Traumatic war neurosis: Egyptian experience.

Abstract

Over the last 24 years the Egyptian Military Forces have been involved in 5 wars. Each war had its own characteristics. The Yemen War, an overseas battle, the theatre of which was completely different from our Egyptian desert, being mountainous and not leading to a modern or even classical combat. The 1956 war, the 1967 war, the war of attrition lasting from 1968 to 1970 and lastly the war of October 1973, all in a relatively short period have enriched our psychiatric experience in handling the problem of war neurosis. The Egyptian military psychiatric team believes that traumatic war is a well defined nosological entity, a belief which is not yet shared by a group of Egyptian civilian psychiatrists. Traumatic war neurosis has its own precipitating factors, its own clinical picture, its own psychopathology as well as its own management. This paper is about war neurosis as an Egyptian experience, and is limited to two main items, namely, the various clinical pictures which we, as a military psychiatric team, have seen among Egyptian psychiatric casualties and secondly their management.