Craiglockhart
I am delivering a public lecture in Edinburgh on Wednesday evening at the site of the World War One hospital for war trauma, Craiglockhart – made famous because Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were treated there for war trauma, and because Pat Barker used it extensively for her regeneration trilogy.
The lecture is about the contribution of WHR Rivers to the treatment of war trauma, and how his ideas are still, in some ways, with us now. Rivers was something of a polymath, being an anthropologist and ethnographer as well as a psychologist/psychiatrist. He supervised the PhDs of well-known psychologists such as CS Myers, the writer of the first published mention of shell shock in 1915; Frederick Bartlett, whose work on memory in the early 20th Century is still important today; and William McDougall – on the other hand let’s not say too much about him as his pet topic was eugenics.
Rivers published a wide range of material, went on several anthropological expeditions around the world, at one point was in charge of two psychology labs, and did many other things, but he was rarely able to work more than four hours a day. Perhaps that should tell our employers something about the best way to look after employees.
In World War One Rivers treated people with war neuroses, firstly at Maghull near Liverpool and then at Craiglockhart. Many doctors treated soldiers with neuroses very harshly, imposing a high level of discipline, providing electric shocks as therapy, and generally continuing with army discipline in the hospital. Yealland used electric shock therapy with soldiers who had lost their voice. A case is described in Barker where a soldier is locked into a room. He cannot speak, the doctor (Yealland) insists that the soldier cannot leave the room until he is speaking, and then provides a series of electric shocks until the person does speak. There is no record of the long term effectiveness of this treatment.
Rivers preferred a more gentle approach, one more in keeping with the modern world. He essentially used talking therapy, essentially arguing that soldiers with war neuroses tended to repress the memories as the are too painful to articulate or have in consciousness. Rivers encouraged the men to talk about their memories, and through this cleanse them, making the memories manageable.
We still do versions of this now, and in the talk I describe one such therapy, Narrative Exposure Therapy, which explicitly involves talking in detail about the traumatic memories. We have good evidence from a range of sources for its effectiveness, having used it in China, Iraq, Bosnia and Saudi Arabia.
The talk will illustrate, through ideas about narrative, how Rivers has influenced the development of psychological thought regarding the treatment of war trauma. If you are interested in going, follow this link:
Dr Nigel Hunt 