Depression has been in the News this Week: The invisible illness of War Survivors

Unfortunately depression has been with us for years and it is very much the quiet disaster waiting to happen. Although many would associate this illness with the pressures of the modern world covering marriage, career and financial failure the current publicity identifies plain old fashioned poverty. However, just having remembered the fallen from two World Wars I will just put a word in for the survivors of the many conflicts in the world that have been mentally scarred. In our parish Church there is a memorial plaque to the two men from the parish that died in the First War as well as a commemorative plaque listing the twenty two men who survived. How did those men cope with their memories and how many were left with the effects of Shell Shock such as depression? While the image of war veterans is that of the blinded or physically crippled those left with mental illness seem to have fallen from public view. It is a commonplace to hear people like myself talk of their veteran fathers as having said nothing of their experiences for the remaining years of their lives, except for the very occasional short reference. My father always referred to courgettes as Corselets, which many years after he had died I discovered was my Dad’s joke for a village on the Somme. He was one of the lucky ones to have coped whilet others were less lucky. When I was a bus-conductor one of my drivers, a tall man well over 6 feet would keep reaching up to imaginary controls above his head as though flying an aircraft. I never raised it with him but others told me that he had been severely tortured after being singled out because his height when a prisoner of the Japanese. Another hidden cost of War.

All of these horrible memories never become expectations by those who take us into wars and when there seems to be an unseemly rush to arms as now seems the case with the Iraq War, a selective memory makes it possible for politicians to sex up the documentation as well as indulge in a bit of ‘creative writing’ at the same time. Such was the rush nothing was planned for the reconstruction of a country which was about to suffer ‘Shock and Awe’. No doubt this would have been the tag line for Hiroshima and Nagasaki if the shallow thinking of the Bush regime had been available. Once the horrors of such events have been remembered together with the devastation of 9/11 then war against modern cities can be seen as genocidal madness. Multiply the Twin Tower images by a large number of city targets and you will soon get the picture. One can understand why those who prepare the next bombing campaign, or invasion or contemplate the use of nuclear weapons, prefer not to deal with consequences.

Prompted by the earlier post on Remembrance Joe, a correspondent with this site, has sent me a copy of a comment he left for Alistair Campbell after it became known the he was campaigning for more help for those suffering from depression. As I was reading it I could not help remembering that we are now approaching the first anniversary of the bombardment of Gaza and wondering what consequences in mental health terms we are yet to see there.

Dear Alastair,

I applaud your campaign to highlight mental illness and depression in society. As a child brought up by a depressed father I know first hand how mental illness devastates a family.

My father served in the Merchant Navy from 1939 to 1942 but was invalided out with “shell shock” when he was 21. Consequently he suffered from depression and insomnia all his life. As well as undergoing electric shock treatment he was prescribed barbiturates for 40 years to which he became addicted. When he died aged 61 in 1983 I found among his books one entitled Towards Diagnosis: A family Doctor’s Approach and I noted the well thumbed pages on the chapter entitled “Mental Disorders”. According to the book depression can be either endogenous or it can be psychoneurotic, ‘which follows from adverse circumstances’; my father’s psychoneurotic depression being the result of the horrors of the Atlantic and Pacific theatres of war.

In March 2003, exactly twenty years after my father’s death, B-52 bombers took off from Fairford in Gloucestershire to unleash “shock and awe” on Iraq, a policy defined by the Pentagon as “a simultaneous effect…to shatter Iraq, emotionally, physically and psychologically”. As the cruise missiles smashed into Iraq I remembered my father’s words: “Watch out when a generation who’ve never experienced war come to power”.


Given your obvious concern about depression, I wonder if you would be so kind as to read the following thoughts by mental health care professionals in Iraq today. Dr Majid al-Yassiri, at the Centre for Psychosocial Services in Iraq, writes: "Depression is at a higher rate than one would expect in a population this size - three times as high”, while Kholoud Nasser Muhssin, a researcher on family and children’s affairs at the University of Baghdad writes:“60-70 percent of Iraqi children are suffering from psychological problems and their future is not bright”; and Dr. Nadal al-Shamri, a paediatrician in Baghdad says: "I look into the eyes of children whose parents have been killed. The psychological trauma is so deeply ingrained that they may never lead a normal life."

Iraqi psychiatrists are seeing what they call a disturbing spike in mental health disorders, a problem compounded by Iraq's lack of mental health workers, facilities and services. Mental health care professionals suggest the number of untreated or under-treated people nationwide reaches into the millions and some like Bilal Youssif Hamid, a Baghdad-based child psychiatrist, write of an “"an immense and unnoticed psychological toll, with long-term consequences"; while Hadoon Waleed, a psychology professor at Baghdad University believes that since the war, “eventually, the entire population of Iraq will require some type of psychological healing”.

Milan Kundera wrote: “The struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting”, and although you continue to enjoy a high profile and extraordinary career espousing high ideals about democracy and depression, there are many of us ordinary Britons who cannot forget the part you played in inflicting mental illness and psychoneurotic depression on a whole society.