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PTSD and its portrayal in Peaky Blinders

AARYAN SANWAL


The award-winning TV series, Peaky Blinders is set in Birmingham, England at the end of the First World War and gives an account of the Peaky Blinders that is headed by the Shelby family. Thomas Shelby was a tunneller in World War I and for his actions, received two medals of honour after the war.  This blog post shall look at the representation of war trauma, its accuracy in depictions and its effects on the lives of the characters.
The two main characters that this blog post will be focusing on are Thomas Shelby and Daniel Owen (a.k.a. Danny Whiz-Bang). The two of them were tunnellers in the War and were going through a routine tunnel expedition when the Germans broke through the end of their tunnel and attacked the men in the tunnel and brutally injured Thomas and Daniel. They were able to kill the enemies and leave the tunnels, alive but severely injured.
During various instances throughout the show, Thomas Shelby has recurring nightmares of his time in the tunnel. He lies in his bed at night, awake and afraid that the German soldiers might break through the wall at the opposite end of his bed. He can even hear the scraping of tools on the walls and prays for the sun to come up before the wall breaks. To calm himself down, he smokes opium but to no avail. Every night he goes through the nightmare over and over till the sun rises.  These were the defining symptoms of shell shock, a condition that is now subsumed under PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). Symptoms included fatigue, tremor, confusion, nightmares and impaired sight and hearing (Jones, 2012).
Danny Whiz-Bang has extreme and severe hallucinations which result in violent outbursts that he is unaware of. He enters a pub whilst violently shouting ‘They’re going to get me’ and creates a commotion inside. After he has been quietened down, he does not remember what took place. During another such instance, he sits outside a business that is closed and is seen talking loudly to himself, the owner comes out and asks him to leave, when the owner pulls out a knife, Danny gets extremely startled and ends up killing the man. He does this without having any memory of it afterwards. Danny is also affected by the incident in the tunnel and acts in a manner falls under the definition of being shell shocked.
Even after the end of the War, “Fifteen thousand men were still in hospital with shell shock in 1921” (Summerfield, 1998, p. 1396). The treatment and implications of shell shock however at that time were not understood by many doctors. The report of the War Office Committee of Inquiry into Shell Shock says the following about contributing factors to shell shock, “Here we find a consensus of opinion that a poor moral and defective training are one of the most important, if not the most important, etiological factor”. (“Shell Shock”, 1922) This official report published in The British Medical Journal makes clear the fact that very less was understood about war trauma and more specifically ‘shell shock’ during World War I. The treatment for the same was very bizarre and in certain cases, patients were electrocuted to rid them of the physical ailments. Professor Roussy even went on to say that “the war created nothing in the way of the psychoses” (“Shell Shock”, 1922). But modern diagnosis methods and the way the PTSD diagnosis was developed clearly show that “we had to link it [PTSD] to memory (symptoms such as flashbacks and nightmares) because if we had focused on other major symptoms then the VA could continue to claim that PTSD developed in veterans because of their childhood or some genetic abnormality rather than in response to war itself (Kolk & Najavits, 2013, pp. 516-522).
Thomas Shelby and Daniel Owen were going through what is now known as PTSD because of the events that took place in their life during the war and by the events that succeeded it. The show tries to accurately bring together our understanding of PTSD today into the situation prevalent in the 1920s after the War. The producer of the show, Laurie Borg said that, “This year, being the centenary of the First World War, this was very key in our thinking” (Burns, 2014). She was referring to the theme of PTSD that is visible throughout the series. The show brought and increased awareness to a very important issue by making use of its cinematic liberty but keeping intact for the most part, the inherent problems that many people may face in differing severities.
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References :

            Jones, E. (n.d.). Shell Shocked. Retrieved October 10, 2019, from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/06/shell-shocked.
Summerfield, D. (1998). Media: Shell Shock Patients: From Cowards to Victims. The British Medical Journal, 317(7169), 1396–1396. doi: 10.1136/bmj.317.7169.1394f
Shell Shock. (1922). The British Medical Journal, 2(3216), 322–323.
               Kolk, B. V. D., & Najavits, L. M. (2013). Interview: What is PTSD Really? Surprises, Twists of History, and the Politics of Diagnosis and Treatment. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 69(5), 516–522. doi: 10.1002/jclp.21992
               (2014, October 21). Retrieved from https://www.bigissue.com/interviews/cillian-murphy-clean-cut-heroes-dont-interest/

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