Civil War PTSD

[JackADriscoll]

Nostalgia is an excellent read.

 

[CWdiaryPA]

Colonel Holliday graduated 24th in the West Point class of 1850.

Ryan

Oh my word, how sad.

 

[Old Soldier]

PTSD is yet another term to describe this ... condition. Most old soldiers, regular soldiers, were. and still are. well aware of this and often helped and protected their small unit comrades. It is more common than people would like to think, but few at home would know or understand how and why.

As others have said, like all cases of 'extreme depression', they would often use a bottle of some alcoholic beverage here and there. For many this side of the Pond, it became very apparent after WW1 when the country, not just the army, was at war and conscription forced them to go. Men returned from service and rarely talked about it. The memories were kept wrapped up, deep inside, and any attempt to find out what they were brushed aside, the subject changed or they resorted to alcohol amnesia.

It is something that many find hard to talk about. I am lucky, my mates on duty and on ops were not victims during my service or when I was with them. Several did not return from the Falklands which is why I will always wear my poppy on Rememberance Day. But, like my father and grandfather, I cannot explain why. If you were not a soldier, you will never understand.

 

[BCS1973]

If you were not a soldier, you will never understand.

As someone who was not a soldier, but grew up around soldiers, I can only agree with that statement. I have some relatives and friends who have been in the $h!# and will not speak of it. I can only imagine, and wish not to.

 

[rpkennedy]

As others have said, like all cases of 'extreme depression', they would often use a bottle of some alcoholic beverage here and there. For many this side of the Pond, it became very apparent after WW1 when the country, not just the army, was at war and conscription forced them to go. Men returned from service and rarely talked about it. The memories were kept wrapped up, deep inside, and any attempt to find out what they were brushed aside, the subject changed or they resorted to alcohol amnesia.

This puts me in mind of the introduction to Edward G. Lengel's To Conquer Hell: The Meuse-Argonne, 1918.

Reese Russell, a tall, slender, fun-loving, and handsome young man with jet-black hair and dark brown eyes, was thirty-four years old when the United States entered World War I in April 1917. He came from the little Appalachian mill town of Cedar Bluff in Tazewell County, Virginia, a place of quiet mountain charm where community picnics, summer bandstand concerts, and church revival meetings were the order of the day. He and most of his friends had never been more than twenty miles from home. Why travel, people joked, when they already lived in the most beautiful place on earth? Russell registered for the draft in the summer of 1917, and the U.S. Army called his number soon afterward. Putting down his banjo and straw hat, he kissed his girl good-bye and joined the 317th Infantry Regiment of the 80th "Blue Ridge" Infantry Division, a unit made up of draftees from rural Virginia, West Virginia, and western Pennsylvania. He went to France and fought in the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne, at obscure places like Béthin-court and the Dannevoux. After less than a week in combat in the fall of 1918, he was evacuated to the rear, with poison in his lungs and demons in his mind. Neither ever left him.

In 1919 he came home to Cedar Bluff to spend "the rest of his life," as his daughter remembered, "traveling a lonely road, out of step with his family, his friends, and his surroundings." His lungs ruined, he could no longer breathe properly and collapsed periodically into uncontrollable spasms of coughing. He never spoke of what he had seen in France, and forbade his family to mention the war in his presence. His uniform, helmet, gas mask, rifle, and bayonet stayed packed away in a trunk, strictly off-limits to his family. When he wasn't looking, his children secretly opened the trunk and fingered the mementos. To them, he had become a remote presence. As they handled the items, the children tried to guess what their father had experienced in the foggy, shell-torn fields and forests of the bloodiest battle in American history, the Meuse-Argonne.
Russell began drinking as soon as he returned home. He drank through the economic recession of 1919, when an ex-Doughboy could not find a job, and the boom years that followed. He drank through the Great Depression, and during Franklin Roosevelt's presidential administrations, when the New Deal's Promised Land always seemed just a step away. In 1941 America entered the Second World War, and Russell drank even more, as if in sympathy for the GIs about to die, or in realization that his war—the so-called War to End All Wars—had been fought in vain. And he never slept. He went through the motions—lying down in bed between midnight and 5:00 A.M.—but he never closed his eyes in sleep, "unless," his daughter recalled, "one could call the stupor he fell into when he drank in his later years, sleep." Perhaps he feared that his dreams would take him back to the war. He died a broken man at age sixty-one. As his daughter heard taps played over his lonely country grave, a sense of relief enveloped her. At last, her father's torments had ended, and he could sleep.

Pages 1-2 of the Kindle Edition.

