Hidden Trauma of World War II

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“I have long believed — and have twisted many a historian’s arm to look into it — that the largest still-untold story of the U.S. in WWII lies in the huge, three-to-five thousand-bed “neuropsychiatric” hospitals built in that period. We know very little about what the staffs of these hospitals actually thought was wrong with these veterans or what they were doing for the veterans and why. We know even less of what the veterans who were hospitalized thought was being done for them or to them. And we know nothing about the silent warning taken by veterans who never came within hospital walls.”

Jonathan Shay, Foreword. Flashback: Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Suicide, and the Lessons of War. Boston: Beacon, 2006. pg. x.

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May 9, 2011: Charles Bivona

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