Book Reviews -

Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War

ISBN: 0300103794  

RRP: £19.95 Hardback

Author: Peter Barham

Publisher: Yale University Press

Pub Date: September 2004

Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War"There are some men who dislike military service to such an extent that it sends them off their heads. It is a tall order for the State to take on the liability to support, possibly for life, a man who becomes a lunatic because he is a coward and fears to undertake the liability which falls upon him as an Englishman" - Ministry of Pensions, March 1918

Detail from the book jacket: "Peter Barham shows how public feeling abut the injustice being shown to servicemen who had become insane through fighting for their country resulted in the emergence of the Peoples Lunatic, producing major concessions from the authorities. He examines the fate of the Peoples Lunatic in the class antagonisms between the wars and the uphill struggles that ex-servicemen faced trying to secure justic from the ironic behemoth that was the ministry of pensions. His book contributes a missing dimension to our understanding of the social and psychological impact of the Great War, opens a window on the lasting inequalities and division of interwar Britain, and gives a new perspective to current disputes over the traumas of war".

Although the shell-shocked British soldier of Word War I has been a favoured subject in both fiction and nonfiction, focus has been on the stories of officers, and the history of the rank and file servicemen who were psychiatric casualties has never been told. This profoundly moving book recounts the poignant, sometimes ribald histories of this neglected group for the first time.

Peter Barham draws on reports from the front lines, case histories, personal letters, and war pensions files to trace the lives and fortunes of a large cast of ex-servicemen who suffered mental breakdowns. He describes the confines of their asylums, the reactions of families to their relatives' plight, the turmoil of the soldiers when they returned home - and the uphill struggle they faced trying to secure justice from the bureaucratic labyrinth that was the Ministry of Pensions. His book gives a new perspective to the impact of the Great War and to current controversies about disputed postwar maladies.

Peter Barham is a psychologist an social historian of mental health. He has published widely on mental health issues but this is his first full-length historical work

Please click here for an independent detailed review on this title by Gwyneth Roberts.

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