Matthew Green, former Financial Times and Reuters correspondent, remains unimpressed by officialdom’s response to casualties who aren’t actually bleeding:
Ever since October 1914, when ‘Case One’ arrived in Myers’s care, the system for tending to the mental wellbeing of soldiers has grown up in a piecemeal and ad-hoc fashion, overshadowed by the Army’s stubborn ambivalence towards psychological injury
(Dr Charles Myers was the Cambridge psychologist seconded to the Royal Army Medical Corps who first used the term ‘shell shock’.)
Green acknowledges that ‘experience teaches that the psychological wounds of war have proved stubbornly difficult to treat’. Nevertheless, he concludes that despite millions of pounds of public and private money being spent to improve treatment, and attitudes to psychiatric casualties having changed radically since Myers’s day, ‘many of those in need of help are not receiving adequate support’. While the MoD is responsible for caring for servicemen as long as they are in uniform, as soon as they are discharged the job passes to the NHS — and to the growing military charity sector.
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