This open access book explores the history of asylums and their civilian patients during the First World War, focusing on the effects of wartime austerity and deprivation on the provision of care. While a substantial body of literature on ‘shell shock’ exists, this study uncovers the mental wellbeing of civilians during the war. It provides the first comprehensive account of wartime asylums in London, challenging the commonly held view that changes in psychiatric care for civilians post-war were linked mainly to soldiers’ experiences and treatment. Drawing extensively on archival and published sources, this book examines the impact of medical, scientific, political, cultural and social change on civilian asylums. It compares four asylums in London, each distinct in terms of their priorities and the diversity of their patients. Revealing the histories of the 100,000 civilian patients who were institutionalised during the First World War, this book offers new insights into decision-making and prioritisation of healthcare in times of austerity, and the myriad factors which inform this.

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Against the backdrop of a critical reflection on the psychiatric concepts of organicism and predisposition to mental illness, the research investigates the relationship between psychiatry and the Great War from a perspective that considers the complexity of the orientations assumed by both the Italian alienists on war pathologies and the health practices implemented towards soldiers. The study highlights the comparison/clash between two totally different approaches forced to coexist during the conflict: on one side, the one from military psychiatry, and on the other the distinctive one from civil asylums. The two perspectives were not always clearly separated, but it is possible to detect a constant tension between the duties towards the war effort and the professional ethics dictated by the neuropsychiatric discipline.

Listed by Unglue.it.

Against the backdrop of a critical reflection on the psychiatric concepts of organicism and predisposition to mental illness, the research investigates the relationship between psychiatry and the Great War from a perspective that considers the complexity of the orientations assumed by both the Italian alienists on war pathologies and the health practices implemented towards soldiers. The study highlights the comparison/clash between two totally different approaches forced to coexist during the conflict: on one side, the one from military psychiatry, and on the other the distinctive one from civil asylums. The two perspectives were not always clearly separated, but it is possible to detect a constant tension between the duties towards the war effort and the professional ethics dictated by the neuropsychiatric discipline.

Listed by Unglue.it.

As seen in military documents, medical journals, novels, films, television shows, and memoirs, soldiers’ invisible wounds are not innate cracks in individual psyches that break under the stress of war. Instead, the generation of weary warriors is caught up in wider social and political networks and institutions—families, activist groups, government bureaucracies, welfare state programs—mediated through a military hierarchy, psychiatry rooted in mind-body sciences, and various cultural constructs of masculinity. This book offers a history of military psychiatry from the American Civil War to the latest Afghanistan conflict. The authors trace the effects of power and knowledge in relation to the emotional and psychological trauma that shapes soldiers’ bodies, minds, and souls, developing an extensive account of the emergence, diagnosis, and treatment of soldiers’ invisible wounds.

Listed by Unglue.it.