4 December

Today's the day when in 1917 the famous psychiatrist W H Rivers presented a groundbreaking report on ‘Shell Shock'. Addressing the Royal School of Medicine, Rivers described his work at Craiglockhart Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he had studied the psychological traumas of soldiers injured on the battlefields of the First World War. He showed that troops on the front lines who had been exposed to heavy bombardment suffered long-term symptoms of shell shock, such as debilitating anxiety, persistent nightmares and physical symptoms ranging from sickness to loss of sight.

By the end of World War 1 the army had had to deal with 80,000 cases of shell shock. Increasingly they found the same symptoms occurring in soldiers who had not been under direct bombardment but had simply been traumatised by the experience of combat. This discovery formed the background to the more recent recognition that people can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.

We are all products of our own past experience and many of us carry hurts and pains from the things we have endured and the battles we have fought. We might not be shell-shocked but we are sometimes grief-shocked or divorce-shocked or life-shocked for some other reason. The Bible gives real encouragement to broken people like us. Listen to this from Psalm 147:

Praise the Lord.
How good it is to sing praises to our God,
how pleasant and fitting to praise him!
The Lord builds up Jerusalem;
he gathers the exiles of Israel.
He heals the broken-hearted
and binds up their wounds.