>>29728905
someone is telling jokes or is trying to lighten the mood and the dude is laughing or smiling.

its a normal thing yo

>>29728905
Naw m8. This nigga happy that medical care arrived. He can finally get off that hell hole and enjoy a comfy cot in a field hospital that's 10x better than the frontlines.

When you undergo extreme stress and the brain snaps you can start feeling pleasant psychosis as a sort of defense mechanism. They're probably smiling because their brain is reinterpreting the madness around them or what they've just seen as funny or magical.

>>29728905

I believe it has something to do with their facial muscles contorting and locking into a mask which can be confused with a smile.

>>29728905

If you look at the big picture, as in the literal big picture, it's a group shot of a pretty well maintained entrenchment. He looks like that because he's deliberately smiling at the camera, which is why his eyes are focused on the camera and photographer. It's only when the rest of the context is stripped out of the picture that he looks crazy or broken. Also, his eyes are very blue, so they have a glowing appearance that looks kind of disconcerting in sepia toned photos.

Everything seems funny when you realise just how fucking insane it is. Grinning is also an natural reaction to stress/threat wires in us since chimpdom.

Poor fucker.

>>29729000

Maybe, but zoom in and see how far his mouth is stretched (try and mimic it and see how uncomfortable it is) - coupled with the way he is holding himself it looks more like shellshock.

>>29728905
I have watched old shellshock videos where they fucking shake like...shit I don't even know what shales as much as they do.

I do wonder why body trembling, cataonia and other physical responses seems to have faded as a response to shell shock/PTSD. Unless shellshock was significantly different from PTSD

Unless the Netley hospital is not a representative sample, but only the worst cases taht were actually rare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AL5noVCpVKw

>>29729103

Shell Shock is probably different from modern PTSD because a counter insurgency is a totally different sort of war than fighting in Verdun. Also yeah, the Netley hospital likely is for the worst cases. Most of the WW1 vets that got PTSD of the type that we see nowadays likely just got a horrible drinking problem and a broken marriage out of it.

>>29729182
The Old Guard, fuck I'm glad I wasn't there.

>>29728905
The tremors are a result of constant artillery strikes, hence "shell shock." Repeated exposure to the over-pressure waves damages the brain and inner ear, which is why they have trouble walking and performing tasks that require dexterity.

Modern soldiers usually don't have the same prolonged exposure to explosions. As deadly as IEDs are, few are exposed to hundreds per hour, every hour, for months on end. This cumulative damage is what causes the "shell shock" symptoms.

>>29728955
>I have never felt extreme stress/went under extreme duress; The post
M8 its not pleasurable

>>29728905
>Why are shell shocked soldiers often seen smiling?
Dissociation, basically the mind goes in a state of fugue in order to run away from the trauma.

>>29729312
So they only got better by adapting to their new handicap, not actually returning to normal?

>>29729394
The damage got better with time and physical therapy, but because of the nature of nervous system damage a lot of symptoms were permenant.

It's worth noting that not every soldier with "shell shock" had some symptoms, and that many were more like what today we would call PTSD. Some soldiers got PTSD symptoms without being shelled, while others suffered the nervous system damage without getting PTSD. At the time however they had only ever documented the two conditions happening at the same time and thought they were the same, which is why "shell shock" was phased out of use for PTSD once it was shown not to be part of the physical damage caused by shelling.