It started with a twitch. Then a stare. By the time the "waves of madness" fully crashed over the battlefields of the First World War, thousands of soldiers weren't just exhausted—they were catatonic, or shaking so violently they couldn't hold a spoon. People called it shell shock back then. But that’s a massive oversimplification that ignores the sheer psychological devastation that redefined how we understand the human brain today.
War is loud. It’s messy. But the specific mental breakdown that occurred between 1914 and 1918 was something the medical world simply wasn't ready for. Doctors in the early 20th century, like the famed British psychologist Charles Myers, initially thought the "madness" was a physical brain injury caused by the concussive force of exploding shells. They were wrong. Mostly. It turns out that when you stick a person in a muddy hole for three years while metal rains from the sky, the mind doesn't just "break"—it rewires itself in ways that look like a total system failure.
The Breaking Point: What the Waves of Madness Actually Looked Like
You've probably seen the grainy black-and-white footage of soldiers with "the shakes." Their limbs move independently of their will. This wasn't a choice or a lack of "moral fiber," though the military high command loved to use that phrase to justify executions for desertion.
The waves of madness were characterized by what we now recognize as conversion disorder and severe PTSD. Imagine a soldier who suddenly goes blind despite having perfectly healthy eyes. Or a man who forgets his own name but can still recite the manual for a Vickers machine gun. This wasn't some niche occurrence; by the end of the war, the British Army alone had dealt with over 80,000 cases of shell shock. The sheer volume of men returning home "broken" forced a conservative medical establishment to admit that the soul, or at least the psyche, could be wounded just as easily as the flesh.
One of the most harrowing examples comes from the work of Dr. Arthur Hurst at Netley Hospital. He filmed his patients. One man, Private Meek, had been unable to walk for years. He moved with a bizarre, jerky gait that looked like a macabre dance. Hurst believed in "persuasion" therapy—essentially convincing the patient that they could walk. While some of it worked, it was often brutal. They used electric shocks. They used isolation. They were basically trying to jump-start a stalled engine with a lightning bolt.
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It Wasn't Just the Explosions
Actually, the "madness" often peaked when the fighting stopped.
Think about that for a second. While the shells were falling, the adrenaline kept the brain in a high-alert survival mode. It was during the quiet moments in the rear or after a discharge that the walls came crumbling down. This phenomenon led to the realization that trauma has a "latency period." You might be fine on Tuesday, but by Friday, you can’t speak. This delay is why modern veterans often struggle months or years after returning from deployment. The brain finally feels "safe" enough to collapse.
The Disastrous Search for a Cure
The medical response to the waves of madness was, honestly, a bit of a nightmare.
In Germany, Dr. Fritz Kaufmann developed the "Kaufmann Method." It was horrific. He used high-voltage electric currents on "hysterical" soldiers to make the symptoms of their trauma more painful than the trauma itself. The goal was to make being "mad" so miserable that the soldier would choose to go back to the front lines. It was medicalized torture disguised as psychiatry.
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Meanwhile, across the channel, things were a bit more nuanced but still experimental. Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, working at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, took a radically different approach. He treated famous poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Rivers leaned into "talk therapy" before that was even a common term. He realized that suppressing memories was the poison. You had to talk about the mud. You had to talk about the smell of the gas. If you didn't, the madness stayed locked in the body.
Rivers’ work is basically the ancestor of modern Prolonged Exposure Therapy. He saw that the "waves" were ripples of repressed horror coming to the surface. He treated his patients like humans, not broken equipment. But even Rivers couldn't save everyone. The suicide rates among veterans in the 1920s were staggering, though often suppressed in official records to protect the "glory" of the victory.
Why Modern Science Still Studies the 1917 Outbreak
We tend to think we're much smarter now. We have MRIs and SSRIs. But the waves of madness from a century ago provided the raw data for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) that doctors use today.
The Physical vs. Psychological Debate
Even now, there is a massive debate about "Micro-TBI" (Traumatic Brain Injury). Recent studies on Iraq and Afghanistan veterans have shown that repeated exposure to blast waves—even those that don't cause a visible concussion—can cause physical scarring on the brain's "interface" between gray and white matter. This mirrors exactly what those 1917 doctors were arguing about. Was it a physical bruise on the brain, or a psychological wound?
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The answer is almost certainly: both.
The "madness" was a chemical and structural response to prolonged, inescapable stress. When the body stays in "fight or flight" for weeks, the cortisol levels literally begin to melt the hippocampus. That's the part of your brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation. When you look at the 1917 waves through a modern lens, you aren't looking at "weakness." You are looking at biological disintegration.
The Actionable Reality of Trauma Recovery
If there is one thing we've learned from the history of these waves, it’s that "powering through" is a myth. The soldiers who tried the hardest to stay "manly" and silent were often the ones who broke the most spectacularly later on.
How to Navigate Your Own "Waves"
Trauma doesn't have to come from a trench. It can come from a car accident, a bad breakup, or a toxic job. The mechanics of the brain's collapse remain remarkably similar.
- Acknowledge the Latency: If you’ve been through a high-stress period, don't be surprised if you crash weeks after it’s over. This is your brain processing the backlog. It’s normal.
- Vocalize the "Unspeakable": The work of Rivers at Craiglockhart proved that naming the horror reduces its power. Whether it's a journal or a therapist, get the "mud" out of your head.
- Watch for Somatization: The waves of madness often showed up as physical pain or tremors. If your doctor can't find a physical cause for your back pain or your migraines, look at your stress levels. Your body might be screaming because your mind can't.
- Stop the "Moral Fiber" Narrative: Self-shame is the fastest way to turn a temporary mental health struggle into a permanent one. The soldiers who were shot for "cowardice" were actually suffering from a physiological breakdown. Stop treating your own burnout as a character flaw.
The history of 1917 is a bloody, tragic roadmap. It shows us exactly what happens when the human mind is pushed past its design specs. We can't change what happened in the trenches, but we can stop repeating the mistake of ignoring the "waves" when they start to rise in our own lives.
Understand your nervous system. Respect the limits of your biology. Seek intervention before the twitch becomes a tremor.