The Schizophrenic Face of War
The Schizophrenic Face of War

Summary/Abstract: My contribution deals with the question of how the First World War affected the mental health of Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian soldiers who served in the Austro-Hungarian armies and who were sent during or shortly after the war to the Hospital for the Insane in Stenjevec (close to Zagreb, Croatia-Slavonia). In that time, military men who were admitted to Stenjevec were predominantly given diagnoses such as dementia praecox, catatonia, or amentia. This is astonishing indeed, as in other societies at that time, such as in Germany, France, or Britain, the massive breakdown of soldiers during World War One generated the then heatedly debated diagnoses such as shell-shock or war neurosis. What were the reasons for the absence of war related diagnoses such as war neurosis in the Stenjevec psychiatric files? Did different theatres of war produce different diagnoses, and as such, different psychological reactions to war? Did the Croatian, Bosnian, or Serbian soldier, as opposed to the German or British one, simply not suffer mentally from the horrors of the First World War? Or did psychiatric practices of diagnosing soldiers during and after 1914–18 generate different diagnostic labels for potentially the same symptoms? To answer these questions, I am presenting an analysis of selected soldiers’ patient files as well as of the psychiatric discourse of the main Croatian and Serbian medical journals in the respective period. Analysing the psychiatric language that was used to describe a mentally distressed state of a (former) soldier, I argue that during and after the First World War, the diagnoses of schizophrenia, amentia, catatonia, or mania – then the most widely used psychiatric concepts in Croatia and Serbia, later Yugoslavia – were in fact placeholders for soldiers’ mental suffering from war.

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