ПСИХИЧЕСКИЕ РАССТРОЙСТВА ФРАНЦУЗСКИХ ЖЕНЩИН В ГОДЫ ПЕРВОЙ МИРОВОЙ ВОЙНЫ

Abstract

The article deals with the problem of the mental health of French women during the First World War, which has not yet been covered in the Western historiographical tradition. The author considers cases of mental disorders caused or provoked by the state of hostilities, the social and stressful situation of the 1914–1918 conflict. The source base for the study was professional medical journals in the field of psychiatry and neurology, as well as publications of professional medical associations. The clinical cases identified by the author made it possible to identify and classify the main triggers of mental illness: the loss of a relative at the front, the events accompanying the state of occupation, the impact of propaganda. The author also traces the ways to resolve the mental conflict: in addition to inpatient treatment in psychiatric institutions, women who experienced the traumatic consequences of the First World War, found solace in occult practices, organizing communication with like-minded people, and alcohol abuse. The study is relevant in the context of the debatable issue of the etiology of mental disorders: at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries in European and Russian medicine, the discourse about degeneration dominated, as well as the idea of heredity as a source of mental illness of the population. According to some French researchers, the First World War called into question this conviction, forcing representatives of medical science to reconsider their views due to the admission of patients with no previous history of psychiatric diagnoses to specialized hospitals.