Mental disorder after two wars: sauce for the goose, but none for the gander. [Review of: Dean ET. Shook over hell: post-traumatic stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War. Harvard University Press, 1997].

Abstract

I have rarely encountered a single-author book that is both very good and very bad. Shook Over Hell is such a book. How this should be-and possibly why-aroused my intense curiosity. Eric Dean has examined the post-war psychological and social problems of coming home and being home among American veterans of the War and the Civil War. Dean applies different methodologies to these two veteran groups and seasons his historiographic sauce differently for each, cultural constructionism for the veterans and philosophic naturalism for the Civil War veterans. As a practicing psychiatrist whose only patients are combat veterans with severe psychological injuries, I am grateful that Dean did this research on the insane Indiana Civil War veterans. This is a very good book on post-combat mental disorder and character change in that era. He has done us valuable services on many fronts. All future studies of mental health of veterans in that era will have to look in jails and private lockups for the severely disabled, as his quotations from the Indiana inquests (what today we would call civil commitment proceedings) reveal in their narrative accounts. Hair-trigger anger, violence, antisocial behavior, alcohol and drug abuse, paranoia, suicidality, compulsive roaming-all parts of the Vietnam veteran stereotype-emerge as things that war can do to a person's character and did do in the Civil War. We have no way to establish psychological injury rates for Civil War veterans nor to make rate comparisons between the two wars.