Breakdown cover art

Breakdown

Shell Shock on the Somme

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Breakdown

By: Taylor Downing
Narrated by: Gordon Griffin
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About this listen

Paralysis. Stuttering. The shakes. Inability to stand or walk. Temporary blindness or deafness.

When strange symptoms like these began appearing in men at casualty clearing sin 1915, a debate began in army and medical circles as to what it was, what had caused it and what could be done to cure it. But the numbers were never large. Then, in July 1916, with the start of the Somme battle, the incidence of shell shock rocketed.

The high command of the British army began to panic. An increasingly large number of men seemed to have simply lost the will to fight. As entire battalions had to be withdrawn from the front, commanders and military doctors desperately tried to come up with explanations as to what was going wrong.

Shell shock - what we would now refer to as battle trauma - was sweeping the Western Front. By the beginning of August 1916, nearly 200,000 British soldiers had been killed or wounded during the first month of fighting along the Somme. Another 300,000 would be lost before the battle was over. But the army always said it could not calculate the exact number of those suffering from shell shock. Reassessing the official casualty figures, Taylor Downing for the first time comes up with an accurate estimate of the total numbers who were taken out of action by psychological wounds. It is a shocking figure.

Taylor Downing's revelatory new book follows units and individuals from signing up to the Pals Battalions of 1914 through to the horrors of their experiences on the Somme which led to the shell shock that, unrelated to weakness or cowardice, left the men unable to continue fighting. He shines a light on the official - and brutal - response to the epidemic, even against those officers and doctors who looked on it sympathetically. It was, they believed, a form of hysteria. It was contagious. And it had to be stopped.

©2016 Taylor Downing (P)2016 Isis Publishing
Mental Health Military Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders Psychology Psychology & Mental Health War United Kingdom Health

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Thoroughly enjoyed this audiobook, especially from a social science and psychology perspective. The reader was very easy to listen too and several aspects answered the ‘why’s, how and who’ and yet, despite what we know today, there is still notable resistance in sectors of PTSD and it’s far reaching effects. Highly recommend and will definitely need a second listening, I think.

Insightful and yet, so sad

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Liked the way it carried onto modern warfare but msybe a little too much detail of battles.

Interesting

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An interesting and moving account, of a little written about subject of what was called Shell-shock during the Great War.
It is emensly moving to think of how much the victims of so called Shell shock suffered. This often lasted for a lifetime and so little understood.
Well narrated. If you have an interest in the Great War I would recommend this.

Well worth a listen

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