The Origins of Madness : Former prisoners of war in psychiatric care in the Hungarian Stalinist era

Csikós, Gábor (2023) The Origins of Madness : Former prisoners of war in psychiatric care in the Hungarian Stalinist era. CENTRAL EUROPEAN HORIZONS, 3 (1-2). pp. 148-173. ISSN 2732-0456

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Abstract

By the Second World War, the neurotic symptoms of “shell shock” were replaced by “combat exhaustion” which became an umbrella term for different depressive states and neuroses with organic conditions. While in the Western countries it became more common to compensate former victims for psychological harms too, in the Soviet dom- inated regions the experience of being a prisoner of war was dominated by ideological principles in the public sphere. Pavlovian doctrines for example denied the duality of reactive and somatogenic psychoses, placing psycho-traumas secondary to neurologi- cal features. In this study, the medical history of six former prisoners of war is discussed who were treated in Lipótmező in the early 1950’s. A comparison of Holocaust and POW survi- vors shows that the latter included people of lower social status and a higher prevalence of psychotic disorders. Illness became apparent to patients or their relatives at an early stage, but psychiatric intervention came relatively late. “Captivity” was an umbrella term, and they did not specialize the location, so only other sources might help us in the identification

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