Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?

I'd say this could qualify as a case of PTSD.

The Washington Post, July 9, 1913, page 4

Gettysburg soldier jumps.jpg
 
Thanks for that Rosefiend- yea, I'd say so. How awful. You wonder if one of best things you could say of the soldiers homes would be that the veterans were together since no one else could understand what they were going through- how war had left it's mark on each of them.
 
Oh dear, poor man! My dad used to dream that his weapon had jammed.
My mother used to tell me that my father, for years, would leap off the bed, and shout for his company to "take cover". He was an officer in WWII. He most definitely had PTSD until the day he died, by his own hand. Those poor CW soldiers--there was no diagnosis for it then--and I'm sure many, like my dad, didn't seek help for what they couldn't understand. "Men just don't do that" attitude...
 
Hope it isn't modern politics to state we lose our veterans to suicide at eye poppingly surreal rates. 200 a day?

Battle PTSD is a whole, ' nother beast from PTSD acquired through other traumas. It sounds to me as if they accidently discovered a bandaid for our CW vets without in the least understanding what it was which was so beneficial. Plain, old support in key to managing PTSDs symptoms. The soldiers homes at least provided that, having a population closely linked through experiences.

So many veterans just fell apart post war I think of then oftrn, how they survive with a shattered, rerouted nervous system. It had to be awfully common, not only ex soldiers but our female aid workers too.
 
From page 164 The Army of Robert E. Lee, by Philip Katcher.

"A number of soldiers, affected by both nostalgia and the pressures of battle, succumbed to what today is know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many of them in Lee's Army were sent to Louisiana Hospital in Richmond which was, as of 27 March 1865, set aside strictly for the treatment of such cases of mental illness."

The treatment of mental illness was in its infancy during the Civil War. I can not help but wonder what the treatment for mental illness during the Civil War consisted of. Where did the Confederate Army find enough doctors trained in the treatment of mental illness to properly staff a mental heath hospital?
 
From page 164 The Army of Robert E. Lee, by Philip Katcher.

"A number of soldiers, affected by both nostalgia and the pressures of battle, succumbed to what today is know as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Many of them in Lee's Army were sent to Louisiana Hospital in Richmond which was, as of 27 March 1865, set aside strictly for the treatment of such cases of mental illness."

The treatment of mental illness was in its infancy during the Civil War. I can not help but wonder what the treatment for mental illness during the Civil War consisted of. Where did the Confederate Army find enough doctors trained in the treatment of mental illness to properly staff a mental heath hospital?
I can't find further information on the Civil War use of Louisiana Hospital in Richmond as a mental hospital. This page on the Civil War use of that hospital doesn't mention it.

http://www.mdgorman.com/Hospitals/louisiana_general_hospital.htm

Does Katcher give a source that could point me in the right direction?
 
A lot of hospitals had dual or triple uses- some are listed as prisons like Moore Hospital in Richmond. That was right next door to ( I think ) Hospital #11 , Legons? Leggons? It's difficult to find lists of all the hospitals in Richmond much less prisons. There's no central data base covering all of them much less what they were variously assigned as. My point is not all sources contain all the information on these places.

I'm curious as to why the source is required, is there something about having this place used as a mental hospital which is controversial? I'd have think it a splendid thing on the part of those caring for veterans in the south right? In an era which did not deal well with mental illness societally, for these men to be specifically cared for is amazing! It raised my eyebrows- so, so many veterans had to deal with their shattered nervous systems all by themselves. For post war mental trauma to be recognized and addressed like this puts Richmond decades ahead of the times.
 
Was thinking about this while reading nurse Julia Wheelock's journal- disclaimer being it's ridiculous, diagnosing disorders from 150 years distance. Still, PTSD and war? Little different than the 10 years it takes to come up with bipolar. Julia replays her brother's death again and again and again- while dealing with awful death in field hospitals, the war at its worst. Understandably never gets over her experience ( like a lot of nurses- when asked to write their pages for the book " Our Army Nurses " some simply provide a statement saying they are unable to due to how traumatic the memory remains. ) to the point where her eventually published journal is titled ' Our Boys In White '. Decades post war, ' white ' boys are the men who she says turn white at the moment of death- they stay with her.

