The B's Flashcards
What is battle neurosis?
Term used in the British army during World War Two for soldiers who had broken down in combat. It was employed by doctors and included in some official publications in place of the term exhaustion. It carried the implication that a psychological or constitutional weakness in the serviceman was at least partially responsible for his inability to continue fighting.
What is battleshock?
term adopted by Brigadier Peter Abraham (1982).* It had been inspired by a Russian tactic of World War Two. Battleshock originally referred to a state of temporary paralysis caused by intense artillery bombardment, which rendered troops incapable of fighting for a period of at least two minutes and therefore vulnerable to frontal assault.
*Abraham defined battleshock in functional terms: An ‘inability to fight which does not result from major physical injury or disease’ (p. 20).
How battleshock could be predicted?
He argued that the incidence of battleshock cases could be predicted: ‘The yardstick is the number of wounded in action, which in turn reflects the intensity of the battle.’ [as proposed by Brigadier Peter Abraham (1982)]
What gap battleshock came to address, and what was it replaced by?
Abraham proposed the concept of battleshock to address weaknesses in the World War Two term ‘battle exhaustion’. The latter implied a mental state that develops after protracted exposure to the ordeals of modern warfare.* In the British army the term had been superseded by combat stress reaction by the early 1990s (Gillham and Robbins, 1993).
*Battleshock, argued Abraham, can occur almost immediately and is related not to the length of a campaign but the intensity of combat.
What is Battleshock Recovery Unit (BRU)?
part of the British army’s organisation for the treatment of combat stress reaction. It refers to a small unit staffed by members of a field psychiatric team (FTP). Situated in the rear of a division, BRUs were designed to treat soldiers using the principles of PIE. During World War One similar units set up to treat shell shock were called ‘not yet diagnosed nervous centres’ and in World War Two they were called ‘exhaustion centres’.
