Combat Trauma Bibliography

Over at Small Wars Journal recently Robert Bateman posted a great bibliography on the History of Combat Trauma. This is not an area that I know a great deal about myself. However, I do know that the King’s Centre for Military Health Research (co-led by Professor Simon Wessely who heads the Department of Psychological Medicine in the Division of Psychological Medicine and Psychiatry and Professor Christopher Dandeker from the Department of War Studies) has done extensive work in this area. So in the spirit of giving to the ‘community of learning’ that constitutes the readership of this little corner of the blogosphere I asked Dr Edgar Jones at KCMHR (a co-author with Prof Wessely) to contribute a few items to the reading list of all concerned with the subject. Here they are:

E. Jones and S. Wessely (2001) Psychiatric battle casualties: an intra- and inter-war comparison, British Journal of Psychiatry 178: 242-47.

E. Jones and S. Wessely (2005), War Syndromes: the impact of culture on medically unexplained symptoms, Medical History 49: 55-78.

E. Jones and S. Wessely (2005), Shell Shock to PTSD, Military Psychiatry from 1900 to the Gulf, Hove: Psychology Press, Maudsley Monograph Number 47.

E. Jones (2006), ‘LMF’: the use of psychiatric stigma in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Journal of Military History 70: 439-58.

E. Jones and N. Greenberg (2006), Royal Naval Psychiatry: organisation, methods and outcomes 1900-1945, Mariner’s Mirror 92: 190-203.

E. Jones, A. Thomas and S. Ironside (2007), Shell Shock: an outcome study of a First World War ‘PIE’ unit, Psychological Medicine 37: 215-23.

E. Jones, N.T. Fear and S. Wessely (2007), Shell Shock and mild Traumatic Brain Injury: an historical re-evaluation, American Journal of Psychiatry 164: 1641-45.

I’m angling to get some people from KCMHR to contribute to this blog. There are some very clever people over there. Perhaps I can encourage Dr Jones to contribute some further insights.

Afterthought: one of my students was, still is, an air force man who was responsible for running Predators over Iraq and Afghanistan. At the time he was based in a world-renowned pleasure spot many thousands of miles from either place (now he’s in a hot and dusty place, however, a bit closer to the action; keep your head down!). I remember him telling me about how psychologically jarring it was to be effectively in intimate contact with troops on the ground in the most extreme circumstances, to be effectively ‘in combat’, only at shift-end to pick up his bag and drive home to wife and children 10 minutes away. (Distinct shades of the plot of this great novel, BTW: Forever Peace). Which makes me wonder has there been yet a case of PTSD or some other mental disorder stemming from combat by someone whose experience of the action was entirely remote? We may someday fight war by telepresence in which the only scope for actual casualties would be psychological.