Hiding PTSD Records Of Civil War Veterans?

What we know is that soldiers with what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, were shot for being cowards. They often ran away and yes, even committed suicide. There was an excuse back then because no one really understood what psychological trauma was. So what is their excuse for not releasing these documents? Easy. Family members may have the proof to clear the record of their veteran after all these years. I doubt there could be any other excuse.

Hiding PTSD Records Of Civil War Veterans?
Even files of the long dead are off limits
Editorial
The Hartford Courant
February 28, 2014

Doesn't this sound familiar?

Some years ago, Connecticut scholars researching post-traumatic stress disorder in Civil War veterans won a state Freedom of Information Commission ruling providing the researchers access to records of patients treated at a Middletown mental health facility in the 1860s.

That researchers would want to search such records makes sense. As Matthew Warshauer, the Central Connecticut State University professor who petitioned for the records, has written, the history of Civil War soldiers has "stark relevance for today's soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan."
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The UK was doing it too.

At total of 304 men were executed during the First World War, while another 18 suffered the same fate while waiting to leave the army after the signing of the Armistice. Of those executed, the vast majority, 286, committed the offence while in the trenches on the Western Front.

Here during WWII

Nearly 50,000 American and 100,000 British soldiers deserted from the armed forces during World War II. (The British were in the war much longer.) Some fell into the arms of French or Italian women. Some became black-market pirates. Many more simply broke under the strain of battle.

These men’s stories have rarely been told. During the war, newspapers largely abstained from writing about desertions. The topic was bad for morale and could be exploited by the enemy. In more recent decades the subject has been essentially taboo, as if to broach it would dent the halo around the Greatest Generation.

“The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II,” by the historian and former ABC News foreign correspondent Charles Glass, thus performs a service. It’s the first book to examine at length the sensitive topic of desertions during this war, and the facts it presents are frequently revealing and heartbreaking.