"In every war, victory is conditioned in the final analysis by the spiritual state of those masses who shed their blood on the fields of battle." Lenin 13.5.20
Wednesday July 5, 2000
The annual meeting of the Royal College
of Psychiatrists has heard that the
so-called Gulf War Syndrome is a product
of stories spread by veterans in a
"contagious" fashion after the 1991
conflict.
Professor Elaine Showalter of Princeton
University, New Jersey, said symptoms
were exacerbated by the culture of anger,
bitterness and blame that followed the
war.
Professor Showalter told the meeting in
Edinburgh, that Britain, the United States
and Canada had "statistically significant"
numbers of veterans reporting symptoms,
but soldiers from Kuwait, Scandinavia and
France had not reported symptoms.
She said: "Since Vietnam there has been
a real change. Those men came back
with a great deal of anger and they looked
for people who were responsible. There is
an incredible rhetoric of blame.
"The veterans blame the government and
the army and the army blames the media
and the doctors. There is this incredible
atmosphere of acute social suspicion."
Prof Showalter identified a sequence
whereby a veteran experienced
symptoms, named them as Gulf War
Syndrome, blamed an organisation or
agency and then made a court claim,
before the media took up the story.
She said: "What you are now seeing is a
real contagion, but it is not medical,
biochemical or viral contagion, but a
narrative contagion. The stories are
contagious from one context to the next."
Professor Simon Wessely, director of the
Gulf Illness Research Unit at King's
College Hospital, London, said the war
had a more profound effect on the health
of servicemen and women than Northern
Ireland and Bosnia.
This was reflected by recent studies in
The Lancet and the British Medical
Journal, which showed the Gulf conflict
resulted in specific physical symptoms
such as headaches, insomnia,
gastrointestinal disorders and motor
neurone disease.
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At the moment the favoured physical explanation for Gulf War Syndrome is the interaction of organo-phosphorous insecticides with other toxic materials.
But perhaps Lenin, and the Royal College of Psychiatrists are nearer the truth of why the symptoms gained such prominence in the consciousness of the soldiers.
Perhaps not enough of the armed forces were decorated as war heroes.
Chris Burford
London