The Effects Of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Through The Ages

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en with PTSD. It is estimated that some 60,000 British soldiers were diagnosed and 44,000 were retired from military duty because they could no longer perform in combat. WWI was one of the most destructive wars of the modern age in terms of loss of life. Around 9 million men lost their lives in this war. But when it came to PTSD the British were terrible in their diagnosis and care of their sick soldiers. During the war, 306 British soldiers were shot on the orders of their commanders.
Back then the British had no real definition of the disease and these men were shot because they were though to be malingerers. Malingering back then, to the British was just an excuse by commanders to execute a soldier, but these symptoms they were showing were the signs of PTSD, or as they called it, “War Neurosis”. These symptoms were walking around dazed and confused or as the British called it, desertion. This was a total atrocity that is still being settled by the UK government to this day. It was due to lack of knowledge and the willingness of commanders to recognize this problem that these soldiers were killed.
Through the years following WWI and II more research was done to try and find the cause of the problem. The actual term of “Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” was not actually used until around 1980 when the Third Edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders was published. When the first edition was published in 1952 it named PTSD “Stress Response Syndrome”. In 1968 when the second edition was published things of course had changed due to the Vietnam War. When this edition was published, part of the diagnosis for the problem had changed they said that if you carried the symptoms of this disorder more than 6 months after returning home from the war, then you had a pre-existing condition making it a “Transient Situational Disorder” and the problem was never connected with violent milit...