Tranquilliser use was higher in Northern Ireland than anywhere else in the United Kingdom. In some later era, the condition would probably be described as post traumatic stress, but one contemporary book called it ‚the Belfast syndrome‘, a malady that was said to result from ‚living with constant terror, where the enemy is not easily identifiable and the violence is indiscriminate and arbitrary‘. Doctors found, paradoxically, that the people most prone to this type of anxiety were not the active combatants, who were out on the street and had a sense of agency, but the women and children stuck sheltering behind closed doors.

—Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing, (London: William Collins, 2018), 58.

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