Combat Exhaustion Treatments
In my novel, Nora writes home on 9/2/44:
"Treatments for the neuro cases include talk therapy, sodium pentothal (truth serum) therapy, hypnosis, and the most intense... insulin narcosis therapy. Patients are injected with insulin until they are in a coma. The patient is awakened after an hour with glucose given intravenously or through a stomach tube. The shock of these two extremes is supposed to reset the brain."
On 9/21/44, Nora writes:
"I’ve come to feel that some of our treatments are too extreme—especially the insulin and abreaction treatments. Abreaction is supposed to desensitize patients by forcing them to relive the sights and sounds of battle. I don’t think it helps and certainly makes some of them worse. I’ve become so convinced that insulin treatment is wrong that I feel kind of sick to my stomach when I have to administer it. But what can I do about it? I’m not a doctor."
Nora's mother writes on Nov. 29, 1944 about an article she read stating, "The reported combat exhaustion statistics are staggering: 17% of men broke after one to 10 days on the front lines, 20% after 11 to 20 days, and 37% during weeks 3-7. Who is left on the battlefront?"
Accounts of psychological symptoms following military combat date back to ancient times. However, the neuropsychiatric condition now properly identified as post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, was not recognized as a diagnosis until 1980. Many U.S. soldiers returning from
WWII did not discuss their war experiences with family members, in part because they thought their stories would be too shocking.
Over the course of the war, forty percent of medical discharges were for neuropsychiatric reasons. Over 500,000 U.S. service personnel suffered psychological trauma and mental breakdown. A code of silence about their traumatic experiences also existed for military nurses. Only 16% of the 65,000 Army Nurse Corps personnel who served had any undergraduate training in psychiatry. Nora’s real-life counterparts were ill-equipped to deal with the number of neuropsychiatric patients and the wide range of their conditions.
During WWII treatments took a turn away from the extreme methods described in my novel, Dear Nora. Talk therapy came into use in part due to the work of a nurse in the ETO, Hildegard Peplau, now known as the founder of modern psychiatric nursing. Her experiences with treating soldiers lead her to search for more humane treatments.
For a stark, and disturbing, look at the combat exhaustion treatments used in WWII, view the Army medical training film at this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yK4StBUYq2Y Skip ahead to 21:00 to see some of the drugs that were used. Insulin narcosis treatment is shown at 36:00.