Symonds on fear and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Prominent English neurologist Sir Charles Symonds, during World War II service with the Royal Air Force, published a series of articles emphasizing the role of fear initiating psychological breakdown in combat airmen (termed Lack of Moral Fibre). Having served in a medical capacity in the previous war, Symonds re-presented the phylogenetic conceptualizations formed by his colleagues addressing 'shell shock'. In 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5) re-classified Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), removing the diagnosis from the category of Anxiety Disorders. This was the view introduced a century ago by the trench doctors of World War I and affirmed by Symonds' clinical experience and studies in World War II.

Post concussion syndrome: the attraction of the psychological by the organic.

Post concussion symptoms following mild traumatic brain injury are a difficult clinical state to conceptualise. The constellation of symptoms include those with an organic signature (and presumed organic aetiology), and those with overt psychological features. A seemingly trivial head injury may result in enduring symptoms. The validity of post concussion syndrome (PCS) has been the focus of much medico-legal debate, as has its cause. Whether PCS is 'neurogenic' or 'psychogenic' in aetiology remains contestable. Babinski, in 1918, hypothesised that an organic factor initiated the symptoms of the disorder now known as PCS, and that this acted as a 'bait', or attractor, for pre-existing and post-injury psychological influences. This hypothesis, which has been neither proven nor disproven over the subsequent nearly one hundred years, deserves reconsideration for it is an appealing model of PCS.