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

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

#141

Post by carapace » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:03 PM UTC

Dude is resting his shoe-clad feet on a stack of Babylon 5 DVDs like an ottoman. Excuse me while I go wash my eyes.

WTF dude!?

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> I’d say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do.

Yeah, no shit Sherlock! The entirety of civilization back the was a horror show. People have been psychotic since the Younger Dryas. The reason there's "vanishingly little evidence" of PTSD is because everybody had it, all the time.

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

#142

Post by ben509 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:10 PM UTC

acituan wrote: post #130

_wovb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. I’m a trauma therapist, I work with many people who have PTSD. Reading this article all I could think was: Trauma is a sophisticated concept. As a society and species, we are pretty “trauma naive” in that we have just recently come to this understanding of the very complex web of psychological, somatic, emotional, sociological, intergenerational, and cultural aspects of this experience. Because of th…

I disagree about being trauma naive as a society. Having a scientific understanding of trauma is separate from having phenomenological understanding of trauma, and I believe we have a large amount of knowledge and wisdom about the latter. I also believe there is a large repertoire of psychotechnologies that helped people to be trauma resistant or helped them if they had PTSD. We just lost contact with many of them an…

> there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces

Certainly, in historical warfare, you faced off against an enemy. There were far fewer devices that could be highly lethal and completely unseen. Even stuff as simple as IEDs is awful, but airstrikes, artillery, etc. probably contribute to that sense of no control. And the counters to them are, generally, prolonged periods of hyper-awareness, continually scanning for threats.

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

#143

Post by Frondo » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:11 PM UTC

mattigames wrote: post #69

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

Purely anecdotally, as a pet owner this doesn't surprise me at all. I have two rescue cats that, from the descriptions from the fosters, had very stressful lives before I got them (attacks from dogs, being attacked by other cats in a feral cat colony, etc). I've also cats that had a very relaxed prior life. The differences in their behaviors is stark; one of the rescues displays a lot of stress behavior whenever there are loud noises or anything surprising. One of them has calmed down a lot, but those behaviors still pop up pretty regularly.

I don't know enough about animal psychology or their inner worlds to say, "that's PTSD," (I do think, mind, that animals experience emotions, but how that experiences compares to human emotion, I don't know) but there sure seems to be something about reliving trauma there.

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

#144

Post by Udik » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:13 PM UTC

_wovb wrote: post #90

Udik wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.: “That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.” Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work…

> Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms.

There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune.

If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).

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

#145

Post by pjc50 » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:16 PM UTC

csours wrote: post #125

marcus_holmes wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always dubious about this. "Decimation" was a horrific thing, inflicted on Roman Legions as punishment for cowardice. It meant killing one out of every ten soldiers. So it seems to me that that's the extreme upper bound of casualties - 10%. Anything more and running away to face decimation would improve your odds. But the survivors might well have trauma from their actions not their injuries. Hacking another huma…

I think you also have to consider the fact that throughout history, the individual outcome of battles for most soldiers has been survival - either you win, flee, or become a prisoner. People did die, for sure, but maybe not as many as we imagine. I wonder how much video games have do to with this perception? In a video game, you have a Kill-Death ratio, not a Kill-Death-Prisoner-Flee-Serious Injury-Light Injury ratio…

Or disease or desertion. The majority of Napoleon's troops in the famous Tufte diagram were not lost in battle. The Boer war similarly lost more to disease than combat.

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

#146

Post by yters » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:18 PM UTC

There is the idea that warriors could get infected by bloodlust. Also, the berserkers who would be placed in an altered state of consciousness and obliterate anyone near them, friend or foe.

Also, in a culture where public toture and execution were the norm, they might have had different tolerances.

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

#147

Post by mLuby » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:22 PM UTC

_wovb wrote: post #96

Cederfjard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stupid question here, but isn't it possible that experiencing violence and death isn't as highly stressful/traumatic if it's to you like water is to a fish, to borrow your phrase? Especially if you have some sort of belief in an afterlife to console you. Just a question from someone who knows very little about this.

It's not a stupid question at all. Death nor violence does not have to be inherently traumatic. I would be very surprised if 100% of people back then had degrees of PTSD (and that's not what my comment was meant to imply). A working definition of trauma: "trauma can be defined as any unresolved autonomic nervous system response. It’s about the nervous system’s response to an event, not necessarily the event itself. E…

I like that definition, but is the response "unresolved," or just "unhelpful?" Maybe "unresolved" has a different meaning in your specialty though.

I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.

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

#148

Post by agumonkey » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

rsynnott wrote: post #27

agumonkey wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics. Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted hand…

Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases. This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.

Well at least in this case the patient were interned before.

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

#149

Post by kristiandupont » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #138

_wovb wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for this. I’m a trauma therapist, I work with many people who have PTSD. Reading this article all I could think was: Trauma is a sophisticated concept. As a society and species, we are pretty “trauma naive” in that we have just recently come to this understanding of the very complex web of psychological, somatic, emotional, sociological, intergenerational, and cultural aspects of this experience. Because of th…

> "We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize." my otherwise wonderful dog, adopted from a rescue org when she was ~3 years old, plainly has PTSD from prior trauma. she spent the first 3 months with me going through frequent cycles of fear diarrhea, usually in the very early morning hours. i can only guess that she was treated badly by a ver…

>fearful/cautious of men

My ex neighbor rescued a wonderful dog that had been tied somewhere and left to die, in Spain. He brought her to Denmark and she has mostly recovered with the weird caveat that she is now racist. Southern-european looking people (black hair/beards) make her really angry or nervous.

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

#150

Post by _wovb » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:28 PM UTC

Udik wrote: post #144

_wovb wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.: “That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.” Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work…

> Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way…

Everybody is different - for some alcoholics it will be incredibly healing in going to see a therapist or psychologist who validates their experience, lets them know that their pain from, for example, a life of abuse, is completely legitimate, and that the drive to seek something that soothed the pain is also legitimate - we are hard wired to avoid discomfort. We live in a society where addiction is demonized and people are ostracized for it. This does not help people to heal. Part of this healing is letting people know they are not "bad" or "wrong" for having these urges.

This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.

In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.

While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).