The First Major Appearance of PTSD

We've all heard about post-traumatic stress disorder, and we've all probably watched or read information about how it's commonly found in people who have fought in a war or have experienced the "warzone" environment. The important thing is that it's very rare in today's time, and that's because we haven't had a major war in a while.

Right after World War 1, though, there were millions coming home from being stuck in trenches for hours, or running through barbed wire on No Man's Land, or being blown into the air by bombs, or seeing bullets fly around them as they struggled to stay safe.









As soldiers returned to their everyday lives, the people around them noticed that they didn't seem normal anymore. They seemed to be unable to communicate as well as they had before. Their symptoms were similar to those of illnesses like amnesia, or some kind of inability to communicate or function normally. There was no clear physical cause on the outside.

An English physician named Charles Myers was the first to write about "shell-shock", and theorized that these strange symptoms were actually caused by concussive blasts endured by soldiers in the war. According to him, these blasts did cause actual physical injury to the brain and resulted in these strange symptoms. However, his theory didn't hold true, as people that weren't on the battlefield developed the same symptoms, and some people on the battlefield didn't develop them.



It took a long time, but psychologists eventually started to realize that this was a disorder caused by traumatic events, hence the name 'post-traumatic' stress was soon used to describe it. People soon learned that everyone was affected by PTSD differently, and that each person dealt with it on their own. This sudden outburst of discoveries about trauma and traumatic events led to a growing interest in psychology and the mind.

Because an entire generation of men came home - each soldier with his own problem - society struggled to adjust and rebuild itself, and it took time for everything to feel 'normal' again.