Case 1 of Shell Shock 100 Years Ago

100 years since the first case of shell shock, it’s time to prioritise mental health
It’s 100 years since the first documented case of shell shock today. What progress should we be making a century on?
New Statesman
BY DAN JARVIS PUBLISHED
31 OCTOBER, 2014

Since "Case 1" of shell shock, we still need to make far more progress.

Photo: Getty

One hundred years ago today, on the morning of the 31 October 1914, a 20-year-old private ventured out into firing line of the First World War for the first time.

We know from frontline reports that he and his platoon had just left their trench when they were "found" by the German artillery.

The explosions sparked chaos and confusion as everyone dived for cover. The young soldier was separated from his comrades and became tangled in barbed wire.

As he struggled to free himself, three shells rained down on him, missing him by only a few feet. Witnesses said it was sheer miracle that he survived.

But when the young man was admitted to hospital a few days later, it was clear to the medics that his close brush with death had left a mark on him the like of which they had not seen before.

History hasn’t remembered the young private’s name. Today we know him only as "Case 1" from a seminal report published early in 1915 by a Cambridge professor and army doctor called Dr Charles Myers.

It detailed the first documented cases of what Myers came to describe as "shell shock".

More than 80,000 members of the British Army had been diagnosed with the disorder by the time the First World War came to an end, including the famous war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen.
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The human cost of war is hidden from us

The human cost of war is hidden from us

Statistics for the number wounded in the line of duty have been buried. We need to know more
Magnus Linklater

Our friend Billy came back from Afghanistan rather earlier than planned. A Scots Royal Marine, he was on patrol in Sangin province when his Jackal armoured car hit a roadside bomb and was blown apart. Both his legs have been badly broken, but he has been told he is not going to lose them. “I'm definitely going to enroll in the Paralympics,” he joked from Selly Oak, the military hospital in Birmingham where all our serious casualties go. The reality is that months of long and painful recuperation lie ahead of him. As to the long-term mental effect, that can only be guessed at.

As Lance Corporal Johnson Beharry, VC, pointed out so forcibly at the weekend, the war wounded returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, however well cared for initially, are too often left to fend for themselves later - the forgotten victims of an endless conflict. Beharry was hailed for his bravery, but the scars may be with him for life. “I am learning to live with it,” he said. “Everyone experiences combat stress differently. But we are all linked, we all suffer the same problem in different ways.” His charge was that the Ministry of Defence provides inadequate aftercare - he called it “disgraceful”. But perhaps too he meant that for every soldier who dies there are others whose suffering we hear little about.

The death of a soldier in Afghanistan or Iraq is still accorded a mention on the news. The statistics about the wounded are buried. You can find them on the Ministry of Defence's website. But they do not command the headlines. Death is different. British soldiers killed in action - 148 of them now, since 2001 - are returned home with full military honours. Flags fly at half-mast, and the Union Flag is draped over the coffins as they are carried in a slow march off the plane at Brize Norton.
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UK looks at MRI scans for PTSD

MRI testing on PTSD
MRI testing in America has revealed startling differences in the brains of soldiers with combat stress
# January 27, 2009 by admin1


Feeling the pressure: British troops in Afghanistan in 2007 Photo: PA
For the Ancient Greeks, it was a “divine madness” that infected the minds of soldiers. During the US Civil War, it became known as “soldier’s heart”. By the First World War it was called shell shock. Today, the condition is known as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The idea that war can inflict deep and lasting psychological wounds is not new. In Sophocles’s tragedies, former soldiers descend into a state of mind that would be all too familiar to modern military psychiatrists. Yet despite the passage of more than 2,400 years, our understanding of PTSD has remained surprisingly unsophisticated: not only are the underlying biological and psychological causes poorly understood, but it is almost impossible to predict which soldiers are the most susceptible.

Now, however, new research from America – triggered by the soaring incidence of PTSD among troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan – has found striking differences in the brain patterns of those suffering from combat stress, raising hopes that we will be able to identify and treat sufferers much more effectively.

At the most basic level, PTSD is the result of a breakdown in the defence system that copes with traumatic and frightening experiences. After such events, most people will suffer what is known as Acute Stress Disorder, which involves symptoms of anxiety and depression. The majority will recover, but a minority go on to develop the chronic mental health problems that characterise PTSD.

“They get stuck in a cycle whereby recollections of a traumatic event are triggered by a particular situation they encounter,” explains Professor Simon Wessely, director of the King’s Centre for Military Health Research at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. “This triggers the symptoms, and they then try to avoid the situation that triggered the recollections – but that just means that the symptoms get worse the next time they encounter the same situation.”

“Those who develop PTSD are not necessarily the most vulnerable,” adds Professor Roberto Rona, a lecturer at King’s Psychological Medicine and Psychiatry Division. “Ideally, we would want to start treatment as soon as possible by separating those who are going to recover normally and those who will have a problem after a traumatic event.”
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Troops coming back from Afghanistan need to beware of what they bring back, deadly spiders

When Rodney Griffiths came home on leave from Afghanistan, he thought he was leaving the perils of the desert behind.
By Daily Mail Reporter

Last updated at 10:48 PM on 27th August 2008

But a little bit of danger had hitched a ride back with him.

A camel spider has been seen scuttling across the floor of the paratrooper's home and is thought to have killed the family's pet dog Bella.

Now his wife Lorraine and their children Cassie, 18, Ricky, 16, and Ellie-Rose, four, have been forced to move out until the creature is found.

Mrs Griffiths, 37, thinks the hairy, sandycoloured spider is nesting in Cassie's bedroom.


She has left out traps and plates of raw mince in the bedroom. The meat has been devoured, but so far the spider has managed to escape.


The camel spider, which grows up to six inches long, belongs to a group of arachnids called solifugae.


It can run at up to 10mph and feeds on insects and small animals.


Mrs Griffiths said the spider appeared after her husband, 32, returned in June
from a four-month tour in Helmand province with the 16 Air Assault Brigade. Mr Griffiths has now returned to the desert.

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