During and after the First World War, thousands of soldiers reported serious mental disorders , but it was not immediately clear that having participated in the war was the cause, because psychopathology was not thought to be a trigger. [3]

The term " shell shock " was first used in 1915 by psychologist Charles Myers in the medical journal The Lancet . Myers hypothesized that the brain lesions were a consequence of the proximity to the bombings, due to excessive noise and carbon monoxide poisoning, but this turned out to be unfounded, as brain damage was also present in subjects far from the bombings. [3] The soldiers were taken to mental hospitals , where the treatment often consisted of electroshock ; some lost their minds, others had more or less disabling disorders throughout their lives. [3]

The French neurologist Joseph Babinski in 1917 attributed the symptoms to hysteria , which at the time was treated with hypnosis , so he proposed this type of treatment to soldiers, also obtaining promising results. The idea also spread that the symptoms reported by the soldiers were fictions, implemented so as not to return to war. [3]

In Italy it was considered inappropriate to attribute the psychological traumas reported by the military to the war, since military service was compulsory, [3] furthermore among psychiatrists the theory prevailed of a particular vulnerability and genetic predisposition to the disease, or that it could be of simulation. [4] In Italy, in fact, psychiatrists investigated the mental disorders of soldiers also in light of the studies of Lombroso , who, based on physiognomic and craniometric analysis and findings, attributed certain deviances to the so-called " degenerationism of the species ". [5]

Thousands of men were placed in asylums or returned home but assigned to private treatment.

People began to call them " war fools ."

Shell shock could manifest itself in different modalities and intensities, in the medical records the symptoms could be described as "manic exaltation", "psychomotor excitement", "confusional access", "hallucinatory confusion", "mental confusion" and "sensory delirium", [5] "irrepressible tremors", "hypersensitivity to noise", "inexpressive men, who look around themselves like birds locked in a cage" or who "eat whatever comes their way, ash, rubbish, earth" and also varied from diarrhea uncontrollable to relentless anxiety , from hysterical tics to stomach cramps. The most common forms of mental illness reported by soldiers involved persecutory delusions , amnesia , loss of ability to express oneself, inability to suppress memories or repression of anything having to do with the war, loss temporary perception of the external world, hallucinations , motor dysfunctions, mental arrests, hypochondriac obsessions . [6]

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock

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