I encountered the writing of Ben Shephard while working with victims of torture and, later, offenders, many of whom had had problematic pasts. His book War of Nerves described the development of war neurosis, in its social and political context, and put into words some of the clinical quandaries I was grappling with, for example the dramatising of trauma rather than the reality of it. He suggested that war neurosis was relatively well handled during the second world war and that the psychiatric classification of PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) in 1980 was skewed by stories about William Rivers’s treatment of Siegfried Sassoon for shell shock in the first world war, the “ill-conceived” Vietnam war and the extreme of the Holocaust. This led to sentimental and unhelpful tropes of passive victims and “bad” perpetrators.
At various conferences of forensic psychiatry and psychotherapy I was impressed by his view as a historian, his humour and his healthy subversion – asking the audience to reconsider accepted wisdoms. He always wrote beautifully and his voice will be missed.
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