Correspondents' Correspondence

...Battle shock is, of course, another central area of investigation, and it, too, was a major topic at the meeting...

...Many experience bad conscience and feelings of guilt at being in a hospital while their friends are fighting at the front...

...Conditions of actual or impending warfare are not the only stress-situations facing modern societies," explained Professor Noah Milgram, head of the Psychology Department at Tel Avtv University and one of the organizers of the congress...

...Living under prolonged tension, one might imagine, would have a very negative effect...

...According to Milgram, it has been shown that leaders acting under conditions of war or other extreme emergency "tend to move away from individualized decisions, which reflect their particular personalities, and attach themselves more and more to the common denominator of the group so as to be relieved of the burden of responsibility...

...Because of the Arab surprise attack in the Yom Kippur War, Israel has now had considerable experience with this phenomenon...

...Still, the problems of "living under conditions of emergency" have been subjected to increasing study in this country, and a special international congress attended by several hundred experts was held here early this month...

...and although professionals generally believe such shock victims should be removed as far as possible and for as long as possible from the source of the shock, this seems to be the wrong approach in the overwhelming number of cases...

...Stressing Stress Tel Avtv-Recent public opinion surveys tend to confirm the view of many Israeli psychologists and psychiatrists that the population here, by and large, is bearing up very well under the heavy stress of Arab terror, threats of renewed warfare and economic difficulties...

...A third obvious subject for any symposium on stress behavior is feelings about death...

...A poll taken at the end of last November by the Institute of Applied Social Research and the Institute of Communications of Jerusalem's Hebrew University reveals that 83 per cent of the public believes there will be another Israeli-Arab war within the next two years, while only 20 per cent felt this way last June...

...One can markedly shorten both the distance and the time that the patient needs to be removed from his unit...

...One of the most interesting-and potentially crucial-aspects of the subject is the behavior of decision-makers under extreme tension, and a special session of the conference devoted to this theme was introduced by Israel's former Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abba Eban, who delivered a paper on "War and Peace-The Experience of Situations of Stress by Statesmen...

...But Milgram points to the other side of the coin: "A society organized to deal with the problem-to deal with it even if it cannot be resolved-and develop ways of adjustment, can be a healthy society...

...On the other hand, the proportion of those who found the situation intolerable went down from 22 per cent in October to 15 per cent one month later.-Eliahu Salpeter...

...Says Milgram, who was on duty in a field hospital during the War: "I became convinced that sending the soldier away from the place of his shock is not very useful...

...On this, the Israelis present an extremely divergent picture: The loss of a single soldier in a battle or border incident is viewed as a tragedy, but no comparable attitude exists toward the large number of people killed, under much more avoidable circumstances, in individual road accidents...

...Finally, the Israeli public's adjustment to ongoing conditions of stress is graphically demonstrated by the contrast between the growing number of people who assume a new war is inevitable and the decreasing number who claim they cannot get used to the present situation...

...Nations at peace also have their fears and anxieties, from youth rebellion and street-crime to the specter of global nuclear annihilation...

...Furthermore, societies capable of facing situations of stress can become stronger from such experiences...