Feature

Dealing war and madness

Mandy Garner reports on the scars of war you can’t see

The Gulf War may have been short, but the after effects are sure to be long lasting — not only in terms of the political and military stability of the Middle East, but also in terms of the profound psychological impact of the war on all those caught up in it.

A great body of research shows how the psychological effects of war are almost always delayed until well after the guns have ceased firing. As Henk Lelifeld says in his report on war victims and society: ‘The after-war period is of much more importance than we usually think. We have to make a distinction between the cause of an event and the meaning it gets’.

He cites the example of Jewish survivors of the concentration camps who sought justice and in some cases saw their own governments harbouring Nazi war criminals.

Many studies show that psychological illnesses actually decrease during time of war as people come together to fight the supposed threat to the nation. It is only when the war is over that the longer-term effects begin to show: neuroses, inability to concentrate, restlessness, nightmares, flashbacks, palpitations, alcoholism. Other problems, like family breakdown and unemployment, follow.

During the Falklands war it was found that such effects did not usually begin until six months or more after exposure to ‘life-threatening stress’. A 1987 study of Falklands veterans cites the case of a 19 year old Welsh Guard who escaped from a bomb blast on the Sir Galahad, but whose best friend died. It was not until he returned home, visited his best friend’s family, and received an award from his local council that he began to feel guilty and wished he had died too. He could not sleep, suffered from nightmarish flashbacks, began to sweat profusely and to suffer from palpitations. Tension increased at home and the rows lead him to seek escape in heavy drinking.

In past wars, lumbar punctures and drugs provided quick ‘cures’ to psychological traumas before soldiers were posted back into the firing line. According to a psychologist who treated soldiers in the Spanish Civil War, it was thought to be less disturbing to army morale to send a soldier who was not completely ‘cured’ back into combat than to keep him for treatment.

It is not just the soldiers who suffer the psychological effects of war, but their families as well — though children seem to emerge from war the strongest. Studies of child survivors of the holocaust show that although they have to cope with the experience of violence and evil, with feelings of impotence and shame, in general they can adapt and rebuild their lives. They are helped in this if they are allowed to remember what they went through and if creative ways are found for them to express their emotions and fears.

Teachers on the West Bank recently asked Palestinian children to rewrite their favourite fairy tales; the originals were simply laughed at because they bore no relation to the children’s lives. One 7 year old rewrote the story of Little Red Riding Hood who was picking flowers when ‘the wolf soldiers’ came and arrested her. She was set free and when the soldiers attacked again she threw stones at them, killing them and so ‘liberated Palestine’. The story ends: ‘When Palestine was liberated, life was normal, peaceful and beautiful’.

But many people find it extremely difficult to adapt to life after war. In part this may be due to the way society seeks to silence the witnesses. In our desire to rebuild and feel safe again, we repress the memory and experiences of the violence — so forcing those directly involved to withdraw into their war experiences and to feel increasingly isolated. Often even therapists find the real stories of war too horrifying to deal with.

Following the Gulf war the problem is perhaps more acute, because the general public received a very sanitised view of a war in which death was described as ‘collateral damage’. Even if the allied forces did not suffer heavy casualties themselves, they were certainly exposed to severe mental stress as they imagined the catastrophic consequences of the chemical and nuclear arms that could have been used against them. The long wait between the August invasion of Kuwait and the outbreak of hostilities, coupled with the uncertainty over when land forces would be used, must have had an effect on the soldiers’ psychological state.

This sure applies even more forcefully to those civilians living in the Middle East who faced bombs, Scud missiles and the possibility of chemical warfare or nuclear annihilation. The long-term psychological effects of the night after night bombing raids on Baghdad and the huge losses of Iraqi lives, are almost unimaginable — yet they will eclipsed by the morass of political and economic problems, including civil war, facing Iraq, together with the long term physical effects of poor sanitation and malnutrition. The horrors which continue to be experienced by those in Kuwait will also inevitably take their toll.

Although the rest of the world was also exposed to the fear of nuclear warfare and terrorism, which must have had its effect, the heavy censorship applied to the media make the war an almost cinematic experience, removed from reality. And this shielding of the truth of war from the majority of the public is likely to make us even less able to understand its impact upon those returning from the Gulf.