Mental Health During World War 2

During the war, there was a lot going on. There was fighting going on in Europe, families being torn apart, there was hardly any food because it was rationed, and wives and mothers didn’t know if their husbands and sons were going to come home alive. It was a very challenging, horrible, brutal time in history.

Along with the everything that the soldiers went through and the experiences that they witnessed, they didn’t just bring home physical scars, but mental scars. They saw things that nobody should never see. They saw friends get killed, they saw innocent people lose their lives and they had to kill or to be killed themselves. As much as young men wanted to do what was right to serve their countries, they didn’t realize that what they were going to be doing was going to change them forever.

More than half a million service members suffered some sort of psychiatric collapse due to combat. Alarmingly, 40 percent of medical discharges during the war were for psychiatric conditions. The vast majority of those can be attributed to combat stress

You also have to think about the children who grew up not only in a war torn country, but the children whose fathers weren’t the same person as when they left. A lot of them grew up not knowing if their father was going to come home or if they will ever see their families again because they were separated from them when they were taken to work camps. The war did a lot of physical and mental damage, and it shows.

Combat stress reaction (CSR), often referred to as combat fatigue or battle neurosis, emerged as the successor to shell shock during World War II. This condition is an acute behavioral disorganization directly resulting from the trauma of war. While the experience of combat fatigue was nothing new, soldiers had faced similar issues in World War I and even earlier – military medicine during WWII began to better understand its causes. Initially known by terms such as nostalgia and old sergeant’s disease, this condition came to be more systematically identified as combat fatigue.

There’s an old saying in the army: “Stay Alert, Stay Alive!”

Wise words indeed. But how long can a soldier remain in a constant state of alertness before damage is caused to their mental state? How long before this damage becomes permanent?

Treating mental health back then wasn’t as common as it is now. They didn’t have the knowledge or the tools to help soldiers and their families. The treatment options were not perfected or were fawned upon because they did more harm then good.

The simplest therapy was rest, sometimes combined with tranquillizers. Other treatments included the use of electroshock therapy, hypnosis, and narcotherapy. This last treatment option involved the use of Pentothal, a 'truth serum. The use of certain treatments for mental illness changed with every medical advance. Although hydrotherapy, metrazol convulsion, and insulin shock therapy were popular in the 1930s, these methods gave way to psychotherapy in the 1940s. By the 1950s, doctors favored artificial fever therapy and electroshock therapy.

Men knew they had to be the man of the house and provide for their families. They didn’t want to admit that they were mentally struggling. A lot of the time, they didn’t want to talk about what was going on. They didn’t want to bring up those memories or pass along those mental images onto their families. They less they knew, the better. Those memories stay with you.

Soldiers would have triggers that would take them back to war. Thunder, fireworks and things being dropped could sound like gunshots or hearing different accents can take them back to the battlefield. It’s a fight or flight response. Some people may get violent, or they get scared and breakdown. It’s a survival mechanism. It may fade over time, but it never fully goes away.

Getting a mental health diagnosis at that time was almost non existing. You could have at the simplest problem or ailment and be treated with something severe with lifetime consequences and there would have no way to reverse the damage that was caused. Lobotomies were common and a lot of the time, they weren’t successful.

Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale in the 1940s, with one doctor, Walter J. Freeman II, performing more than 3,500 by the late 1960s

It was a different time, and they had little to go on when it came to helping those who were struggling. Men didn’t want to talk about it, women didn’t know how to act around their husbands and children were sometimes scared to be about their fathers because they didn’t know how they were going to react.

Men wanted to fight, they wanted to do their part, but they suffered mentally for it. They came home as a different person. They will self-medicated with alcohol to help cope with the memories. They want to forget and move on as best as they could.

No matter how far you look back in history, mental health conditions have always been there. We’re gotten better at approving and trying to make things right, but there’s always going to be room for growth and change. We’re always learning and with the knowledge we have from the past gives us a better chance of trying to make things right. We learn from our mistakes.