To the British soldiers of the Great War who heard about it, 'shell shock' was uncanny, amusing and sad. To those who experienced it, the condition was shameful, unjustly stigmatized and life-changing. The first full-length study of the British 'shell shocked' soldiers of the Great War combines social and medical history to investigate the experience of psychological casualties on the Western Front, in hospitals, and through their postwar lives. It also investigates the condition's origin and consequences within British culture.
Royal Dutch/Shell is a multinational behemoth. Every four seconds of every day, 1,200 cars fill their tanks with petrol on Shell forecourts, while at airports around the world civil airliners are refuelled with Shell aviation spirit every ten seconds. The company has long been regarded as a world leader and a model for other corporations. That is, until January 2004.In a truly dramatic statement, the company told an incredulous world that estimates of Shell's reserves had been inflated by a staggering 3.9 billion barrels. It was the first of a series of admissions that brought into question Shell's reputation for rectitude and sent its share price tumbling. Shell Shock is an engrossing account which reveals details that have never been included in any company accounts. Prominent amongst these is the confirmation that one of the corporation's two 'founding fathers', Henri Deterding, was a passionate supporter of fascist dictators such as Gmez in Venezuela, Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy and Hitler in Germany. Shell Shock then exposes the company's appalling environmental record, notably in Nigeria and the United States, and reveals the possible ecological consequences of current plans to extract oil from Sakhalin Island, off Russia's Pacific coast. As the company - threatened with multi-billion-dollar legal action in America and West Africa - struggles to recover from what amounts to self-immolation, this timely account of its history shows how an internal cultural revolution and an obsession with spin besmirched the company's good name, the quality that mattered most to Shell's founders.
'Shell Shock Cinema' shows how classical German cinema of the Weimar Republic was haunted by the horrors of World War I & the trauma of Germany's humiliating defeat. Anton Kaes argues that even films which do not depict war reveal a wounded nation in post-traumatic shock.
The application of psychiatry to war and terrorism is highly topical and a source of intense media interest. Shell Shock to PTSD explores the central issues involved in maintaining the mental health of the armed forces and treating those who succumb to the intense stress of combat. Drawing on historical records, recent findings and interviews with veterans and psychiatrists, Edgar Jones and Simon Wessely present a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of military psychiatry. The psychological disorders suffered by servicemen and women from 1900 to the present are discussed and related to contemporary medical priorities and health concerns. This book provides a thought-provoking evaluation of the history and practice of military psychiatry, and places its findings in the context of advancing medical knowledge and the developing technology of warfare. It will be of interest to practicing military psychiatrists and those studying psychiatry, military history, war studies or medical history.
A fast-paced, rip-roaring historical fiction thriller that entertains and educates. So gripping, it will leave you desperately hoping that what you are reading is pure fiction "It is sure to be a major motion picture." - Louann Brizendine, M.D., New York Times Bestselling Author When psychiatrist Dr. Gus Conrad is called to consult by the U.S. army for its growing epidemic of suicides and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) among soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, his problems begin. Accused of murdering one of his own patients, a soldier with PTSD, Conrad learns from the mother that the answer to who is the real killer resides in England, where her family holds a long-hidden secret. Now Conrad must find the real killer as he slips out of the country to uncover to his horror the practice over the past century of British and U.S. armies both secretly killing their own soldiers who claimed psychological problems following combat, deeming them cowards, making their deaths look like suicides. The current head of the American death squad has apparently killed Conrad's patient, and is now targeting Conrad himself for death. Following the clues in England, Conrad is shocked at what he discovers. Will Conrad and Warburton be able get back to the U.S. to expose the practice of armies killing their own soldiers they deem cowards? Can they stop the rogue leader of the American death squad before they themselves are killed? Praise for Shell Shock Shell Shock is a stunning debut novel by best-selling