Did the majority of people really come back from WW1/WW2 with PTSD? Most just seemed to go directly back to civilian life afterwards if you read obituaries
Did the majority of people really come back from WW1/WW2 with PTSD?
Did the majority of people really come back from WW1/WW2 with PTSD? Most just seemed to go directly back to civilian life afterwards if you read obituaries
”PTSD”... traumatised by the horrors of trench warfare? Sure. But a lot had brain damages from shell shockwaves too. They just couldn’t see the mico scares of the brain tissues.
Many more had lost pieces of meat, legs, hands, ”broken faces”, chemically burnt lungs...
they aint talk about it, then drink them self to death
Yeah, but it was normal to hit your wife and kids back then so nobody thought you were a head-case for being extremely irritable, prone to violent outbursts and other symptoms of PTSD
This, society was overall less nice. If you couldn't cut it after the war you were just another soon dead vagrant nobody cares about
WW1 PTSD'd joined freikorps
WW2 PTSD'd joined colonial armies and anticommunist militias in south america
Idk about majority, but a lot of people beat their wives, didnt interact with their kids and were just generally withdrawn. Ask your grandparents what it was like growing up, everybody had or knew of at least one uncle or father who was twitchy, alcoholic and you didnt fuck with. Didnt mean they had panic attacks or pissed themselves, they were just different from how people had known them before the war.
My great grandad apparently came back and had turned into a raging alcoholic by my late grandas telling. He was a semi-professional footballer before the war and spent almost the entire war in the trenches until he was gassed in 1916 and sent home to recuperate, and then was sent back upon recuperating. The gas attack ruined his lungs and he only played football professional for a short while after in the very early 1930s, before turning to management. But according to my granda he made his wife and childrens lives a misery with his drinking and violent outbursts. My granda came back from WW2 after serving in the Navy and then the Palestine police and became a minister, only ever drank on his birthday and Christmas. He said the shit he saw in Palestine was worse than watching the ammo storage of a nearby vessel going up after a torpedo attack and flinging bodies hundreds of feet through the air. He said they were just "chum" in the end and they only found a couple of survivors.
> Most just seemed to go directly back to civilian life afterwards if you read obituaries
Seemed yeah, other posters already gave you the answer. War takes its toll on the person and their human psyche but it remains very personal and society is built in such a way that it can function around many dysfunctional individuals.
Having PTSD doesn't preclude a return to civilian life. You can have a job, family, kids, and be a well-adjusted person for all the details visible to an outside observer, and still be mentally/emotionally fucked up.
>t. father survived WW2, spend time in communist "invisible prison", and kept a lot of the details to himself until shortly before his death
>Spend time in communist "invisible prison"
What the fucks that?
NTA but it's an expression meaning mental prison I think, or like the psychology of being inside a Soviet-style communist control system and its state-sanctioned alternative reality.
>“This is an irrational idea. It is not the pragmatic European striving to extract the maximum of personal profit. It is the idea of the great Russian spirit, of which your own individuality, and mine, is only a small subordinate part, but which repays us a hundred times over. This feeling of belonging to a great organism inspires our spirits with a feeling of strength and immortality. The West has always striven to discredit our idea of statehood. But the greatest danger lies not in the West, but in ourselves. We grasp at all these incessant and fashionable Western ideas, seduced by their obvious rationality and practicality, not realizing that just these qualities give them a fatal power over us.”
>Varakin says nothing. “But never mind,” the prosecutor continues.
>“In the end our own idea always emerges victorious. Look, all of our revolutions have finally led not to the destruction, but to the strengthening and reinforcement of the State. They always will. But not many people realize that the present moment is one of the most critical in our entire history. And the case of the chef Nikolayev — which appears so trivial at first glance — has a profound significance.”
>“So… there’s no way you can leave town.”
>spend time in communist "invisible prison"
This is like when women make up fake diseases
Probably, but no one can know for certain. All the men in my family who fought in WW1 came back as paranoid abusers. Most left their families, in one way or another, because it was the only they could protect them. My great, great grandfather came back and was so explosively violent that he built himself a shack at the back of the property and lived apart from his wife and children for over 10 years, before finally drinking himself to death.
