PTSD and The American Civil War

PTSD and The American Civil War

Written By Gaurav Roy

Psychological trauma has been with us humans in one form or another for thousands of years. It used to be with us when humans used sharp stones for hunting, and it’s still with us after thousands of years.

A few literary accounts had also covered posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), even before it was considered as a diagnosis. Books such as Henry IV, The Iliad, and A Tale of Two Cities have described traumatic experiences, symptoms and its aftermath.

What’s in the Name?

There were 150,000 disease-related deaths and 50,000 battle-induced deaths during the American Civil War (1861-1865) , according to Google. The deaths caused by diseases and the ongoing war were accounted for; however, there were no statistics that could provide an estimated number of deaths that were caused by psychiatric casualties. PTSD was known by different names in the past. The physicians used to call it by names such as soldier’s heart, sunstroke, nostalgia, or irritable heart.

A Promise!

At the height of the civil war, surgeons figured out the impact of emotional distress on the psychiatric symptoms amongst soldiers. The surgeons concluded that the only way to reduce the death induced by “nostalgia” was to furlough the affected soldiers. Indeed, the promise of going home, far from the horrific scenes of the battleground, proved to be great medicine for affected soldiers, according to https:// warfarehistorynetwork.com/.

The number of psychiatric casualties kept on increasing year-after-year during the civil war. In the last year of the war, the situation became so grave that the Surgeon General Moore was requested by Medical Director Carrington to establish a stand-alone hospital to treat mania and dementia among the soldiers. Likely, many of the psychiatric cases were suffering from “soldier’s heart” or one of the other diagnostic predecessors of PTSD.

Nostalgia was found to be interrelated with homesickness. A few accounts even went as far as equating both of them as two sides of a coin. In 1864, J. Assistant Surgeon Theodore Calhoun wrote that nostalgia was just a fancier term for homesickness. As per the Medical and Surgical History of the War of the Rebellion, homesickness developed into something far more morbid. Thus, it was reported as nostalgia during the war.

A Long Way to Home!

When the wounded soldiers returned to their homes, their family members only felt that the war changed returning veterans because of what they had to face during the war. Families often didn’t understand the level of mental damage that the soldiers had to endure because of the war.

The Civil war saw far more advanced weapons compared to that of the past. Rifles and muskets that were employed during the civil war were pretty sophisticated. The newly invented soft lead bullets shattered the bones of the affected soldier. On the other hand, the war tactics were still the same, and hence, the new weapons inflicted far more damage to the soldiers. Thus, the civil war was far more lethal and the fatalities far bloodier.

Long-lasting Effect

At the end of the war, the battlegrounds were littered with human remains, with a few of the soldiers still alive in half-dead conditions and writhing in enormous pain. At that time, amputation was the only effective way to prevent the wounds of soldiers from getting infected.

American society could not fathom the enormous mental issues that the war veterans had to face. Veterans turned to alcohol for numbing the pain and horrific memories of the war.

In the end, many of the civil war veterans had to be placed in mental asylums as their family members were unable to manage their behavior at home. It is noted that PTSD was not formally recognized as a diagnosis until after the Vietnam War. PTSD came into mainstream attention and became a diagnosis only because of various social movements such as the Veteran and Holocaust survivor advisory groups.