Shellshock was finally seen to be a psychological condition, and so are many others. So is Gulf War illness then a psychological condition after all?
Let’s go back to our study and have a look. [Illustration on screen.] This is a standardised psychiatric interview. I won’t bore you with the details, but it is to find out are Gulf veterans and the control groups suffering from identifiable psychiatric disorders, and indeed some are. You can see, of our sick Gulf veterans, 24% overall, a quarter of them, have a recognised psychiatric disorder, which is twice the background rate of the controls, so doubling the rate. They are twice as likely to be suffering from psychiatric disorders – not, incidentally, post traumatic stress disorder, which, as you know, is the kind of quintessential psychiatric injury; they are much more likely to be suffering from mood disorders and depression. So there’s the doubling of rates, which is clearly very important, but that also means three-quarters of them are not suffering from diagnosable psychiatric disorders, so is this then a psychiatric condition? No, that is not sufficient to explain the ill health, but it certainly contributes in some, and that is of course extremely important. Now, that’s not say that covers the whole thing, because the problem with a diagnosis like post traumatic stress, is that it depends upon identifiable trauma, as had clearly happened to Arthur Hubbard. But for many Gulf veterans, the issues were not the kind of classic trauma beloved of Vietnam films; it was more a chronic sense of unease and fear - the fear over the six months before Desert Storm, as the Americans call it (and this is the American data now): the fear engendered by chemical weapons, which of course is a very scary business. So we must have a broader concept of the role of psychological injury than just pure PTSD.