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Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?

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

#111

Post by gadders »

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…

I've been to Egypt a couple of times, and did a trip to the Valley of the Kings. One of the tombs (I forget which) was for a child of a pharoah that had died. The pictures on the wall were of his father the pharoah going round introducing his child to the gods he would meet in the afterlife. I found that pretty moving.

Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.

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

#112

Post by FrojoS »

7952 wrote: post #13
drewbeck wrote: post #5

Really interesting, tho I wish he cited or talked to some psychologists as well! I wonder if the specific tools of war are a factor as well — the suddenness of explosions and bullets might provide a significantly more traumatic experience than spear sword and trebuchet, the pace of humvees and airplanes more shock than feet and horses.

A counterpoint is that war could also be anguishing slow. An enemy could be moving across a land for months or even years and you would just get occassional news and rumours as they got ever closer. People knew that the enemy was coming, but not neccessarily when. That is a different kind of stress.

Sounds a bit like the new Corona virus.

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

#113

Post by phkahler »

Uehreka wrote: post #97
wetmore wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please elaborate.

I unfold my interpreter spectacles It would appear that GP wishes to express skepticism of the concept of PTSD by invoking the “Reproducibility Crisis” that has affected the social sciences. It would seem that GP believes the crisis to be so all-encompassing and fully invalidating that merely speaking its true name is enough to dismiss any modern psychological finding.

>> believes the crisis to be so all-encompassing and fully invalidating that...

That's the danger in publishing sloppy work across an entire field. In many peoples mind they lose all credibility. If the peer review can't separate the wheat from the chaf, why should anyone else?

No taking a stance on any particular findings, or field of study. Just pointing out that the posters response should not be unexpected. Nor should it be universal ;-)

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

#114

Post by saalweachter »

cletus wrote: post #9
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…

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…

This struck me when I was reading up on SIDS and wondering how people could go so long without realizing that, if you put your babies down to sleep wrong, something like 1 in 1000 of them will die.

And then you look at the historical statistics and realize that, depending on your time and place, something like 250-400 in 1000 infants died. And aside from how viscerally terrifying that thought is, it's no wonder you couldn't notice that extra 1 in 1000 until you fixed childhood plagues and nutrition. It was the terrifying scourge of the 80's, but just a drop in the bucket historically.

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

#115

Post by dsfyu404ed »

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…

>But then, if every woman has gone through multiple stillbirths, child deaths, and so on, then everyone is going to be messed up. What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma".

>I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards.

But if everybody is traumatized then nobody is, it's the local normal. Sure we can say they were "wrong" but that's just a reflection of our current cultural norms. What is right and wrong or traumatic or not is a matter of cultural norms and social consensus. The reason we give a crap over whether or not people are traumatized is because it makes them "messed up" and affects their ability to function normally in society. If people are able to function normally in society, are not "messed up" according to the people around them and don't consider themselves traumatized are they really traumatized?

It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office and say the past was horrible but it's only horrible because we have a different frame of reference. For the people who lived it it was just how things are. I think it's kind of paternalistic to say the people of the past were all/mostly traumatized because it's not like they had any other options, the things they had to experience were unavoidable facts of life.

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

#117

Post by raverbashing »

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…

Yeah I was thinking about the technology as well

WWI had the technology to be profoundly violent. Ok, there were cannons in ships and in the Civil War for example, but I suspect that WWI (and later wars) had a bigger technological dependency.

Technologies that are loud, flashy and destructive: tanks, bombs, machine guns, grenades, etc.

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

#118

Post by cam- »

gdubs wrote: post #42

I always wondered if Achilles was struggling with PTSD during The Iliad . He had seen so much fighting and bloodshed that he became depressed and sat in his tent, refusing to budge. Maybe the anger at Paris was just a front.

The first hysterical blindness was documented by Herodotus in the battle of Marathon, "Epizelos the son of Cuphagoras, while fighting in the close combat and proving himself a good man, was deprived of the sight of his eyes, neither having received a blow in any part of his body nor having been hit with a missile, and for the rest of his life from this time he continued to be blind"

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

#119

Post by king_panic »

Udik wrote: post #26
king_panic wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.

Hm. Think of how you normally try to comfort someone who is grieving about something that is not (in your opinion, at least) of paramount importance. For example, the loss of a sum of money. Would you rather say: "your loss is terrible and only you can understand fully how deep the pain is; savour it and integrate it in your person- it will take years to recover and will eventually become a part of you" or would you…

The exact opposite of your conclusion is true.

Acknowledging someone's emotion gives them permission to feel it, and eventually let it go. Dismissing someone's emotion is denying them the permission to feel it, and let it go. Feelings we don't allow to be felt are never released.

This is true of PTSD at one bound, and the anxiety someone can feel day-to-day, over what seems like absolutely nothing to the casual observer, at the other.

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

#120

Post by pdubs1 »

The ancient world exposed people to more stress and more events of stress compared to developed world inhabitants.

More stress => get used to stress => stress has less of an effect.

Just like any form of mental or physical training: Get challenged => Grow to meet challenge => The same challenges as before are now less challenging.

See: Stress inoculation

"The stress inoculation hypothesis presupposes that brief intermittent stress exposure early in life induces the development of subsequent stress resistance in human and nonhuman primates."

"People with the capacity to maintain healthy emotional functioning in the aftermath of stressful experiences are said to be resilient, or stress resistant (1, 2).

"Researchers have sought to identify attributes associated with stress resistant individuals, with the expectation that understanding the etiology of stress resistance may lead to the prevention of stress-related psychiatric disorders.

"One intriguing finding to emerge from this retrospective research has been that stress resistance is associated with childhood exposure to mildly stressful events (1, 3)."

https://www.pnas.org/content/103/8/3000

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