My Grandad was well and truly fucked up by the war. He was a fight engineer on a Halifax/Lanc. He lied about his age to join up and managed to do 2 and a half fucking tours before he was made an instructor. He had to ditch in his plane 3 fucking times !
The first time a canon round from a night fighter hit the cockpit of his plane and obliterated the pilot. A piece of the poor bastards skull fragmented and got lodged in my grandads arm and he almost blead out. The co pilot was so blinded blood in his eyes they had to ditch the aircraft in the channel and wait for a RAF fast boat.
The next time his Lanc got so badly shot the hydraulics failed and they could not lower the gear and they had to ditch in in a skid way.
The last time they got shot up tried to limp back home and just about made it back to the channel before they had to ditch. Unfortunately it was pitch black of night and the engines were so badly damaged they pissed oil and fuel into the ocean and when he jumped in he got fuel and oil in his eyes and went temporally blind. He spent 48 hours bling floating in the channel before he was picked up.
He had terrible night terror for most of his life
Bomber crews were absolutely nutters.
The Royal Australian Airforce had a bomber called "N" for nuts.
https://www.awm.gov.au/collection/C254132
That's pussy shit compared to U-boat retards.
I've been to the U-505, 1 shitter for over 50 stinking men for the majority of the patrol until they ate all the food stuffed in the other toilet. No showers for months and a single 2 burner stove to cook with. And all that is on top of the constant allied patrols and enduring depth charge attacks. The first captain of the sub blew his brains out in the engine room during a particularly long depth charging because it rattled him that bad.
PTSD isn't real. Science has proven that consciousness is an illusion and thus all disorders claimed to be related to it are the same.
Yeah tons of veterans drank and drugged themselves to death in the decades after the war but its just not really talked about today. Ruins the narrative of heroic war when you realize the actual people who fought the war were left to die with no support from society. But when you read older books the character of drunk hobo war veteran drinking himself to death is quite common in the 50's.
Le trad West is usually an incel meme but social support actually plays an important role in PTSD development.
Getting back to a tight-knit community where you marry early and spend the rest of your days as an respectable member of said community, gives you (statistically speaking) much better prospects than being a zoomer nu-veteran, that splits his time between playing video games, watching e-whores and occasionally partying.
This is the hard truth, no one wants to hear about.
t : coming back and dealing with "society" afterwards fucked me up even worse then muh horrors of war.
Almost every man went to those wars and the women suffered economically at home with the shortages and little pay their husbands sent home.
When they came back, those men were among others who went through the same shit and they had the mission to rebuild the country.
Also culture was different. People were religious, had down to earth priorities and had no access to drugs outside of alcohol, which helped.
Today's soldier comes from a society where the items he consumes define his personality and where the actions of singers and actors are national news.
Suddenly seeing rotting corpses in the street, starvation, dead or raped mothers and children and losing one of your mates suddenly opens your eyes to the actual reality of life.
Going back to people who have an emotional breakdown because their boss said something or their car doesn't work really alienates you after you have seen this shit.
>and had no access to drugs outside of alcohol
Are you shitting me? Cocaine was prescribed by your doctor and meth was in diet pills.
The majority of people were still living in villages and small towns, where they didn't have access to this.
>this nigga unironically took VHS-wave memes at face value
kek'd
>People were religious, had down to earth priorities and had no access to drugs outside of alcohol
Addiction to morphine in former soldiers was a known phenomenon since the Civil War. Military morphine stockpiles were also trafficked in the streets after WW2.
Hell, Coca Cola was originally so Pemberton could kick his morphine addiction.
Where do you think the stereotype of the angry vet that drinks/OD’s to death and beats his family the entire time comes from? Life in general was a lot rougher around the edges then, those guys could have major PTSD (or in the case of WW1 actual brain damage) but so long as they could get some kind of work they’d barely be any different from the norm, maybe a little quirky but thats it. But to think that the condition itself doesn’t exist is just blatantly retarded, the ancient Greeks alone talked clear as day about it.
I remember reading an account of a knoght who returned home from the crusades. He would get angry from the "sound of clashing metal" and beat his servants when they dropped pots and pans lol
It's hard to be a pussy when you have cast iron balls.
I had a great uncle who went to war when he was 18, after the war he moved into a house on the same street as his parents, he would regularly have night terrors where he would run down the street to his mother.
