Treatment at Home

The National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, Holborn. Photolithograph by J. Akerman, 1884, after J. W. Simpson, 1883.
Credit: Wellcome Collection. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence.

Treatments for shell shock and other psychological conditions were varied and experimental. At the National Hospital for Paralysed and Epileptic at Queen Square in London, Dr Lewis Yealland used electric shock therapy. He often treated patients with the technique for hours at a time. Charles S. Myers wrote a letter to the Lancet in 1919 stating “such measures are not only needless, but also dangerous”. Other treatments for shell shock included forcing frozen limbs back into the right positions using machines and clamps, solitary confinement, discipline, diets of milk, and hypnotism.

Black and white film still of a man peeking out from underneath a hospital bed.
Black and white film still of a man’s head and shoulders. He looks to the left with wide eyes.

The approach taken by Arthur Hurst at the Royal Victoria Hospital in Netley and Seal Hayne Hospital in Newton Abbott was very different. Hurst took patients out into the countryside and encouraged them to farm. He believed the men should relive their experiences, and even got them to role play scenes from the battlefields of Flanders on Dartmoor. Hurst made films to showcase his techniques. They show patients with severe physical symptoms before and after treatment.

You can watch some of Hurst’s footage on the Wellcome Collection’s website: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/tpbupwp6

Still from Arthur Hurst’s film ‘War Neuroses: Netley, 1917, Seale Hayne Military Hospital, 1918.’ Hurst films his patients enacting ‘The Battle of Seale Hayne’.

The patients at Craiglockhart Hospital produced a magazine called The Hydra. The magazine published hospital news, sports scores, and poems and short stories written by patients. The Hydra gave shell shock patients a voice and provided a form of creative therapy. It was edited for a time by Wilfred Owen and featured some of his writing, as well as war poet Siegfried Sassoon’s.

Visit the Scotland’s War website to find digitised copies of the Hydra: http://www.scotlandswar.co.uk/hydra.html

Front-cover of the Hydra designed by Adrian Berrington. The design powerfully depicts the nightmarish experience of the shell-shocked soldier, who is blasted from the battlefield, into the grip of a terrifying monster.

The Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society was formed in 1918 by a group of women, with Mrs Waddingham as chairman. The Society focused on the recovery and rehabilitation of veterans suffering from psychological trauma. In 1927, they acquired a factory in Leatherhead which made electric blankets, which provided training and employment for their veterans. The society is known today as Combat Stress. It is one of the UK’s leading charities supporting the mental health of veterans.

Veterans weaving baskets as part of the occupational therapy provide by the Ex-Services Mental Welfare Society. Image credit: With kind permission from Combat Stress