The aim of this thesis is to present the social situation of mentally ill war invalids after the end of the war. It uses Yugoslav and Italian legal documents from the post-war period to establish that mentally ill war invalids received state support in the form of disability pensions. It uses newspaper sources from the inter-war period to shed light on the key features of the difficult social status of war invalids and to show that references to mental disorders and mentally ill patients in periodicals were extremely scarce. Drawing on inter-war medical professional literature, it illustrates the often negative perceptions of wartime neurotics and mentally ill war invalids in the context of the medical discourse of the time. Based on the archival documentation of the San Giovanni Hospital in Trieste, the author establishes that soldiers and veterans of the First World War in Slovenia received institutionalised psychiatric treatment.
|
