WW1's Forgotten Female Shell shock Victims

A new story to me.
"In late 1917, a British woman named Elizabeth Huntley decapitated her own daughter. When the case went to trial, her friends and family testified that she had been a "jolly-hearted woman"—that is, "until the air raids." Her sister told the judge that the raids in London caused Elizabeth to shake and have delusions, and that she had become depressed. Her doctor had tried to get her out of London and away from her children, because during the raids they "screamed" and "worried her," but he was too late. She had a nervous breakdown during a raid, and murdered her child. They called it "air raid shock."
During World War I, the relatively new field of psychoanalysis was full of possibility and, unfortunately, thousands of new patients. The war’s destruction was not limited to the physical; the psychological devastation was immense, and soldiers returned home from the front every day exhibiting a range of new symptoms, including "hysterical paralysis," deafness, mutism, arthritis, facial spasms, “fear, disgust, fatigue,” “delirium,” “suicidal thoughts,” “stammer,” and more. Though we now recognize many of these as symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, doctors at the time struggled to find ways to categorize the rapid and widespread breakdown of the British mind. The solution for soldiers was the invention of a new condition: shell shock. The diagnosis and treatment of similar traumas in women, however, has been largely unexamined by historians.
The psychologist Dr. Charles S. Myers coined the term shell shock in an article for The Lancet in February 1915, after seeing a number of cases of mental distress in soldiers who experienced shells bursting near them at close range. Yet Myers quickly realized that many of the men exhibiting similar symptoms “had never been near an exploding shell, had not been under fire for months, or had never come under fire at all.” He admitted shell shock was “a singularly ill-chosen term,” and the British medical community quickly suggested "war neuroses" instead. But the public had already latched onto the memorable alliteration, and “shell shock" has remained in popular discourse ever since.
Though a misnomer, historians have argued that shell shock provided a convenient way for doctors to separate the mental traumas exhibited by soldiers from the "effeminate associations of ‘hysteria.'” For centuries, hysteria was thought of as a uniquely female condition, used to explain everything fromfainting to sexual desire. Victorian women assumed they were so susceptible to the disease that they carried smelling salts around with them, believing pungent smells could help keep their emotions in check. But while hysteria might have been accepted as an explanation for a Victorian woman's nerves, it was considered an inadequate, emasculating explanation for a male soldiers' mental health. Not only did medicine separate the experiences of men and women; the experience of the soldier was understood as uniquely difficult and traumatic."
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/09/world-war-ones-forgotten-female-shell-shock-victims/378995/