This source indicates that the incidence of mental illness increased dramatically after the Civil War. There were 40 state and federal "asylums" for the mentally ill in 1860 and by 1880 there were 140. "Sadly, two-thirds of the patients stored in those massive warehouses were Civil War veterans". Most people had no idea of the "grim personal nightmares that would haunt the war's veterans, their families and society for years after". Most of these vets were ignored or forgotten by society in the years following the war. There are graves behind many of these old asylums-marked only by numbers without names-where the veterans were buried. Many of the patients in the asylums up to 1900 were veterans suffering from what today we know as "post-traumatic stress disorder.
(Source: "Whose graves are These? The quiet crisis of mentally ill Civil War veterans" by Allen Cornwell. In The Civil War Historian May/June 2006).
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