PSYCHIATRIC INVESTIGATION IN BRITAIN

Abstract

Psychiatrists in Britain have naturally written more about soldiers during the war than about the civilian population: It might therefore be inferred that once the effect of air raids 2 had been sufficiently examined, the problems of men and women in the services became the chief object of psychiatric interest. This implies a sharper distinction between military and civil psychiatry than clinical practice warrants. Even those doctors who see only service patients cannot ignore the civilians who keep forcing themselves on to the stage, in the role of relatives whose behavior and reports greatly influence for good and ill the state of mind of the soldier, sailor or airman: they may provoke his anxiety or foster his hysteria, and be the most obstinate or the most removable of the many causes of his neuosis. The service patient comes to the psychiatric interview trailing his civilian past after him, and clinging to civilian ties which cannot be left out of account. He raises, in an urgent form, old questions about the limits of normality and health, or about the shifting differences between moral and medical standards, which the psychiatrist cannot answer profitably without bringing his own civilian training to bear as well as his newer insight and experience. Among the service patients, too, are those whose mental health is not good enough for continued military employment: when for this reason a soldier is about to revert to civil life, the service psychiatrist must consider what activities he is fit for and what treatment he will need, since some recommendation on these matters must then be put forward for the guidance