Trauma and Mental Illness Theme Analysis

The horrific conditions of World War I and the advent of trench warfare created widespread trauma among soldiers. The horrors of the war led to widespread mental breakdown, referred to as “war neurosis” in Regeneration. This psychological affliction was also referred to as “shell shock” at the time, prior to the modern understanding of the illness as post-traumatic stress disorder. Although psychiatric doctors such as Rivers are commissioned by the military to treat war neurosis, much of the public does not recognize it as a legitimate condition, viewing it rather as a moral failure or mark of cowardice. Through Rivers’s treatment and observations of war neurosis, the narrative argues that such mental breakdown is not a mark of cowardice, but the natural result of human beings getting placed in intensely stressful and traumatic environments for long periods of time, suggesting that it is not the result of weakness or insanity.

Although many people see mental breakdown as a sign of weakness, many decorated officers and excellent soldiers experience it after a certain length of time in combat, implying that such mental breakdown is not a symptom of an individual’s inherent weakness or cowardice. Burns, a young soldier, experiences horrible trauma—in the worst of his experiences at war, an explosion throws him through the air and he lands head-first in the belly of a rotting corps. Yet when he experiences symptoms of war neurosis and is honorably discharged from the army to return to civilian life, multiple civilians hand him a white feather, a sign of cowardice, demonstrating the common belief that a mental breakdown indicates an individual is cowardly or mentally weak. However, even the bravest soldiers in the book experience breakdown eventually, suggesting it is not cowardice. Sassoon, though a revered and decorated officer, has hallucinations of his dead friends’ corpses. In spite of Sassoon’s mental breakdown, he and many other of Rivers’s patients still desire to return to combat so they can protect their comrades, firmly arguing that mental breakdown is not a symptom of a cowardly or weak mind.

Rather than a sign of weakness, Rivers argues to both civilians and his patients that mental breakdown is the natural result of prolonged stress and trauma, rather than a mental illness or personal failure. While explaining the nature of Prior’s mental breakdown to Prior himself, Rivers suggests that rather than a failed resolve or the fallout from a single traumatic event, “it’s more a matter of…erosion. Weeks and months of stress in a situation where you can’t get away from it.” This suggests that being enclosed in a highly stressful environment, such as a military trench, plays a significant and even predictable role in war neurosis. Although Rivers works in a hospital in Scotland, far from the fighting in France, he too develops a minor war neurosis which manifests in the characteristic stammer and a facial twitch. Although Rivers’s life is never endangered, the stress of the hospital and repeatedly hearing and witnessing traumatic flashbacks affects his own mind as well. Rivers has nothing to fear yet experiences his own minor breakdown, which reinforces the argument that mental breakdown and war neurosis come from prolonged stress rather than moral failure or a singular event.

Mental breakdown and war neurosis develops over long periods of time, afflicting the brave as well as the cowardly. The widespread nature of the illness ultimately suggests that war neurosis is not a sign of weakness or insanity, but an entirely sane reaction to the horror and absurdity of war, and the unsustainable environment these conditions create. Rivers reveals to Prior that mutism, such as Prior experiences during his neurotic episodes, “seems to spring from a conflict between wanting to say something, and knowing that if you do say it the consequences will be disastrous. So you resolve it by making it physically impossible for yourself to speak.” This further suggests that rather than signifying dysfunction or insanity, such neuroses (though debilitating) are the mind’s natural method of resolving inner conflict.

However, this proposition puts Rivers in a tenuous position. He realizes that if neurosis is a patient’s “unconscious protest” against horrible conditions, then by coaxing his patients through their traumatic experiences and teaching them to overcome their neuroses, he is “silencing a human being,” destroying their mind’s unconscious will or ability to protest so that the military can send them straight back to the fighting front, to experience even more trauma and horror. Rivers thus realizes that he is treating soldiers for their sane reactions to an insane war, suggesting that curing their mental breakdowns and sending them back to conflict is itself insanity.