ABSTRACT
Developments before, during and immediately after the Second World War changed not only the course of British psychiatry, but also the form and direction of mental nursing. While wars are wasteful and destructive, they can nonetheless be a powerful means of exploring and purging the national psyche, transforming people and organisations so that outcomes are achieved which, under normal conditions, would not have been possible.1 Lessons are learned in crisis, and the sheer volume of psychiatric morbidity caused by the Great War had created unanticipated demand for treatment. Shellshock, it seemed, did not arise only from individual weakness, but from the monstrosity of trench warfare.2 Assumptions about insanity as a hereditary disease, and pejorative notions of malingering, were undermined. Nonetheless, casualties were disposed to county mental hospitals, where staff had little idea of how to relieve their suffering.3 While soldiers and their families faced an uphill struggle for justice from the bureaucratic labyrinth of the Ministry of Pensions, many psychological casualties of the fight for king and country languished in the asylum wastelands. As war loomed again over Europe in 1939, the British government planned a better response to a predicted whirlwind of mental trauma. The terrible force of modern weaponry having been demonstrated in the Spanish Civil War, the War Office predicted high levels of mental illness, with the civilian population as likely to be a target as military personnel and installations. The country was preparing for the worst.
