The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (Contributions in Military Studies)

Colored by the popular and official mythologies of heroism, the accepted view of mental collapse during combat is that it is a fairly rare occurrence that can be attributed to psychological "weakness" or simple "cowardice." With the advent of each new generation of weapons, however, this view becomes less tenable. The increasingly lethal battlefields of conventional warfare have sharply escalated the numbers of psychiatric casualties, which reached staggering proportions worldwide by the early 1980s. Professor Gabriel, a leading authority on military psychiatry, provides the first systematic examination of the problem, its history and current dimension, the systems developed by the superpowers to counter it, and the far-reaching implications of our continued acceptance of warfare under radically altered conditions.Richard A. Gabriel is the author of 'The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (Contributions in Military Studies)', published 1988 under ISBN 9780313247187 and ISBN 0313247188.