Dr. Dillon Carroll Unveils a Lesser Known Chapter of the Civil War: The Mental Scars Left Behind
By: Aidan Butler
9 December 2021
On Friday December 3rd, another new piece of literature joined the thousands published on a shadow that still looms over America today, the Civil War.
“Fortunately and unfortunately it's just eternally relevant,” said author, Dr. Dillon Carroll. “It just keeps reverberating in modern life and we're still living in the shadow of the civil war.”
Dillon Carroll Ph.D. recently completed publication of his first book, ‘Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and the Civil War.’ The book, which had its first official release on December 3rd, takes a look at the Civil War, analyzing not the battles or tactics, but the mentality of those that experienced and how the war left its mark on the survivors mentally.
Carroll has always been interested in history, attributing some of his interest to the love he has for storytelling. “I have always been sort of a history lover, as long as I can remember and I think that's both a bit of a love of storytelling, my parents love to tell the story about how I’d memorize and retell teenage mutant ninja turtles episodes. I like history because they [my parents] were very interested in stories that were true.” Carroll also notes part of his love for history comes from the influence of his mother, “She was a history buff too and she had some of that reverence that rubbed off on me.”
However, his interest in the Civil War wouldn’t come until later on in life, when he was attending college at California State University in Chico. “Very early on I was a history major. The civil war wasn't really on my radar until college where I took a course on reconstruction and I was just hooked on the civil war.”
This new found infatuation with the war would spur Carroll to pursue higher learning at the University of Georgia. “I was pretty obsessed with the civil war, and as I was graduating I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life, so I went and got my master’s degree, and that led to a Ph.D.”
The American Civil War to this day stands as the most devastating conflict in American history. Casualty rates average around 600,000 men killed, wounded, or missing. The war came at a time when the medicinal field knew little about sanitation, disease, or the mental strain war can cause.
“While war wounds have often been interpreted as fitting outside of the larger narrative of disability in the United States, disability has long been relegated to the margins of Civil War history” said Dr. Sarah Handley-Cousins, a professor of history at the University of Buffalo, in her own book ‘Bodies in Blue: Disability in the Civil War North.’
In a piece by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine, it is discussed that the Civil War is often forgotten in the discussion of mental illness due to the extreme lack of knowledge or information at the time. Diagnoses such as ‘shell shock’ or ‘post traumatic stress disorder’ would not come about until World War I and the Vietnam conflict respectively. Post-war records detail many mental hospitals were full of civil war veterans, many of whom attempted suicide, a sign now associated with PTSD.
“I’m more interested in what we call social history, not so interested in the political, or military history of the war, but what the war was like living for people, and how people thought” said Carroll, regarding his interest in a lesser known part of the war.
The sentiment was shared by fellow historian Professor Diane Sommerville, who teaches at Binghamton University in New York and is blurbed in Carroll’s book. “I’m a social historian, and as a social historian, I’m most interested in the lives of ordinary people but I’m also really interested in the documents where you find the lives of ordinary people.”
Professor Sommerville spoke of the importance it is to studying the mental aspect of the war, “You can't completely know what the cost of the war was until you know the full extent. It had an impact that went well beyond 1865. It’s about getting a full accounting of the cost of the civil war.”
The civil war was not like how wars would be fought in the twentieth and twenty first centuries. It was a conflict of countrymen versus countrymen. In a piece by the American Psychiatric Association, it is noted how regiments that fought in the war comprised local communities of people who had been family, friends, neighbors and had likely known each other for a long time. Citing that the stress of civilians partaking in war likely compounded with witnessing the death of many loved ones.
Writing his book has been no easy task for Dillon Carroll. “It’s been a long time, it's been about ten years since I started researching. It came out of my dissertation, ten years I started researching about what would become this project.”
As someone who always enjoyed reading, Carroll never thought it would take him as long as it has. “I like reading acknowledgements, and a lot of them said ‘this was a ten year project,’ ‘this was a ten year part of my life,’ and I thought ‘suckers,’ and here I am ten years later, it's been a journey.”
Carroll’s new book is not the first to attempt to understand the mental strain placed on Americans during the civil war and it very likely won’t be the last.
He hopes that his new book will change the way people perceive the civil war or war in general. “I think a lot of people if they know about the civil war at all they know it as this white washed story, and the book will show the underbelly of the civil war and I hope that readers come away with a better understanding of the reality of the mental struggle, which I think is just a big a part of the war as amputation, and illness, and the experience of soldiering is one about trauma, struggle and mental illness.”
Carroll also believes that his book can have an impact on the way people perceive mental illness. “In one chapter I talk about how soldiers coped with their mental illness and moved on after, I hope they come away with a belief that they can be agents of their own recovery.”
However it’s important to understand that the Civil War didn’t have a negative mental impact on everyone involved. In early 1863, the government officially sanctioned the creation of African American regiments to be created, to join the cause of abolition. “There is also the experience of black soldiers in the war, which found soldiering to be a positive experience which helped them cope with the trauma of slavery. The war allowed them to strike back at slave holders, their war was a rebelliona gainst the slave holding south, which slaves before them had only dreamed about. So black soldiers suffered mentally much less than white soldiers did, so I hope it helps us understand the war mentally.”
The shadow of the Civil War still looms over the country today. As society progresses, a massive priority has been placed on mental health and how it’s understood and diagnosed.
“There was a debate among asylum doctors, family members, and neurologists who debated about the mental illness of soldiers following the war. I hope readers take away a new understanding of mental illness following the war, that’s different from ours today and also similar. Whether it's someone’s own failings, or hereditary, I hope readers come away with those different conclusions from the book.”
Getting your first book published comes with many emotions. Dr. Carroll has been feeling everything that comes with putting your work out into the world for people to read.
“I’ve been telling people i’ts equal parts excitement, excitement that the book is out, equal part relief that I’m finally finished with this project that’s been in the background and foreground of my life, and part low grade terror that people are going to be reading this book that I’ve been working on for ten years. So a little bit of terror that people are going to read it now, parts relief, excitement, and low grade terror.”
There’s a sentiment that after you finish one major project, you get right to work on the next one. Carroll hasn’t thought much about what will occupy his life now that his first book is out in the world.
“I haven't thought much about what's next. I haven't had much time in addition to working on this project,” he said. “Something will come up, I have some ideas I’m kicking around.”
For now, Carroll continues to teach history at Butte Community College and live his life, until the next inspiration comes along.
“The only thing I hope for the future is that people read the book, that they like it, that it darts a dialogue or conversation about the lived experience of the civil war or the conversation in our society at large. Especially now that we're having conversations about mental health in a new and exciting way.”