sed by shell explosion. Often due to fatigue, anxiety and emotional instability from prolonged strain, resulting in final breakdown, precipitated by a shell-burst near the sufferer. (p. 41)
While war-related shock was recognized prior to the twentieth century, however, those individuals suffering from the phenomenon typically were not perceived as victims of some form of mental illness. Rather, as in the Civil War in the United States, such individuals more often were regarded as cowards and were punished. On some occasions, such individuals were executed as deserters (Talbott, 1996).
Shell shock describes the psychological condition wherein a soldier ceases to be able to function and can no longer cope with a combat environment. Freud viewed the phenomenon of shell shock in the First World War as proof of his theory that life events cause mental neuroses (Kentsmith, 1986). Aaron Hass (1995) referred to this condition as a "survivor syndrome" (p. 7).
While study of the phenomenon continued sporadically following the end of the First World War, it was not until the Second World War that the study of war-related neuroses intensified. At the time, the condition was not called war trauma. Rather, such reactions to war-related trauma-induced stress were referred to as combat exhaustion and battle fatigue (Kentsmith, 1986).
One study of American veterans of the Second World War found that combat veterans who grew up in privileged households and attended an elite university developed relatively few symptoms of war trauma (Bower, 1995). Individuals in the group covered by this study, however, were found to have developed more chronic physical illnesses and to have died earlier than those individuals who experienced little or no combat. These latter findings were held to confirm that "severity of trauma is the best predictor of who is likely to develop" war-induced neuroses (Bower, 1995, p. 229). This study tracked men thro...