Aberration Of Mind Research Articles

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll Diane Miller Sommerville (bio) Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. Dillon J. Carroll. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. ISBN: 978-0807169667. 368 pp., cloth, $45.00. [End Page 88] Eric T. Dean Jr. broke new ground in 1997 when he suggested in Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War that Civil War soldiers exhibited symptoms he suspected were related to war trauma, specifically post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD; see Eric T. Dean, Jr., Shook Over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997]). Historians, however, resisted taking on the psychological impact of the Civil War on its participants for about two decades. In recent years, though, studies on the war’s impact on individual soldiers and their families have proliferated. The convergence of social history, history of medicine, gender and family history, and military history has yielded valuable works on Civil War soldiers and their families that expose the horrific and damaging consequences of war on the psyches of combatants. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers is an important addition to this literature. Carroll’s ambitious agenda is to examine “how the Civil War damaged the minds of its participants” (10). In eleven chapters, he touches on the experience of soldiering, institutional care of soldiers and veterans, the impact of war on Black soldiers as well as US and Confederate veterans and their families, and the rise of the field of neurology. Throughout the book, Carroll identifies myriad ways the Civil War affected the mental health of its participants. He makes good use of both published and archival sources: letters, diaries, memoirs, asylum records, and pension applications. And he is exceedingly cautious, as he should be, about overstating links between war-generated trauma, like PTSD, and aberrant behaviors of Civil War soldiers and veterans. Carroll’s thesis, that participants in the Civil War suffered psychological damage, mirrors those of Dean and authors of recent studies including this reviewer, Jeffrey McClurken, and David Silkenat (Diane Miller Sommerville, Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018]; Jeffrey W. McClurken, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009] and David Silkenat, Moments of Despair: Suicide, Divorce, and Debt in Civil War Era North Carolina [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011]). Carroll’s original intervention is to consider not merely those who suffered from psychological distress but those who did not. He raises a new question: what of those who emerged from war with their minds intact? Carroll identifies coping mechanisms, like religion, humor, and camaraderie that, he believes, allowed some soldiers to resist succumbing to psychic disorders. Whether he can then claim that Civil War soldiers “were not as psychologically traumatized as some historians believe,” however, remains an open question, perhaps even unanswerable (5). Scholars will no doubt grouse about the skimpy coverage of relevant historiography and Carroll’s reluctance to explicitly situate his own work in a number [End Page 89] of these debates. He makes clear his work rejects the “triumphalist narrative” and aligns with the so-called dark turn in Civil War literature. But he misses important opportunities to inform his readers about myriad conversations historians have engaged in about many of the subjects he raises. For instance, he might have more effectively used the debate about death and the Civil War spawned by Mark Schantz and Drew Gilpin Faust to elevate his own argument about war trauma and death (Mark S. Schantz, Awaiting the Heavenly Country: The Civil War and America’s Culture of Death [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008]; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008]). Carroll has ample goods to challenge Schantz’s assertion that Civil War soldiers were insulated from the shock of death because it was so prevalent and familiar in the nineteenth century and to instead fall into the Faust camp, which asserts that...

Aberration of mind or soul: the role of media in perceptions of mass violence

Purpose Unconscious biases against certain groups aid in forming assumptions which may be promulgated in the USA via popular news media linking rare but memorable violent acts with specific groups. However, the relationship between marginalized group association, assumptions regarding the motive for violent acts and individual media consumption has never been directly examined. This study aims to directly examine this relationship. Design/methodology/approach In the present study, individuals read a vignette of a mass shooting in which the perpetrator’s implied religion (i.e. Islam or unknown religion) was manipulated. Participants then indicated their assumptions regarding motive (i.e. terrorism or mental illness) and personal media consumption habits. Findings Contrary to hypotheses, differences in assumed motive based on implied religion were not found; participants were not more likely to associate an assumed Muslim perpetrator with terrorism as a motive or consider the assumed non-Muslim perpetrator to be mentally ill. Originality/value These unexpected findings are discussed in the context of the data-collection period, which coincidentally overlapped with a well-publicized act of domestic terrorism that led to a unique national debate regarding biased news coverage and associations between religion, ethnicity, terrorism and mental illness.

Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck. Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness, and Suicide.Diane Miller Sommerville. Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South.

