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  • Difficult HuntingAccessing Connecticut Patient Records to Learn about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder during the Civil War
  • Matthew Warshauer (bio) and Michael Sturges (bio)

In the fall of 2008, graduate students at Central Connecticut State University enrolled in The Professional Historian, the history department’s required historical methodology course. I had previously taught the course for many years and had allowed students to study any subject related to Connecticut history, with the understanding that archival resources were readily available. For the fall 2008 semester, I decided for the first time to have students work on a common theme—Connecticut and the American Civil War—keeping in mind that the sesquicentennial was only three years away. What began as a bit of curiosity on my part as to what students might come up with turned into genuine amazement at the variety of topics they chose and the tenacity with which they researched.1 One of the students, Michael Sturges, a high school teacher, became fascinated with post-traumatic stress disorder and whether Civil War soldiers might have suffered the same psychological [End Page 419] trauma psychiatrists and historians have come to understand from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam conflict. Logic and simple assumption would suggest that many of the soldiers fighting in America’s bloodiest conflict, with horrific battles like Antietam and Gettysburg resulting in death tolls not previously imagined, would be forever affected by what they had witnessed. Assumption, however, is the bane of historical inquiry, and Sturges set out to find evidence.

Neither of us knew that the hunt for records would lead to the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, located in Middletown and founded in 1868 (today known as Connecticut Valley Hospital and run by the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services [DMHAS])—nor that it would lead to a two-year battle for access to the records, bringing us before the Connecticut Freedom of Information Commission. To avoid the suspense, I will tell you now that we were successful in getting access to the records, which were ultimately turned over to the Connecticut State Library and Archives. Our victory, however, was bittersweet. Not long after the records were transferred, the Connecticut General Assembly passed a new bill with a short amendment tucked away inside that sealed the files.

This article is the story of our hunt and fight for patient records to determine whether Connecticut Civil War soldiers suffered war trauma that today we recognize as post-traumatic stress disorder. Yet it is far more than the story of our travails: it is also a window into the continuing stigma of mental health and the rather remarkable fact that the agency within the state most devoted to aiding people with psychological disorders and of destigmatizing mental health—the Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services—became the worst roadblock in our attempt to better understand the psychological toll of the Civil War. This is also the story of how our research has continued. Perhaps the most important item learned from the process and our findings is the stark relevance this history has for today’s soldiers returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan. As Col. Richard Young, the Connecticut state army surgeon, noted following a presentation on PTSD and Connecticut Civil War soldiers, “this sort of research is so incredibly important so that we can let the young men and women in our armed forces know that this sort of trauma has been around for many years, that they are not the first to be affected by it, and to place it all in a larger historical context.”2 [End Page 420]

Sturges’s historical research began with the secondary literature. Eric T. Dean Jr.’s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War was the first study of its kind. A practicing attorney in Indiana, Dean began his work on PTSD as a seminar paper at Purdue University in 1987. His fascination and passion for the subject steered him from the law and into full-time study of history at Yale University, where he expanded his research into a dissertation that became the basis for...

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