World War 1 was likely the first conflict where widespread video recordings exist of scenes of combat and life on the battlefield. Life behind the front, as well as on the home front also show up regularly in post war and modern documentaries.
A subset of these videos, and a common topic within war documentaries, is video footage purported to show the physical and psychological effects of the war. A Youtube or Google search nowadays brings up hundreds of videos of symptoms of "shell shock" or "war neurosis" on soldiers at field hospitals or treatment centers, and the various treatments that are being administered. However, given the highly-propagandized nature of video footage and news at the time, how realistic are these videos in their portrayal of shell shock? Are there instances of modern medical professionals debunking (or at least questioning the validity of) some of these videos?
Can answer the medical professionals part of this. Currently Doctor working in psychiatry with military vets with ptsd. I also work with senior (and older) doctor with experience and interest in teaching about historic presentations of ptsd.
Overall shell shock videos show a functional disorder secondary to traumatic experiences which was influenced by the culture of the time, but also the videos shown are the 'interesting' cases, so this skews our view of the condition. Physiological manifestations remain a presentation seen today with military and non military trauma.
Particular relating to ww1 shell shock. Medical professionals at the time originally interpreted it as a organic illness (which is what you would think as a doc seeing it now). As they became more experienced they began to recognise it as secondary to the trauma of the war. It is often described as a cultural phenomenon due to the lack of similar episode seen during ww2 and following. This is thought to have many possible causes and is the cultural and social influence on functional disorders is interesting and complex if you want to get into it. Even in ww1 German soldiers with shellshock type conditions were seen to be more like to have non epileptic seizures than the brits. Whether related to our diagnostic culture, this is unclear.
As far as the videos go, they are showing accurately the condition (although can't 100% prove each patient was genuine) but more people had what we would think of as more classical ptsd like symptoms than this extreme physical manifestation. Although ultimately this makes for a boring propaganda video. You can ready about the interpretation of clinical cases from the time here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4176276/
Incidentally, it is really interesting to look at the face of a person with 'shellshock' and compare to those in other major military conflicts. The glazed wide eyes espression is consistent, even if it manifests differently.