Shell Shock and the Politics of Asylum Committal in New Zealand, 1916-22

Abstract

Shell shock constitutes a rich object of historical inquiry situated, asit is, at the intersection of such prominent disciplines as the history of military medicine, the history of psychiatry, and war and society.1 Within the history of health and medicine, researchers have identified 'war neurosis' as a significant moment in the history of medico-psychological thought, illustrating the extent to which external trauma (rather than biological lesions) could directly cause certain forms of mental illness.2 It thus opened a century-long chapter into 'neurotic' disorders and highlighted the need for strong psychotherapeutic outpatient, as well as somatic inpatient, treatments. As a consequence, shell shock has been often been identified as the taxonomical pre-cursor to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),3 as an early form of twentieth-century war trauma4 and, indeed, used as an archetype for understanding war-related physical ailments more generally.5 Researchers have demonstrated how responses to, and classification and treatment of, shell shock brought out the subtle differences, as well as the similarities, between national political and medical cultures. In Britain, for example, historians have explored the extent to which the 'psychological collapse' that accompanied shell shock was conceived as 'effeminate' within the context of contemporaneous notions of masculinity. As a consequence, psychological treatment focused on 'rehabilitating' deviant men in order to return them to their true 'aggressive' dispositions and, ultimately, to the Front.6 In other contexts, shell shock encapsulated a generalised form of social deviance for those apparently not coping with the readjustment to civilian life, regardless of whether or not those so-labelled were suffering from a recognised mental disorder.7 By contrast, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, influenced as they were by Freudian psychodynamics, proved to be more sympathetic and supportive of soldiers suffering from 'war neuroses'.8 German political leaders were more trustful of the efficacy of psychiatric interventions than their counterparts in Britain and the Dominions.9 Most recently, a prominent historian of World War I asserted that, within inter-war British society and culture, shell shock