As contemporaries noted, the long months from the Munich Crisis (autumn 1938) through to the end of the Phoney war (spring 1940) felt like a ‘war of nerves’ in Britain. The battlefields were physical and material as much as psychological and imagined. Turning to sources that reveal visceral experience, in this paper I explore the internal and internalised history of the international crisis, exhume the causalities of this war of nerves, a group of people who exercised their bodily autonomy and self-determination to free themselves from the world in crisis. Based on a dataset of over 200 cases, the ‘crisis suicides’ --“committed daily by people terrorised at the thought of a war”--constituted an apparent epidemic. This body of evidence of bodily experience makes a case for reframing and renaming the period, and identifying the first battle of Britain’s ‘People’sWar’.