Ryan

 

[damYankee]

It wasn't just booze that veterans used to dull memories and stop the pain of wounds.
Opiates were sold over the counter and became Americas first drug crisis, and many veterans were addicted
(It has been rumored by many who lived near him, that Jesse James returned from the war addicted to laudanum)

One of the most common medicines of the Civil War, and for thousands of years prior, were opiates such as morphine (administered via hypodermic syringe), powdered opium, and laudanum, a mix of alcohol and opium. Opium-derived medicines in the modern era are used as painkillers, however, in the Civil War era and antebellum America, opiates were used for just about every affliction and given to just about anyone regardless of age. By reading the diaries of Civil War veterans and Civil War-era medical journals, historians can see just how widely opiates were used at the time. The prevalence of opiates and their wide use became the cause of America's real opium addiction epidemic.

Opium Eaters and the Civil War

Learn how the use of opium to treat Civil War soldiers led to many cases of addiction

www.civilwarmed.org

America’s First Opioid Epidemic | The Saturday Evening Post

As the country struggles with a terrible opioid crisis, we remember a similar epidemic that raged through the U.S. in the 1800s.

www.saturdayeveningpost.com

 

[USS ALASKA]

Sirs, I read somewhere - and I wish I could give proper accreditation - that what we now identify as PTSD was the reason why many veterans of both sides left their states at the end of the war and headed west. Wide open spaces, no other human contact unless one seeks it, 'Leave me the heck alone.' And quiet...

Also that the Hollywood representation of bad guys in the post-war west terrorizing everyone was false. If you survived Antietam, Chickamauga, Gettysburg - some clown on a horse with a gun was not going to intimidate you.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

 

[rpkennedy]

Sirs, I read somewhere - and I wish I could give proper accreditation - that what we now identify as PTSD was the reason why many veterans of both sides left their states at the end of the war and headed west. Wide open spaces, no other human contact unless one seeks it, 'Leave me the heck alone.' And quiet...

Also that the Hollywood representation of bad guys in the post-war west terrorizing everyone was false. If you survived Antietam, Chickamauga, Gettysburg - some clown on a horse with a gun was not going to intimidate you.

Cheers,
USS ALASKA

One of mine did that. He went to Montana and lived there for about 20 years by himself. Eventually, he made his way back to New York over the course of about 7 years while staying in veteran's homes along the way. He lived the last few years of his life with his sister and was buried with her and her husband.

Ryan

 

[BCS1973]

I would recommend Brian Matthew Jordan's Marching Home: Union Veterans and their Unending Civil War. It discusses a number of different topics including PTSD and how the veterans dealt with it.

Ryan

That book is next on my list. Had it for about a year now.

 

[Pete Longstreet]

Shelby Foote talks briefly about Civil War PTSD in this interview. He begins to speak on the topic at 1:46:30 of this video.

 

[Tennessee Union Gal]

Probably lots of self-medication with alcohol.

 

[MWood1841]

If you survived Antietam, Chickamauga, Gettysburg - some clown on a horse with a gun was not going to intimidate you.

Great point!

 

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

PTSD is yet another term to describe this ... condition. Most old soldiers, regular soldiers, were. and still are. well aware of this and often helped and protected their small unit comrades. It is more common than people would like to think, but few at home would know or understand how and why.

Yes and no.

Soldiers definitely experience things too awful and traumatic to describe, things that civilians can't imagine. I don't what it feels like to deliberately killed someone or to see someone blown apart by an explosion. The sounds, the smells, the sense of death looming over you. To know what's like to truly trust someone with your life, or what it feels like when someone you've trusted like that dies in front of you. I can't grok it.

However, there is an increased public awareness that the horrors of war exist, in stark contrast to the past when it was not shown and not discussed. Civilians were in the dark, often deliberately so.

Part if it not just being exposed to war. There's an increased understanding that PTSD doesn't only happen to soldiers, and that it's not just from a single event; that it can be cumulative too. Too much strain for too long.

"You'll never understand" is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if they cannot ever fully understand - can't grok - the wall of silence perpetuates and reinforces an absence of understanding.

PTSD is a major cause of suicide, and suicide is something we as a society refuse to discuss openly and honesty. So many people are so obsessed with staying alive as long as they possibly can, whatever it takes, they simply cannot fathom why anyone would want to die. They are like Jefferson Davis in 1865, perpetually in the bargaining stage of grief, desperate not to lose, past the point where winning is possible or meaningful.

Maybe one must to at some point want to die before one can understand why someone else would want to. Before the unfathomable becomes fathomable.

I think with PTSD many people at least want to try to understand. With suicide most people want to ignore.

 

[USS ALASKA]

F
USS ALASKA

 

[A. Roy]

There was an author on the CWT Wednesday night presentations that wrote a book about this. I am unsure of the author or name. It makes sense though. The noise and wounds alone were horrific.

