HBO’s ‘Wartorn’

Shows Soldiers’ Struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress

{In this 1950 photo, a corpsman fills out casualty tags as a soldier consoles his friend after the loss of a comrade in Korea. A new documentary, “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” charts post-traumatic stress disorder from the Civil War, whose veterans accounted for more than half the patients in mental institutions in that era, to Operation Iraqi Freedom.}

Nov. 10, 2010 - I am not so well. I am clear off the hooks,” wrote a soldier who soon would be discharged from the Army as unfit to serve.

Back at home in Pennsylvania, he turned increasingly paranoid and violent. Then he killed himself.

The year was 1864 for this young Civil War veteran.

It would take more than a century, and many more wars, for post-traumatic stress disorder to be recognized as a medical condition and to be acknowledged by the U.S. military as a raging fact of life.

A new HBO documentary, “Wartorn: 1861-2010,” charts this heartbreaking story, from the U.S. invasion of Iraq all the way back to the Civil War, whose veterans, according to the film, accounted for more than half the patients in mental institutions of that era. {read rest}