Getting further an further into this part of the war you begin to understand what a cohesive bond these people had post war, men and women, wounded and those who somehow were not. There's a thread somewhere ( probably quite a few in the long history here ) discussing how it would have been impossible, the idea that veterans of both armies really did drop their animosity towards each. That the photos we see of them at Gettysburg's reunion must be the exception, or something which happened just for that occasion then everyone went back to hating each other. Bet it wasn't like that no matter how handy that is for Agenda. Bet this was so awful no one but each other, North and South knew what it was like- both during the war and to live with what it had done to them.

Having grown up as a child around the VA hospitals where my dad worked, it seemed that everyone whom a vet came into contact with, from the nurses and orderlies to the laundry guys and grounds keepers, the maintenance and food service people, the med techs--they were all veterans. Perhaps it was like that for Civil War veterans--so many more people had served that there were just more people in any community to understand and to be supportive.
 
A lot of hospitals had dual or triple uses- some are listed as prisons like Moore Hospital in Richmond. That was right next door to ( I think ) Hospital #11 , Legons? Leggons? It's difficult to find lists of all the hospitals in Richmond much less prisons. There's no central data base covering all of them much less what they were variously assigned as. My point is not all sources contain all the information on these places.

I'm curious as to why the source is required, is there something about having this place used as a mental hospital which is controversial? I'd have think it a splendid thing on the part of those caring for veterans in the south right? In an era which did not deal well with mental illness societally, for these men to be specifically cared for is amazing! It raised my eyebrows- so, so many veterans had to deal with their shattered nervous systems all by themselves. For post war mental trauma to be recognized and addressed like this puts Richmond decades ahead of the times.
I am not doubting him, I'm trying to find out more about the use of this place as a mental hospital. I kind of thought that was the purpose of the thread.

I'm also not sure why having questions about whether or not the hospital was used as a mental hospital would have anything to do with whether or not a mental hospital would be a splendid thing. Splendidness is not a measure of a fact's likeliness to be true.
 
Well, it's not a matter of being accustomed? Because you can't see the d*m thing it's frequently discounted which is why it took so long to be recognized. It's literally a broken nervous system. The neuro pathways have been rerouted, like a creek finds new ways to run, or electrical circuits, new ways to flow- the brain is just, plain broken. We're just not glued together to deal with the kind of adrenaline dumps war hands you- so extreme and on such a massive level, for SO, so long, too although it only takes one dreadful event to break the system. War PTSD is a whole, different animal because it's so, so shattered a person's nervous system, who on earth can coax that creek back to it's correct banks? You can't. All the circuits went and found the wrong wall sockets, plugged themselves, everything's gone POOF. Running 220 through 110 wiring.

If someone came away from the war without PTSD, you'd have to think they were badly wired going in. There's no cure, just management- and how does one manage something no one acknowledges you have?

This is very good. The brain actually physically breaks. Micro scans can now show a field of neuro-receptors that once looked like flowering bushes....that after mental trouble or war trauma or whatever....look like a field of dead, thorny stump of a shrub. The actual physical construction of the brain can change. With or without physical trauma.
I have seen pics of these scans and they are amazing. Sad, though. They can probably be viewed online if you are a good searcher.

I personally don't think very many humans are built to withstand the emotional and visual trauma of war. I don't think very many of us were intended to withstand that kind of constant turmoil.
As far as ACW soldier was concerned I think their physically demanding life actually helped. I think ahead of the chance for trauma the physical toil and physical requirements placed on the body and brain chemicals was actually preventative and restorative. Now not to the point of enduring disease, just a great deal of strenuous physical activity. Men on the march were immeasurably healthier than men in camp., also.

A few people seem to do fine...almost like they WERE built for this purpose. Most of those are not high officers but warriors in the ranks.
 
And it's probably not so much about stoicism in the CW folks as it was about things "not being talked about" or covered up.

It's easy for important stories to vanish in the space of one or two generations, especially if they aren't written down -- in the space of three or four generations, the stuff you don't talk about is very, very hard to dig up, if there's any trace of it at all. My grandma's uncle, upon his return home from the service, was constantly drunk, and he died while walking on a train trestle over the Nodaway River -- killed by an oncoming train. Maybe he was drunk and careless, maybe he was up there on purpose. (Though Grandma said the engineer said he was running.) But only a few people know this story, and he was only a generation back.