textbook author and world famous psychiatrist, sure to capture your interest and outrage and leave you yearning for more. "it becomes nearly impossible to tell where the fiction stops and the story continues ... in a fast-paced read that is reminiscent of Dan Brown." - Chad Clement, Chief Warrant Officer 3 (CWO3), US NAVY SEAL (RETIRED) "Shell Shock is not only a page-turner but a tour de force first-novel by renowned psychiatrist Stephen Stahl. It is sure to be a major motion picture." - Louann Brizendine, M.D., New York Times Bestselling Author of The Female Brain and The Male Brain "Iconic psychopharmacologist Stephen Stahl demonstrates his mastery of the crime mystery genre in a shock and awe novel that barrels along with Stahl's customary brio while informing us about PTSD and, as ever, man's inhumanity to man." - Professor Gordon Parker, Black Dog Institute, Australia "Gripping and thrilling to the very end ..." - Lieutenant Commander Dr. William Sauve, former U.S. Navy psychiatrist embedded with army troops in Iraq during Operation Iraqi Freedom About the author Steve Stahl is an internationally renowned psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry, holding faculty positions both at the University of California San Diego and at the University of Cambridge in the U.K. He is the best-selling author of several psychiatric textbooks, and coauthor of hundreds of academic papers in psychiatry. Trained at Northwestern University, the University of Chicago, and Stanford University, Dr. Stahl has received numerous awards in psychiatry. He resides with his wife and near his two daughters in Rancho Santa Fe, California, and Lake Arrowhead, California, where he is working on his next novel, The T4 Project, based on the true story of Nazi psychiatrists choosing mentally disabled patients for extermination, a project that was eventually expanded into the Holocaust.
As Anthony Babington is careful to point out in his forwrd, this is not a medical book. It is, rather, a distillation, in words which any layman can understand, of the long struggle by the medical profession, and by influencail civilians of an understanding frame of mind, to persudae the Service Chiefs, in particuliar Senior army pfficers, that soldiers can only stand so much fighting. In the First World War, as Babington points out, men were shot at dawn for cowardice or desertion. One can only wonder that many more didn't crack up under the appalling stress to which they were subjected. By 1939 the situation had improved, and of course the Second World War was a much more mobile affair, without the set-piece mass slaughter that characterised the earlier conflict. It may also be remarked that it was much easier for the average private soldier to realize that he was fighting for a good cause, the Nazis being more readily identifiable as bogeymen than the soldiers of the Kaiser. There are those who argue that in the postwar era, things have gone too far in the opposite direction. Indeed Babington quotes the Duke of Edinburgh as saying: "We didn't have counsellers rushing around every time someone let off a gun asking "Are you alright" You just got on with it." Nonetheless few would argue that a counsellor is preferable to a firing squad. Judge Babington has produced a fascinating, if sometimes harrowing, study of the effects of war upon the fighting soldier, of the gradual understanding of the problem of battle fatigue and of the more merciful and sympathetic approach to its treatment. Readers of his earlier works will appreciate that it is a subject which he is uniquely qualified to handle.
The British poets Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, and Siegfried Sassoon found themselves psychologically altered by what they experienced in the First World War. Owen was hospitalized in April 1917 for "shell shock" in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon in June of that year, hospitalized for the same affliction. Ivor Gurney found the war, ironically, to have been a place of relative stability within an otherwise tormented life; When he was wounded during the war's final year, his doctors observed signs of mental illness, which evolved into incapacitating psychosis by 1922. For each of these men--all poets before the war--poetry served as a way to inscribe continuity into their lives, enabling them to retaliate against the war's propensity to render the lives of the participants discontinuous. Poetry allowed them to return to the war through memory and imagination, and poetry helped them to bring themselves back from psychological breakdown to a state of stability, based upon a relationship to the war that their literary war enabled them to create and discover. This work investigates the ways in which the poetry of war functioned as a means for these three men to express the inexpressible and to extract value out of the experience of war. Bibliography and index are also included. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
