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Clinical Problems of Repatriates

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2018

T. F. Main*
Affiliation:
The Cassel Hospital

Extract

In recent months most of us have seen patients who have been in the Services and who now present features of psychiatric illness. Many of them are in the ordinary run of our experience, and we have no difficulties—other than the usual ones—of understanding the origins and pattern of their present distress. By and large, the ordinary clinical breakdowns occurring in the Services were of a kind familiar to us before the war, while during the war we became familiar with most of the disturbances of behaviour and feeling produced by specific stresses of service life. Many patients with difficulties of these two kinds were discharged the Services in the past, and others have since been demobilized. The large and compelling problem of their treatment and effective rehabilitation should not blind us to another newer problem—that of ex-servicemen who made satisfactory adjustments to civilian life before the war, and to service life during the war, but who are now in severe difficulties under the stresses presented to them by their return to civilian life. In a manner unexpected by the majority, they have become ill-at-ease in familiar surroundings, phobic, depressed or irritable, asocial, confused, retarded, aggressive, antisocial or restless. There is a mass of evidence to show that in addition to the clinical symptoms which lead some of them to seek help from medical men, their damaged attitudes disrupt other aspects of their lives—social, domestic or industrial—in serious and subtle ways.

Type
Part I.—Original Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1947 

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References

“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion and them that wasted us required of us mirth… How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?” Google Scholar

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