With my own grandpa, who was in the 82nd Airborne in WWII, oh yes, the war affected him too. But my generation, his grandchildren, doesn't know his story at all. I'm already having to dig for it.
Our family was destroyed by the ACW. What had been a family producing doctors, lawyers, preachers and well off large farmers, changed. When 2 of the 6 brothers came back from the war they drank a lot. We had a 640 acre farm owned by my direct ancestor which in a generation was gone. The men didn't work good or do much for that generation or the next.
 
As far as ACW soldier was concerned I think their physically demanding life actually helped. I think ahead of the chance for trauma the physical toil and physical requirements placed on the body and brain chemicals was actually preventative and restorative. Now not to the point of enduring disease, just a great deal of strenuous physical activity. Men on the march were immeasurably healthier than men in camp., also.

I feel like I read something somewhere at sometime that stated extreme physical exertion combined with lack of sustenance and water can really mess with your brain chemistry, too. Though maybe I made that up?
 
For that matter, prisons are being used as de facto mental hospitals and we-didn't-know-any-better isn't acceptable today. So many of the homeless are veterans. They're restless, can't stay in one place, can't be around people. That's why I think the West got a lot of these restless CW vets.

The WWII vets seemed to crash about 20 years or so after they returned. A lot of them were farm boys or miner's sons who took advantage of the GI bill to go to college, then got houses in the suburbs and then died of heart attacks at 49. They were workaholics, burying the war trauma in getting ahead. I think it made a double trauma - the war and the suburbs. You can't keep 'em down on the farm after they seen Gay Paree, but they also feel displaced in Gay Paree. I noticed a lot of survivor's guilt - why did I live and why do I have all this when I don't deserve it. The war boom created a place for them and they buried themselves in improving their families then died young. I think this PTSD generation produced the massive cultural upheaval of the 60s.

I said all that to illustrate what seems to be a pattern with mind-injured war vets - the expansion of the West and the new lives to be had were perfect. There's all sorts of stories of crazy miners, cowboys, outlaws, and Indians - who were crazy because of their wars and losses - abounding in every corner of the place. Many veterans took up farming and led quiet lives...and then either suddenly exploded or imploded. Others went on fine...but their children took on a lot of the burden. There's a generational factor in PTSD that doesn't get enough attention. I think that's why the elderly children and the grandchildren of the CW veterans went on a veritable monument spree in the early 1900s. Many of these were PTSD themselves as they had been in combat zones. I kind of wonder if Harry Truman's mom's experiences in CW Missouri didn't affect some of his decisions about the Cold War, for example.
 
I feel like I read something somewhere at sometime that stated extreme physical exertion combined with lack of sustenance and water can really mess with your brain chemistry, too. Though maybe I made that up?
Yes, if extreme it became a liability. But marching mixed with some fighting as with Sherman seemed to be physically healthier than some other armies. But Sherman did try to accommodate their needs.
In books I have read most generals during the ACW thought 6 hours of battle was all a soldier could physically withstand and then fresh troops were needed. IDK if that was true or not.

So it could become a liability. Yes. Dehydration causes serious mental dysfunction at times.
 
I kind of wonder if Harry Truman's mom's experiences in CW Missouri didn't affect some of his decisions about the Cold War, for example.

That's a very good angle, one I haven't thought of. I'll have to look into that, because that makes all kinds of sense. He was very close to her, and a lot of her thinking rubbed off on him. And she died just as the Cold War was getting underway, so that affected him very strongly, too.
 
Of course they did. There have been writings from the ancient world of probable PTSD translated fairly recently showing that emotional trauma has been with humans nearly forever.

R
 
I can't find further information on the Civil War use of Louisiana Hospital in Richmond as a mental hospital. This page on the Civil War use of that hospital doesn't mention it.

http://www.mdgorman.com/Hospitals/louisiana_general_hospital.htm

Does Katcher give a source that could point me in the right direction?
No Mr. Katcher did not provide a source. I purchased his book The Army of Robert E. Lee at a friends of the library book sale yesterday and was looking through it last night and saw this statement about PTSD.
 
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