This is my first post! It’s good to find a place I can ask all the stupid questions nobody seems to know.
Is shell shock the same as post traumatic stress syndrome? Also, why does it seem to be “'Nam” vets who have flashbacks? I never hear about WWII or other war vets having them. Does it have something to do with war protests?
Well, until someone comes along with some knowledge of this, I’ll throw this in. I recall hearing that post traumatic stress disorder (not syndrome) is in fact the latest term for what was once shell shock, which before that was known as battle fatigue. I believe in WW1 it was battle fatigue, in WWII and Korea it was shell shock, and Vietnam and Persian Gulf it was (and is) PTSD.
As far as the flashbacks go, I would guess that some Veterans of all conflicts suffer(ed) flashbacks.
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PTSD (as noted above, it’s a disorder, not syndrome) is the current term for what was formerly known as shell shock. The definitive criteria for PTSD changed considerably during the revision of the DSM III-R to the current DSM IV (we’re not on IV-R yet, are we folks?). Either way, now PTSD is not only shell shock, but the reaction many people have to extremely stressful situations including bank robberies (tellers get PTSD fairly frequently), rape, assault, and being involved in natural disasters.
Yehuda has done a lot of work in this area (forget her first name, sorry). Any search of Neurobiological journals should turn up a few hits. Adamec has also done a lot of work, and is a brilliant researcher and lecturer on the subject (I took a course from him a couple of years ago, and he’s quite good).
The flashback issue I’m not clear about - one reason we hear less about flashbacks in older vets may be underreporting, but that’s a speculative answer. I’ll leave it for someone else to lay down the law there.
I guarantee you that war protests don’t lead to a greater occurance of flashbacks, though, because in PTSD affected animals we can induce flashback by presenting ‘triggers’ (smells, sounds, etc.). Protestors wouldn’t qualify as a trigger. Also, we could compare groups of vets that were in combat for most of the war (therefore removed from the protests, since they were away while they were going on) to those vets who spent some time stateside and viewed protests. I expect you’d note equal rates of PTSD across those groups… if you compared those who saw acts of ‘extreme personal violence’ to those who never viewed such things while in combat, you’d get more PTSD in the viewing group.
Largely, it’s a disorder of exposure. Protests wouldn’t do much at all. The research is nothing less than fascinating.
FD.
Actually, from what I understand, there were a LOT of WWI vets who came back as total zombies. It was the first real modern war, and some never recovered from the horror.
Well, I was thinking that the unsupportive and hostile attitude towards Vietnam vets sure couldn’t have helped their nerves any. I wouldn’t think it would trigger a flashback, but it would be harder on someone’s nerves to be in a war nobody supported like Vietnam, as opposed to WWII, where people were more supportive.
There was a gent who surveyed those who served in the Vietnam war and attempted to correlate the events they had seen with PTSD results; as it turned out, those who had witnessed the death of a friend or who had participated in the extremely violent death of another (a slashing, other ‘up close and personal’ deaths, generally not shootings) had the highest rates of PTSD.
There might be one circumstance that relates protests to flashbacks - a large number of Nam vets came home to a hostile nation; no jobs, no support from family and friends, and a country that wasn’t offering great post-war opportunities for the soldiers. Maybe these conditions made flashbacks more likely. Depression and PTSD are highly comorbid, and in these conditions it is even more likely that vets would develop depression - PTSD or not.
It’s also worth noting that PTSD was undefined in its current incarnation until fairly recently; therefore treatments weren’t the best. Treatments are still lacking, but they’re coming along. SSRIs have some effect, but not as much as one would hope. They’re better with the depression - that’s something, at least.
If I misinterpreted your OP, sorry about that. If you’re saying an unsupportive environment can make symptoms of PTSD worse, I wholeheartedly agree. 
Welcome to the boards, btw. Thanks for asking a GQ I actually know something about. 
It was first called ‘shell shock’ because it was thought to be caused by all the explosions that a soldier was near.
Since Vietnam was a very ‘dirty’ war, that might contribute to higher numbers of PTSD, in addition to what was already said.
No laying down of laws, just more anecdotes and speculation…
A few Veterans Days ago on another message board, several sons of WWII vets mentioned their fathers’ reliving hand to hand combat in their sleep. One couple had to sleep in separate beds because of this.
After WWII, there was a strong public desire to return to a normal life. I assume that those who had PTSD didn’t want to discuss it and wouldn’t know how to discuss it if they did.
There is growing pressure in the UK to grant pardons to WW1 soldiers who, because they were suffering from shell-shock , walked away from the front line and were then shot for desertion. They were described at the time as “lacking moral fibre” There were nearly a hundred of such cases. Even the veteran’s association The British Legion is supporting this campaign.
Plenty of WW2 vets did not “come home” all the waw, in the emotional sense. The origins of the outlaw motorcycle gang was the Army Air Corps, whose members had become so conditioned to planning and conducting raids under conditions of stress that, once returned to civilian life, they turned it into a weekend pastime. However - actual combat exposure was not a determining factor. The veterans who terrorized Hollister, California where mostly ex-ground-support crew, not de-mobilized air combat.
And that is a significant point. In WW2 only 1 out of 27 men in uniform was an actual front line fighter. That ratio was even higher during Vietnam. But the emotional pressure put upon military people and the reward of fellowship is something hard to walk away from, and bullets and bombs may not actually be the big factor in that.
That said, WW2 did differ from Vietnam in that the technology of each war’s day had its effect upon the homecoming soldier. The WW2 soldier often enlisted along with men he’d grown up with, trained and fought with them as a unit, and, after the war, had the luxury of a long boat then train ride together to “decompress.” The old men at my dad’s VFW post who bought me my first beer in 1978 were all Pacific Theater army vets who went throught it together and
were still kidding the guy whose mother had discovered his battle-prize bag of Japanese gold teeth and who, horified, had taken it away.
But the army later regretted the “in for the duration” death-sentence of the WW2 combat soldier. Unlike the English soldier, he was not allowed to go all the way back home once across the ocean. For the armor and infantry it was even worse than the air corps - no set number of missions and then out of trouble. By the time of the Vietnam war this policy was revised to a set tour of duty - the “364 and a wake-up call.” But that good intention resulted in a young man being dropped in among strangers as the “FNG,” and could in with him being in combat in the tropics his day then back home in front of a TV watching “the Beverly Hillbillies” the next week, without his father’s long boat and train ride with his companions in between. Those misguided good intentions did more than any supposed protesters spitting on the homecoming vet to screw up the Vietnam vet.
(cite: one helluva informative drunk at a VFW post on my 18th birthday).