You might be thinking of Ernest Dollar, my colleague here in Raleigh NC. He gave a presentation a while back based on the research for his book, Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War's Final Campaign in North Carolina.

One of the points he makes in his book is that many of the veterans who made it to the battles of the Carolinas Campaign had been through four years of brutal, life-changing trauma and showed the symptoms.

AR

 

[CWdiaryPA]

Yes and no.

Soldiers definitely experience things too awful and traumatic to describe, things that civilians can't imagine. I don't what it feels like to deliberately killed someone or to see someone blown apart by an explosion. The sounds, the smells, the sense of death looming over you. To know what's like to truly trust someone with your life, or what it feels like when someone you've trusted like that dies in front of you. I can't grok it.

However, there is an increased public awareness that the horrors of war exist, in stark contrast to the past when it was not shown and not discussed. Civilians were in the dark, often deliberately so.

Part if it not just being exposed to war. There's an increased understanding that PTSD doesn't only happen to soldiers, and that it's not just from a single event; that it can be cumulative too. Too much strain for too long.

"You'll never understand" is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if they cannot ever fully understand - can't grok - the wall of silence perpetuates and reinforces an absence of understanding.

PTSD is a major cause of suicide, and suicide is something we as a society refuse to discuss openly and honesty. So many people are so obsessed with staying alive as long as they possibly can, whatever it takes, they simply cannot fathom why anyone would want to die. They are like Jefferson Davis in 1865, perpetually in the bargaining stage of grief, desperate not to lose, past the point where winning is possible or meaningful.

Maybe one must to at some point want to die before one can understand why someone else would want to. Before the unfathomable becomes fathomable.

I think with PTSD many people at least want to try to understand. With suicide most people want to ignore.

Now at least we understand more about C-PTSD, or Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, the symptoms, the behavioral changes in the aftermath of an event, more about what makes some people more or less resilient than others, etc. It doesn't take actual combat, people blown to bits in front of someone before they 'qualify' for the condition. Events that are one-time OR ongoing like childhood abuse, a car accident, prison, a mugging, a drive-by, you name it, all CAN have aftershocks to them that differ in severity. Shattering comes in many forms, even disguises. And I'm certain there's at least a few of us here diagnosed at some point. When symptoms of reaction tend to be the same across the board after traumatic events, it illustrates a common human pattern. It's not a competition, it's a correlation.

Joshism brings up a good point about the "you'll never understand" thing. That's true, same as Joe Shmoe won't understand what it's like to give birth to a dead set of full term twins after your husband punched you in the abdomen. If we can get this stuff more into the light, our commonalities, versus hoarding our life experiences as terminally unique (they're not), we can have more a chance at healing faster, or eventually, or at least think there's a crack where light someday may get in, you know? And suicide is something people say after the fact "If only I'd have known." Were they looking to know? Some, yes. Some, no.

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder - PubMed

Complex post-traumatic stress disorder (complex PTSD) is a severe mental disorder that emerges in response to traumatic life events. Complex PTSD is characterised by three core post-traumatic symptom clusters, along with chronic and pervasive disturbances in emotion regulation, identity, and...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

 

[SWS]

Victorian society and asylum officials went to great lengths in avoiding the correlation between combat trauma and manifestations of psychiatric illness among veterans and the postbellum surge of domestic/intra-community violence, substance abuse, despondency, suicide, etc., by and among them. War was considered the ultimate test of manhood, after all, and other 'moral failings' (as well as the South's social, political and economic condition in 1865-1880) ought to have been the cause of veterans' troubles and 'aberration of mind'.

Of course, antebellum America was no picture of mental and societal health, either, considering the erection of public insane asylums from Maine to Mississippi and an astonishing rate of per capita alcohol consumption, not to mention the sheer irresponsible emotionalism and fanaticism the sectional crises generated, ultimately leading to the demise of as many as 700,000 of us in 1861-65 and the maiming of scores of thousands more. Perhaps the rise of an individualistic and democratic culture steeped in 'self-made' ambition and universal suffrage (including the mortgaged cotton-planter and not the Ashley Wilkes' idyll of fiction) and ceaseless frontier settlement and 'commercial speculation' laden with so much ostensible opportunity also had something to do with it. It's no wonder so many men raised on their father's quiet subsistence farm were rendered mad in such heady and volatile 'arenas' demanding one 'push' for education, wealth, status, etc., no matter what circumstance or competition. A lifetime of agitation, the same kind that compelled prideful creatures such as General Philip Cocke to blow his brains out and Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov to bash in an old pawnbroker woman's skull in with an axe. And many such men were not even combat veterans.

"That our country is happily exempt from many rife sources of insanity, incident to the dense population and the social and political institutions of Europe, is indisputable; but do not those very institutions [peasantry, as depicted in the works of Jean-François Millet and Van Gogh, for instance, remained the norm for many communities well up to the 1900s] which we so much deprecate present a check to insanity? And are not those free institutions in which we glory calculated to promote it?

