![]() He has forced himself to return to work out of desperation, still haunted by the unimaginable horrors he experienced as an officer on the Front but unable to continue facing the mindlessness caused by the drugs he was forced to take. In A Test of Wills, the first of Charles Todd’s excellent novels featuring Inspector Ian Rutledge of the Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard), Rutledge has recently been released from the clinic where he was being treated for shell shock. ![]() But it doesn’t appear to have been widely noticed for what it is until World War I, when it was given the name “shell shock.” Then, the nightmare of trench warfare on the Western Front crowded millions of men together in a stalemate, subjecting them to the seemingly endless threat of sudden death in the artillery barrages that preceded every futile effort by either side to break through the other’s lines. The phenomenon we know as PTSD has probably been around since the time roving bands of Australopithecus afarensis beat each other to death with clubs on the savannah. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |