the First World War to refer to the psychological condition affecting soldiers in combat. Fraser and Gibbons (1925) reported that the term was used to refer to:
à an obscure form of nervous disease prevalent in the Army. It was officially adopted in 1916 and applied to all forms of psycho-neurosis; although by neurologists the term was limited to cases of concussion or commotion of the brain, directly cau...