If the post-9/11 American home front has a “signature disorder” (and I’m not sure that it does), it would have to be veteran suicide. No other social pathology better reflects the deadly combination of mental anguish and communal indifference facing contemporary vets than self-murder. According to a recent White House briefing, roughly twenty U.S. veterans kill themselves every day—a rate one and a half times that of non-veteran adults. Since the start of the War on Terror, suicide has proven to be a greater threat to veterans’ long-term heath than al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) combined. Indeed, it’s become common wisdom to assert that the latest generation of American troops is especially vulnerable to suicidal behavior, their capacity for self-harm exacerbated by the chaotic nature of the wars they fight and the relative isolation they face upon homecoming. However, as a pair of remarkable new books makes clear, today’s suicide epidemic is neither novel nor unique. Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck’s Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness, and Suicide and Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South examine the tidal wave of psychological trauma unleashed by the American Civil War. Individually, the two books paint sympathetic portraits of vast mental suffering on both sides of the conflict. Read together, they chart a new direction in the study of warfare and mental health, one that future scholars will inevitably follow.

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Reviewed by: Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville Angela F. Murphy Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 429. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4330-4; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4356-4.) Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South examines the ways suicide was both practiced and received in the U.S. South during the decades before and after the Civil War. It is a remarkable work that helps us understand not only the shifting nature of American ideas about suicide but also the wartime conditions that provided context for those ideas, as well as the ways that race and gender helped determine them. Sommerville’s research makes liberal use of case studies as well as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, coroner’s reports, and military and asylum records in order to examine individual motives for suicide attempts and to determine how society reacted to such attempts. Acknowledging the paucity of source material that gives a complete picture of individual thinking on suicide, Sommerville argues that an examination of the assigned motives for suicide that can be found in the documents can still reveal much about how both individuals and society approached the practice. In her research on these assigned motives, she is able to piece together how wartime suffering affected southerners’ thoughts concerning suicide, with a particular focus on the ways understandings of race and gender interacted with those thoughts. [End Page 927] The organization of the book is both chronological and topical, with each chapter delving into the experiences of a specific group during a specific period of time. The first two chapters analyze the wartime experiences of Confederate white men and women and how the pressures of and challenges to gender norms contributed to suffering and thoughts about suicide during those years. The next two chapters discuss suicide, first among enslaved southerners during wartime, and then among freedmen and freedwomen in the South after emancipation. In these chapters, Sommerville addresses not only the psychological struggles of black southerners themselves but also the ways white stereotypes about this population affected understandings of black suffering. Next, Sommerville moves to the postwar experiences of white southerners, with one chapter on veterans’ experiences, another on masculinity and financial ruin, and a third on women in the postwar world. She ends with an overview of the concepts of suicide and suffering during the nineteenth century. Sommerville’s work imparts several important arguments. First, she makes a strong case that the Civil War precipitated a shift in the way suicide was viewed by southerners. There was less judgment of the person who committed suicide as sinful and a greater understanding that the suffering brought on by war contributed to such acts. The war thus helped open the door to environmental explanations for psychological distress. Second, her work emphasizes the ways that the war destabilized notions of gender among men and women, white and black, which added new stresses that sometimes led to suicidal thoughts and actions. Third, Sommerville demonstrates that, although black southerners experienced their own particular brand of suffering during the war and its aftermath, racism caused most white southerners to dismiss black men and women’s suffering and to overlook psychological trauma among the black population to a disgraceful degree. Aberration of Mind is a worthy contribution to the scholarship on the experiences of ordinary citizens during the Civil War era and to the literature on the trauma of war. Angela F. Murphy Texas State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Reviewed by: Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville Brian Matthew Jordan (bio) Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 448. $105.00 cloth; $34.95 paper; $27.99 e-book) In this exhaustively researched, methodologically innovative, and brilliantly executed book, historian Diane Miller Sommerville describes "the psychological and emotional damage of the Civil War on Southerners" (p. 12). In the author's sensitive hands, suicidal activity and the responses it stimulated in Southern society and culture yield new clues about the ways in which soldiers and veterans, wives and widows, the enslaved and newly-freed people wrestled with the period's "uncharted territory and unrelenting hardship" (p. 81). Allowing that motivations for suicide "are complicated, multilayered, and largely obscured," Sommerville explains that the Civil War was nonetheless "the social and cultural context" for many self-murders (p. 8–9). Building ties between the war's trauma, personal biographies, and individual "lived experience"—connections that historical actors were unequipped to make—the result is a much "fuller accounting of the war's costs on its participants" (p. 12). Aberration of Mind unapologetically joins a wave of neo-revisionist scholarship focused on the war's less than ennobling characteristics and enormous human consequences. Some critics have dismissed the so-called "dark turn" for purportedly misrepresenting "marginal" experiences as mainstream; others allege presentism. Sommerville smartly responds that "it is unreasonable to expect historians to refrain from considering links between psychiatric distress among soldiers and their experiences in military service, knowledge that we have at our disposal, simply because nineteenth-century Americans did not" (p. 272, n13). Further, she makes clear that taking the war's psychological and emotional scars seriously does not make an argument about their typicality, something that her necessarily qualitative evidence proscribes (p. 14–15). Sommerville's book is divided into three parts. The first considers [End Page 398] Confederate men and women during the war itself. While a "flurry of wartime suicides" became "less stigmatized than in earlier periods," at the same time, "few Southerners seemed willing or able to link the war to the mental distress of combatants" (pp. 37, 41). Though southern women were less inclined than men to commit suicide, they "appear to have been much more engaged in contemplating death as an exit from their suffering" on the home front, something Lost Cause narratives effaced after the war (p. 50–51). The second part examines African Americans in slavery and after emancipation. In the book's most powerful chapter, Sommerville maintains that using "slave suicide as prima facie evidence for resistance . . . risks ignoring or discounting slaves' suffering as a motive for suicide" (p. 97). Slaves resorted to taking their own lives because it "brought an immediate end to emotional or physical pain" (p. 99). Of necessity, southern whites denied the frequency of slave suicides—a pattern that persisted after the war, when African-Americans were deemed "constitutionally incapable of experiencing the same emotions as whites" (p. 147). Only whites could suffer or experience loss; instead, blacks were diagnosed with "mania," which some white southerners interpreted as the predictable result of emancipation. The final part probes the experiences of Confederate veterans and widows. Southern asylums teemed with new patients who not only witnessed the horrors of a brutal war but experienced the humiliating sting of defeat. Emasculated, Confederate men faced "financial ruin" and "dim job prospects" as they returned to civilian communities that seemed unable to comprehend their experiences (p. 179). At the same time, foisted into new and often disconcerting roles, their nerves frayed and emotions knotted, "thousands of southern women . . . collapsed in the wake of defeat" (p. 210). In the last chapter, Sommerville ties together the threads of her argument that the war invited a "change in the cultural meaning of suicide" (p. 48). The enormity of pain and suffering unleashed by the Civil War demanded that white southerners rework antebellum ideas about suicide. Obituaries and coroner's reports began to evince sympathy [End Page 399] for those who took their own lives. Edmund Ruffin was...