They drank, beat their wives and children, and occasionally had a severe nightmare that everyone else brushed aside.The explanation was "That's just how he is." Enough to shape an entire generation. Until the next gen went through Vietnam, started adding in harder drugs to their coping skills and decided "Maybe that's not how it should be, maybe he's actually very ill."
The justifications for those conflicts also played roles in how those who went through them processed things. Suffering for a worthy cause vs suffering for no cause.
Quite a huge chunk of soldiers weren't even involved in direct action, someone's gotta manage the logistics and shit after all.
You'd probably leave pretty fucked up if you were some junior Lt at Okinawa with the Marines, but I can't imagine there was much to cry about if you were one of those Americans who landed in southern France and basically just sweeped the Germans away with a gust of wind.
>you read obituaries
Not sure how many people would want to put "he beat the shit out of his family, was an alcoholic and screamed in his sleep sometimes" in obits
In WW1 you could not only be court martialed, but actually executed if your symptoms pulled you from duty on the grounds of what was basically the early 20th century version of draft dodging/fragging. France in particular was especially bad about that. And as far as WW2 went, just look at how people like Audie Murphy wound up afterwards. They’re the ones who became paranoid schizos over everything or sullen and withdrawn only to explode in bouts of anger, terror, or both. And of course in an obituary they’re not going to put “uncle Murphy became a raging alcoholic/opium addict and was barely functional after the war”, and the medical boards of the time were going to do everything they could to downplay the effects of the war since information traveled much slower and the states still needed bodies for the meat grinder.
the past is just the worst
story my ex used to give, about her friend - a Falkland's war veteran, living in Edinburgh.
now, Edinburgh has a tradition called the one-o'clock gun. I'm sure it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out when they fire off a gun - specifically, at the time, a 64-pound artillery cannon.
She went out with him around town one day (knowing her, it was probably about a 3000-mile trek of every single charity shop in the city...), and 1 o'clock sneaked up without any warning, and a massive boom went down the streets, and even a mile way was loud. Her friend literally leapt sideways, diving through someone's hedge, into a garden.
At which point the little granny who lived in the house, who was doing her gardening, apparently pottered over, and just said "oh, that'll be one o'clock. My husband used to do the exact same thing. Cup of tea?"
Sat down with this old biddy while she recounted how her husband had come back from the War, and would jump every time at the gun, or at fireworks. Never would talk about it, or what he experienced, but clearly, enough that his then widow, close to 60 years later was able to spot the same traits in someone else - and the approach to settling their nerves.
shell shock has probably existed since ancient times
warriors complaining that they keep seeing the faces of their enemy in their nightmares probably had some form of PTSDs, they just chalked it up to vengeful spirits instead of a re-wiring of their neural pathways
it was just less noticeable before WW1 because humans are pretty good at withstanding extreme stress for short periods of time
but being kept on deployment for months on end and being subject to non-stop heavy bombardment and then coming back to a largely indifferent society wears down even the hardest of soliders
which led to their being enough people with shell shock for it to warrant its own designation, sometimes called battle fatigue
the sharp increase in cases of PTSD in the last century is mostly due to a combination of fewer soldiers seeing longer deployment time combined and people just being more ready to admit to having it or to be diagnosed with it
In the aftermath of both wars, you saw a lot of men drinking to excess, partaking in mindless hedonistic behaviors (everything from just partying to using drugs to having affairs), beating their wives, and in some cases abandoning their families.
And those were just the ones who couldn't bottle it up anymore. My great grandfather fought in World War 1 when he was 16, lied about his age and spent time in the Argonne. He did a couple things that were odd for the time, but little that would indicate trauma. Stuff like marrying my great grandmother. He was a 5'7" WASP, she was a 6'+ Catholic Cajun woman (these pairings were uncommon then on the basis of religion alone), and oddly enough he converted to Catholicism for her. He was also inducted into the Freemasons not long after the war's end. Perhaps one of the only signs that the war had affected him very poorly is that he went out of his way for forbid my grandfather from doing what he'd done, taking all precautions to ensure he wouldn't lie about his age to enlist for World War 2. And then, in 1950, he shot himself in the face with a double barrel on the front porch. Nobody saw it coming.