Even today, there are many people whose psychology deteriorates even though they did not engage in any conflict and did their military service for a few months. Permanent mental problems may occur in people who are taken from their accustomed environment and forced into an environment where there is intense discipline and pressure.
Consider also the situation of those who are in conflict, those who are in war. People who find themselves in the middle of a hell in their first youth years can come to a situation where they lose their mental health.
Shell shock was first described by British Psychologist Charles Samuel Myers during World War I.
In 1914, in the early stages of World War I, British soldiers began reporting medical symptoms after the war, such as tinnitus, memory loss, headaches, dizziness, tremors, and hypersensitivity to noise. Normally, these symptoms should appear after a physical injury to the brain, but most patients have no signs of head wounds.
Photographs of soldiers experiencing “bullet shock” show the war at its most disturbing.
The men in the war environment felt that they were about to die at any moment due to the sudden emotional change they were exposed to.
There were problems such as helplessness, inability to reason, sleep, walk, and talk, which emerged as a result of intense panic caused by factors such as being under bombardment, the tragic death of close friends at their hands, inadequate nutrition and sleep, and fear of death.
The number of cases of bullet shock increased in 1915 and 1916, but was poorly understood medically and psychologically.
Some doctors thought it was the result of latent physical damage to the brain, with shock waves from exploding bullets and bombs creating a brain lesion. Another explanation was that the bullet shock was caused by carbon monoxide poisoning caused by the explosions.
At the same time, an alternative view was developed that defined bullet shock as an emotional rather than a physical injury. Because some of the men who showed symptoms of bullet shock were not exposed to intense fire. It could not be attributed to physical injury alone, as the symptoms also occurred in men who were not close to an exploding bomb.
Research by Johns Hopkins University in 2015 found that war veterans exposed to explosives had an injury in the areas of their brain tissue responsible for decision making, memory and reasoning.
This evidence led the researchers to conclude that bullet shock may not be just a psychological disorder. Even slight changes in air pressure were associated with differences in behavior. According to this, explosions on the battlefield caused large pressure changes, inflicting hidden damage to the brain.
Although there were cases of bullet shock, approximately 75% of the soldiers were re-enlisted without being referred to the hospital for specialist treatment.
So many soldiers suffered from bullet shock that 19 British military hospitals were devoted entirely to the treatment of these cases. Ten years after the war, 65,000 war veterans were still receiving treatment in England.
Some doctors used brutal methods to treat soldiers’ bullet shock.
Doctors would give the soldiers electric shocks, hoping they would return to their pre-war selves. For a year, a British clinician, Lewis Yealland, tried to treat one of his patients by giving him an electric shock and putting a cigarette on his tongue. “You won’t leave this room. Until you speak as well as you used to…”
Some of the men who were shocked by bullets were tried and even executed for military crimes such as desertion and cowardice.
These ailments in soldiers were viewed by some as a symptom of an underlying weakness of character. 346 soldiers were executed for “cowardice” and “disobedience”. In 1917, “bullet shock” was completely banned as a diagnosis in the British army, and even mention of it in medical journals was censored. On 7 November 2006, the UK government granted amnesty to the executed soldiers, but it was too late.
In this video, you can see the fear experienced by soldiers suffering from the disease.
The decision makers at the head of the governments left millions of soldiers “forced” into the middle of hell without experiencing this atmosphere, and they continue to do so.
Even if the young men managed to survive the war, some were executed, while others were forced to carry this mental burden for the rest of their lives.
Sources: 1, 2
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