Combat Psychiatry: From History to Theory

Abstract

Effective combat psychiatry requires specific knowledge of social psychiatry's ethics and morals and is incompatible with commonly used psychiatries. Its demonstrated usefulness requires that the psychiatrist be assigned with combat forces, where his membership is with them and not with hospitals. This lesson, learned in the Italian campaign of World War II and demonstrated as effective in the Korean War, remains in constant jeopardy of being forgotten because the required ethics and morals are so readily rejected by civilian and individual-oriented psychiatrists untaught about special psychiatry. The history of the conflict between ideologies that took place in World War II and threatened the war effort is presented here. It is suggested that such dangerous conflicts between fundamental and strongly held civilian and military convictions remain poorly understood.