The Treatment of Cases of Shell Shock in an Advanced Neurological Centre.

Somatoform Dissociation in Traumatized World War I Combat Soldiers

“…Consequently, in this article we have used the concepts of dissociative disorders and dissociative symptoms interchangeably. WWI physicians also noted that the somatoform dissociative symptomatology was extremely varied (e.g., Babinski & Froment, 1918;Bickel, 1918;Brown, 1918Eder, 1917;Ferenczi, 1919b;Gaup, 1916;Grasset, 1915;Kutzinski, 1918;Léri, 1918;Liebermeister, 1917;McCurdy, 1918;Mott, 1919;Myers, 1915Myers, , 1916a&b, 1940. Whenever applicable, various subcategories of these somatoform dissociative disorders were described, such as monoplegia and paraplegia among the dissociative van der Hart et al paralyses.…”

“…Others believed that simulation was rare, but exaggeration of symptoms common. Brown (1918) reported that he found 28 malingerers (less than 3%) in a series of 1000 patients with major hysterical (dissociative) symptoms. The War Office Committee concluded that, with regard to malingering, ''close and often prolonged observation may be necessary, that occasionally doubt may still remain and that in all important cases the decision should be made by a specially trained physician well acquainted with functional nervous disorders'' (p. 142).…”

Using Art to Help Understand the Imagery of Irritable Bowel Syndrome and Its Response to Hypnotherapy

“…It is probably not surprising that a measure of hypnotizability, such as the absorption score, was related to the capacity for imagery as this particular scoring system does to some extent assess an individual's imagination. What was notable was that imagery predicted response to treatment, and there is some evidence that individuals with higher hypnotizability scores are more susceptible to certain illnesses such as posttraumatic stress disorder, which also responds well to hypnosis (Brown, 1918;Spiegel, Hunt, & Dondershine, 1988). Furthermore, we have shown that imagery is also related to noncolonic symptomatology, which is consistent with a report that individuals with high hypnotizability scores are more likely to suffer from somatic complaints (Younger et al, 2007).…”

Healing Past Violence: Traumatic Assumptions and Therapeutic Interventions in War and Reconciliation

“…It was marked by a profound range of physical and psychological symptoms, amongst them loss of speech, sight or hearing, catatonia, convulsions and trembling, paralysis of the limbs, exhaustion, depression, obsessive behavior, insomnia, amnesia, and repetitive nightmares (Brown 1918). So widespread was the problem and so compelling its manifestation that shell shock became the war's "emblematic psychiatric disorder" (Young 1995: 50).…”