23. In Hindsight, the Idea to Torture Away PTSD Might Not Have Been a Good One
The electroshock treatment of PTSD – or shell-shock as it was called back then – patients in Germany boiled down to torturing away the trauma. At its core, the idea was to overcome the remembered horrors of the war with even greater horrors in the here and now, by applying electric shocks to shell-shock sufferers’ genitals. To be fair to the German psychiatric profession of the interwar years, electric shock as a solution for shell shock was not an idea pioneered in Germany.
Still, although they were not the ones who came up with it, German psychiatrists took the idea and ran with it. Using electric shocks to treat shell-shock sufferers sprang from the fertile brain of English electro-physiologist Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for physiology in 1932. During WWI, he devised an electric shock treatment for shell-shocked soldiers. He reasoned that pain was necessary for a treatment that combined therapy with discipline because shell-shock sufferers were suspected of malingering.