Life in our republic has all the excitement of an Olympic contest. A wide arena is thrown open and all fearlessly join in the maddening rush for the laurel wreath, or golden chaplet, which are the guerdons in that race and rarely does any Hesperian fruit seduce the candidates from the contest. Are not the bitter rancor of partisans, the morbid excitement of politicians, the feverish anxiety of gambling speculators, the sickness of hope deferred, ambition maddened by defeat, avarice rendered desperate by failure, so many sources of insanity! When the darker passions of the heart thus rise in mad rebellion, will not reason either be dethroned or reign in tumultuous anarchy?

In Europe, on the contrary, the arena is more limited, the competitors are fewer, their course is comparatively clear, and the metae are less widely separated [as in you are more likely to adopt your father's trade and means, I think]. Life is there rather a walk, than a race, and is pursued in a slower gait, rarely presenting the elbowing strife and jostling emulation so lamentably frequent in our over-crowded agora. The excitement of rivalry is diminished by the different castes of competitors being confined to their respective courses, which are separated by barriers rendered sacred, of time-honored custom..."

- On the Distribution of Insanity in the United States, C.B. Hayden, Southern Literary Messenger, March 1844

 

[Kathy the history sleuth]

You might be thinking of Ernest Dollar, my colleague here in Raleigh NC. He gave a presentation a while back based on the research for his book, Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War's Final Campaign in North Carolina.

One of the points he makes in his book is that many of the veterans who made it to the battles of the Carolinas Campaign had been through four years of brutal, life-changing trauma and showed the symptoms.

AR

Thank you that sounds correct. In addition to living with terrible physical disabilities that society could understand and accept, PTSD was unknown and not understood. The Civil War casualty count should probably be doubled in my opinion taking this into account.
Imagine just the deafness from being around artillery without ear protection. I've never heard that mentioned.
Trauma follows all war. But at least today there is some understanding of it. When we look at a Civil War gravestone of a person who survived the war, we should keep in mind that person's life was changed in some way by it, even if they survived.

 

[Old Soldier]

Yes and no.

Soldiers definitely experience things too awful and traumatic to describe, things that civilians can't imagine. I don't what it feels like to deliberately killed someone or to see someone blown apart by an explosion. The sounds, the smells, the sense of death looming over you. To know what's like to truly trust someone with your life, or what it feels like when someone you've trusted like that dies in front of you. I can't grok it.

However, there is an increased public awareness that the horrors of war exist, in stark contrast to the past when it was not shown and not discussed. Civilians were in the dark, often deliberately so.

Part if it not just being exposed to war. There's an increased understanding that PTSD doesn't only happen to soldiers, and that it's not just from a single event; that it can be cumulative too. Too much strain for too long.

"You'll never understand" is also a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if they cannot ever fully understand - can't grok - the wall of silence perpetuates and reinforces an absence of understanding.

PTSD is a major cause of suicide, and suicide is something we as a society refuse to discuss openly and honesty. So many people are so obsessed with staying alive as long as they possibly can, whatever it takes, they simply cannot fathom why anyone would want to die. They are like Jefferson Davis in 1865, perpetually in the bargaining stage of grief, desperate not to lose, past the point where winning is possible or meaningful.

Maybe one must to at some point want to die before one can understand why someone else would want to. Before the unfathomable becomes fathomable.

I think with PTSD many people at least want to try to understand. With suicide most people want to ignore.

Suicide is something new. In the past, they never tried to top themselves because they knew it was a sin and the end of their trip to heaven, if they believed what they were told at church. This was always some mental support in the past - and a good reason - GOD'S WILL. If you do not believe - or if you have no religion, there are no rules to follow.

PTSD is YOUR problem, no one else's, and few are likely to bother with you - just another drunken ex-soldier who is a bit 'funny'. They will NEVER understand, because they have NEVER experienced what YOU have been through. They cannot even imagine what you have been through They have never seen their friends and comrades battered and punctured , killed and wounded, by shell and bullet. they have never had to shoot the opponent or stick a bayonet in them. They have NEVER been left on their own with just a few strangers to support them in the danger of the front line.

PTSD rarely happens during the battle, it is always after, when the danger has passed and the adrenaline has eased it's way out of your system and you are relaxing - or trying to relax. That is when the memories return and you react to those happenings. That is when you need good mates and someone to talk to.

 

[Josh The Lighthouse Guy]

Suicide is something new.

Rates may be up, but as several ACW excerpts others have posted in this thread it is nothing new.

If anything, shooting yourself in the head with a modern firearm is probably more reliably fatal than 1860s firearms.