It was a completely unheard of concept in the nineteenth century, and I had to tweak some history to make Claire’s role seem believable. The origins of our empirically-supported treatments were still a long way off, so the treatments Claire uses at Fort Daniels are not at all representative of the time or of what we do now. She barely takes the first step of establishing rapport with her patients, which is necessary but not sufficient for successful PTSD treatment. Please don’t take any of the methods portrayed in this story as accurate of what our mental health practices look like today, even though the author is a psychologist. I did, however, enjoy researching the medical history to see what practices were in place at the time. I would particularly like to thank the Dekalb History Center. Their Civil War exhibit, which included information on mental health care, was timely and very helpful. Freud was still a teenager in 1871, so psychoanalysis, the precursor to talk therapy, hadn’t even been invented yet.
