Morality or War Experience? The Definition and Treatment of Mental Illness in the Civil War Military

Civil War America had yet to make full connections in their understandings of mental illness during the war.  The Civil War occurred during a transitional period for psychology; the treatment of the mentally ill changed significantly in the years before the war, yet medical practitioners retained strong ties to traditional medical practices and beliefs.  By the middle of the war, the Union army had policies in place to treat mentally ill soldiers at the Government Hospital for the Insane, a result of the asylum movement in the antebellum period.  Once there, soldiers recuperated under a system of “moral treatment.”  Thus, the Civil War armies understood the existence of insanity and had measures in place to treat it, but believed it to be a result of moral or physical weakness and did not acknowledge the impact of war service on the mental state of soldiers.  Throughout the war, military officers and asylum officials confirmed their beliefs that the increasing rates of insane soldiers was a result of men with poor characters and weak wills, rather than an effect of the increasingly brutal war.  Even after years of reflection passed, in which America learned many other medical lessons from the experiences of the Civil War, the former Surgeon General continued to connect mental illness with purely physical or moral categories.  It would not be until the World Wars that the military recognized the idea of a psychological casualty of war, and it would not be until the Vietnam War that a more complete study would be made of mental trauma resulting from war experience.