Published as part of Cambridge’s Disability Law and Policy series, Heavy Laden focuses on a specific population of Civil War suicides: Union veterans. Drawing heavily upon quantitative data, Logue and Blanck show that veterans’ suicide rates far exceeded those of their civilian counterparts.
If the post-9/11 American home front has a “signature disorder” (and I’m not sure that it does), it would have to be veteran suicide. No other social pathology better reflects the deadly combination of mental anguish and communal indifference facing contemporary vets than self-murder.
According to a recent White House briefing, roughly twenty U.S. veterans kill themselves every day—a rate one and a half times that of non-veteran adults. Since the start of the War on Terror, suicide has proven to be a greater threat to veterans’ long-term heath than al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) combined. Indeed, it’s become common wisdom to assert that the latest generation of American troops is especially vulnerable to suicidal behavior, their capacity for self-harm exacerbated by the chaotic nature of the wars they fight and the relative isolation they face upon homecoming.
However, as a pair of remarkable new books makes clear, today’s suicide epidemic is neither novel nor unique. Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck’s Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness, and Suicide and Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South examine the tidal wave of psychological trauma unleashed by the American Civil War. Individually, the two books paint sympathetic portraits of vast mental suffering on both sides of the conflict. Read together, they chart a new direction in the study of warfare and mental health, one that future scholars will inevitably follow.
Reviewer: John M. Kinder, Oklahoma State University
Larry M. Logue, Peter Blanck. Heavy Laden: Union Veterans, Psychological Illness, and Suicide. Foreword by Elyn Saks. Cambridge Disability Law and Policy Series. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 278 pp. $110.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-107-13349-5; $34.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-107-58995-7.