Yet, during times of crisis, e.g. WWII, we did not hear about depression/mental health issues. You would have thought that with the population under tremendous strain, and thousands of lives lost, that mental health issues would have been worse then, but they were not.
Why?
Well, according to a book "The War and Mental Health in England", there was a substantial fall-out from the war afterwards: " [...] when the strain is over, a multitude of overworked minds break down". The psychological effects of wars on soldiers themselves have been long-documented, whether as "shell-shock" or "post-traumatic stress disorder".
Checking out an abstract for a paper called "Civilian Morale During the Second World War" (that I don't have access to at the moment):
Official histories concluded that the mental health of the nation may have improved, while panic was a rare phenomenon. Revisionist historians argued that psychiatric casualties were significantly higher than these accounts suggested because cases went unreported, while others were treated as organic disorders.
Oh wait, I do have access. The following strikes a chord:
Resilience was encouraged by active participation once bombing intensified. [...] This stands in contrast to today when most of the population, despite being identified by the media and politicians as the focus of terrorism,
remain uninvolved and uncommitted to any role other than that of putative target.
Though there were some cases of mass-hysteria, such as in Coventry in 1940, where was found
an unprecedented dislocation and depression… There were more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis observed in one evening than during the whole past two months together in all areas. Women were seen to cry, scream, to tremble all over, to faint in the street, to attack firemen. The overwhelming dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness.
:/
This was, the article says, possibly due to the more-concentrated nature of the city, that there was much more visable damage.
The psychiatric reports show no large increase in the volume of their cases during the war (in stark contrast to what was reported in NY after the wassit w/ the trade towers). Which contradicts the book I quoted first. So. Ho-humm.
Couldn't find any definite pre-post-mid-WW2 suicide figures though (outside of Japan), after a quick look around the internet, alas.