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War-Era South

The essence of alternative medicine. A dermatologist's view from Germany.

In Germany, alternative medicine is presently very popular and is supported by the federal government. When deliberating on the essence of alternative medicine we should simultaneously reflect on the intellectual and moral basis of regular medicine. To provide an epistemological demarcation of the 2 fields, the following 12 theses are advanced: (1) alternative and regular medicine are speaking different languages; (2) alternative medicine is not unconventional medicine; (3) the paradigm of regular medicine is rational thinking; (4) the paradigm of alternative medicine is irrational thinking; (5) the present popularity of alternative medicine can be explained by romanticism; (6) some concepts of alternative medicine are falsifiable and others are not; (7) alternative medicine and evidence-based medicine are mutually exclusive; (8) the placebo effect is an important factor in regular medicine and the exclusive therapeutic principle of alternative medicine; (9) regular and alternative medicine have different aims: coming of age vs faithfulness; (10) alternative medicine is not always safe; (11) alternative medicine is not economic; and (12) alternative medicine will always exist. The fact that alternative methods are presently an integral part of medicine as taught at German universities, as well as of the physician's fee schedule, represents a collective aberration of mind that hopefully will last for only a short time.

The Surgical Treatment of Delusional Insanity based upon its Physiological Study

The manifestation of delusions is so striking a proof of aberration of mind that we seem tempted to inquire if the study of them will in any degree help us to an elucidation of the actual physical change which must either be the cause or, at any rate, the accompaniment of them.