The Regeneration trilogy: someone who got it right for once!
If you're interested in novels about WW1, or reading something where disability is well handled for once, try Pat Barker's highly-praised Regeneration trilogy. She's taken real events and people and added imaginary ones, so that the war poet Siegfried Sassoon and the psychiatrist and anthropologist Dr William Rivers are leading characters (there's even a lovely scene where Sassoon helps Wilfred Owen with "Anthem for Doomed Youth"), and she covers events such as the 1917 gay witch-hunt, but the main character is Billy Prior, an invented young officer.
The first book largely takes place in Craiglockhart military hospital, where shell-shocked soldiers were sent for treatment. As a result, most of the characters in the book have some degree of PTSD, and it's beautifully explored. You can learn a lot more about the way to approach PTSD from this book than you can from some doctors. As well as the general run of patients trying to get over the atrocities they have experienced, Barker shows the doctors starting to get a sort of shell-shock by proxy, and also the example of Sassoon, who was pressured into going to Craiglockhart as an alternative to being court-martialled for publishing a letter protesting against the war. A major theme of the books is to question what is the sane response to a world gone completely mad.
One of the themes I found particularly interesting was that of how social class interacts with traumatic response. The usual response is that the officers develop a stammer and the "men" (privates) become mute. It's to do with freedom to speak out, what the consequences will be depending on your position in the army. Prior breaks this rule by being an officer suffering from mutism - but unlike the other officers, he's from a working-class background.
The first book largely takes place in Craiglockhart military hospital, where shell-shocked soldiers were sent for treatment. As a result, most of the characters in the book have some degree of PTSD, and it's beautifully explored. You can learn a lot more about the way to approach PTSD from this book than you can from some doctors. As well as the general run of patients trying to get over the atrocities they have experienced, Barker shows the doctors starting to get a sort of shell-shock by proxy, and also the example of Sassoon, who was pressured into going to Craiglockhart as an alternative to being court-martialled for publishing a letter protesting against the war. A major theme of the books is to question what is the sane response to a world gone completely mad.
One of the themes I found particularly interesting was that of how social class interacts with traumatic response. The usual response is that the officers develop a stammer and the "men" (privates) become mute. It's to do with freedom to speak out, what the consequences will be depending on your position in the army. Prior breaks this rule by being an officer suffering from mutism - but unlike the other officers, he's from a working-class background.