Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world? • Hacker News Board

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#61

Post by Someone » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

kazen44 wrote: post #17

cletus wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need to go to the ancient world to see this. A rudimentary look at genealogy will show you that even in the 19th century. If a child under 2 dies, you'll often see reuse of that name for the next child. There were cultural standards, particularly in Europe, around naming children after paternal and maternal grandparents and so forth (such that often you can tell what number a child was by their name if…

Also, illness and mortality was far more definitive prior to modern medical breakthroughs. Prior to world war 2, getting ill from a wide range of highly deadly or incapacitating diseases (polio for example) was quite common and far more fatal then it is today. The culture around mortality has changed a lot in my opinion.

Also, “highly deadly” included any serious open wound (open leg fracture, for example), stepping into a rusty nail or even getting a serious cold.

I think pneumonia, the flu, tuberculosis and diphtheria killed more people than polio (https://www.ncdemography.org/2014/06/16/mortality-and-cause-... doesn’t even mention it)

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#62

Post by Ididntdothis » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #60

sorokod wrote: post #53

I would suggest that some forms of medieval entertainment would cause PTSD in a modern person. From public executions, through bear baiting[1] and cat torture[2]. The (unstated) assumption the people in the past "were just like us" emotionally, deserves closer scrutiny. I believe that the magnitude of trauma inflicted by a certain experience is relative to what is considered to be the norm in the time and place. The…

Even butchering livestock for food, more or less a routine household chore in the past, is sufficiently alien today to most that it would likely cause PTSD if they had to do it.

On the other hand a lot of people today can watch super intense horror movies which probably would have traumatized ancient people.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#63

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #31

cletus wrote: post #12

If you're so inclined to go down a rabbit hole of 100+ hours of content, I highly suggest having a listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History [1]. Dan is particularly interested in military history, especially ancient military history. He has an episode on Caesar's conquest of Gaul (which he argues in any kind of modern context would be called a genocide) as well as a series on the great Persian kings, called the King o…

> When a province rebelled against Roman Rule and Rome would crush them, insurrection was punished particularly harshly. People would be put in groups of 10 (hence DECImate) where each group was responsible for choosing which of those 10 would die and for killing that person. This is incorrect. Decimation was a form of military discipline, not civilian, and it was _extremely_ rare for most of Rome's history. It was u…

The poster was trying to make a point that I think stands even if there are some technical definitional issues.

Roman history is long and practices vary. I don't think that you can critically look at the campaigns to conquer and pacify Gaul or Carthage without walking away with the understanding that mass killing (or enslavement) wasn't a tool wielded by the Romans.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#64

Post by ReactiveJelly » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:00 PM UTC

kryogen1c wrote: post #45

papeda wrote: post #3

On a related note, a while ago I read a little about how ancient families coped with the deaths of their children. My takeaway, pretty much cribbed from this article [1], was that such deaths produced less trauma than they would today because: (1) More families lost children. This lessened the trauma because a family could talk to other nearby families who had experienced the same thing. Those families would also be…

> This rarity breeds isolation highly related: the opposite of addiction isnt sobriety, its connectedness. https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y... a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economi…

And because we get more done by specializing, everyone has to be as disconnected as we can afford. And although there was always a hidden price on it, now the price is obvious: Friendship is expensive, and your friends also have to pay, for it to work.

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender.

Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know.

Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun.

I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#65

Post by C1sc0cat » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

papeda wrote: post #3

On a related note, a while ago I read a little about how ancient families coped with the deaths of their children. My takeaway, pretty much cribbed from this article [1], was that such deaths produced less trauma than they would today because: (1) More families lost children. This lessened the trauma because a family could talk to other nearby families who had experienced the same thing. Those families would also be…

War was also much less intense and drawn out even up to say the Napoleonic war.

If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#66

Post by AlexandrB » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:04 PM UTC

papeda wrote: post #3

On a related note, a while ago I read a little about how ancient families coped with the deaths of their children. My takeaway, pretty much cribbed from this article [1], was that such deaths produced less trauma than they would today because: (1) More families lost children. This lessened the trauma because a family could talk to other nearby families who had experienced the same thing. Those families would also be…

> To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.

I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly.

In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#67

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:06 PM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #62

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even butchering livestock for food, more or less a routine household chore in the past, is sufficiently alien today to most that it would likely cause PTSD if they had to do it.

On the other hand a lot of people today can watch super intense horror movies which probably would have traumatized ancient people.

One is real, with sights and smells linked to millennia of instinct and the knowledge that you yourself are the primary agent of what is occurring to the livestock.

The other you know is fiction which you can criticize the script, special effects, and cinematography of from a comfortable chair, often with friends.

I don't think the two really compare.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#68

Post by ThrowawayR2 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #56

ThrowawayR2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> " People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence. " Doesn't the plight of homeless veterans today demonstrate that PTSD and mental illness is not something that can be easily hidden, even under threat of violence?

Homelessness is an effective way of hiding the symptoms at the cost of hiding the whole human from society. How many homeless lives are in the historical record? To the extent that they are referenced at all, they will appear as beggars in the background of some wider historical event. You can beat symptoms out of someone if you don't care whether they survive the process. Then you have no people with visible symptom…

But that goes back to the author's point: some mention of many beaten-to-death veterans would've received mention in ancient works but doesn't. And that's setting aside the idea that beating up a veteran who's primary combat skill was close combat, unlike modern veterans, was something easily done.

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#69

Post by mattigames » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:09 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #50

Excellent counterpoint from r/AskHistorians (paragraph breaks added for legibility): [1] > Cross-cultural psychologists have observed that, regardless of cultural background, people who suffer persistent emotional disturbances in the wake of a traumatic event exhibit intrusive memory symptoms in some form. Here in the US, these are closely related to what we commonly call "flashbacks." For the Romans, people experien…

Plus there has been strong indicators that other animals can suffer from PTSD e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ejn.12860

Re: Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

#70

Post by SAI_Peregrinus » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 2:14 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

pjc50 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous? It's not fatal and rarely debilitating. It does affect people's happiness and behaviour throughout their lives. It does not leave traces in the bones or DNA. How would we find an un-traumatized person in a world where injury, sickness and death were far more prevalent at all ages? Much traditional childrearing practice that's supposed to…

WW1 was also different for the troops experiencing it because of the technologies involved. There was a whole discussion here a few months back about how the WW1 battlefield (blasted trees, churned mud, etc) has shaped our expectations of what battlefields should look like. Before that, the battlefield itself was mostly untouched. Shell shock was a new phenomenon for soldiers from WW1 because it was a new experience…

Also concussive blast damage was far, far more common from WW1 than in any previous war. The Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) caused by blast damage isn't externally visible, but is responsible for some of the common symptoms of PTSD[1]. We know there are forms of PTSD unrelated to blast-based TBI, but it's quite possible that pre-WWI soliders didn't experience PTSD as much because there weren't as many explosions. Combined with different social views & more traumatic lifestyles the (non-physical injury) trauma of war wouldn't be as great.

Also, surviving a battle injury was far less common before the discovery of antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. Infection from relatively minor wounds caused a much higher death rate. So the surviving soldiers were less likely to have experienced physical trauma and lived long enough to make it into accounts of their behavior afterwards.

[1] https://blastinjuryresearch.amedd.army.mil/assets/docs/newsH...