Research Catalog

Title

Shook over hell : post-traumatic stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War / Eric T. Dean, Jr.

Author

Dean, Eric T.

Publication

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1997.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xi, 315 pages, 18 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations; 25 cm

Summary

• Eric Dean relates the psychological problems of veterans of the Vietnam War to the mental and readjustment problems experienced by veterans of the Civil War.
• Employing a multidisciplinary approach that merges military, medical, and social history, Dean draws on individual case analyses and quantitative methods to trace the reactions of Civil War veterans to combat and death. He seeks to determine whether exuberant parades in the North and sectional adulation in the South helped to wash away memories of violence for the Civil War veteran.
• His extensive study reveals that Civil War veterans experienced severe persistent psychological problems such as depression, anxiety, and flashbacks with resulting behaviors such as suicide, alcoholism, and domestic violence. By comparing Civil War and Vietnam veterans, Dean demonstrates that Vietnam vets did not suffer exceptionally in the number and degree of their psychiatric illnesses.
• The politics and culture of the times, Dean argues, were responsible for the claims of singularity for the suffering Vietnam veterans as well as for the development of the modern concept of PTSD.

Subjects

• United States
• Veterans > psychology
• Vietnam
• Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic
• Vietnam War, 1961-1975 > Veterans > Mental health
• Post-traumatic stress disorder
• Warfare > history
• United States > History > Civil War, 1861-1865 > Veterans > Mental health

Note

• Revision of the author's thesis.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (p. [237]-310) and index.

Contents

Introduction: "Terbacker Out" -- 1. "Unwelcome Heroes": The Agony of Vietnam -- 2. "Every Man Has His Breaking Point": War and Psychiatry -- 3. 'Dangled over Hell": The Trauma of the Civil War -- 4. "A Gizzard Full of Sand": Reactions to Violence -- 5. "For God's Sake Please Help Me": Post-Traumatic Stress -- 6. "Dying of Nostalgia": Official Diagnoses -- 7. "This Must End Sometime": The Fate of the Civil War Veteran -- 8. "Tramping by Night and Day": Indiana Veterans -- 9. "I Am Glad I Served My Country": Vietnam Reconsidered -- Conclusion: "A Spectacle Grand and Awful to Contemplate" -- App. A. The Indiana Sample -- App. B. Casualty Statistics: The Company Sample and Regimental Data -- App. C. Nineteenth-Century Indiana Insane Asylums and Involuntary Commitment Procedures -- App. D. Confederate Veterans.

ISBN

0674806514 (alk. paper)

LCCN

97009737

OCLC

ocm36477107

Owning Institutions

Columbia University Libraries