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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?

#151

Post by irrational »

>I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare – it was viewed not generally a necessary evil in these societies, but a positive good – which may have meant there was less sense that what had taken place was trauma at all. If that is the case, the emergence of PTSD would speak to improvement in our society: we have become more averse to violence and do it less, and as a consequence, feel it more.

This seems to be the heart of his argument as to why this might be. When we look at the artwork that decorated public buildings in the ancient world (I'm specifically thinking of Egypt and Assyria) we see a lot of torture, warfare, abasement of enemies, etc. I'm trying to imagine going to my local public buildings and seeing scenes of, say, North Koreans being flayed alive carved in stone on the walls. It does seem like we view violence in a different way than they did in the ancient millennia.

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

#152

Post by clairity »

kristiandupont wrote: post #149
clairity wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

glad she found a much better home! i worry about my dog being slightly racist too, as she tends to react more to black/brown folks relative to white/asian folks, but i may just be projecting my own implicit/latent racism there.

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

#153

Post by csours »

pjc50 wrote: post #145
csours wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup. I think of the Battle of the Bulge this way as well. It's much easier for Americans to identify with the Battle of the Bulge because we have access to many more dramatizations of it, but it was only a hint of what was going on on the Eastern front!

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

#154

Post by autokad »

did anyone get to the bit about fighting shield to shield?

> "I particularly wonder about this given Lloyd’s dismissal of fighting ‘shield to shield.’ The issue is, we have sources – Tyrtaeus most notably – who tell us that happened. If we cannot understand why, I might suggest that it is we, and not the Greeks, who are missing something."

I personally agree with Lloyd (Lindybeige). I dont think he was saying it never happened, just that it was uncommon.

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

#156

Post by speeder »

One thing I read today might contribute to this, I found it rather interesting.

I was reading about Black Death, and ended reading also about the Great Famine that happened a bit before it, and the two are attributed to be part of the reason why Chivalrious warfare ended, before these two events, professional soldiers (knights for example) usually died in training accidents than in actual battle...

But the deep changes caused by these two events, caused among other things, the start of a more destructive kind of warfare, where instead of winning by making the enemy retreat, you would win by completely destroying the enemy forces.

I suspect in some periods of history there was less PTSD because war was just less violent.

After Black Death, and increasing since, we got closer and closer to the idea of total war, that ended happening for real in the World Wars.

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

#157

Post by benibela »

Someone wrote: post #61
kazen44 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Tuberculosis did not go away. World wide it still kills 1.5 million people / year and 25% of the population is infected.

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

#158

Post by seph-reed »

Was surprised not to see any mention of guns. Even within a very limited life-experience of playing paintball, vs larping it's apparent the two lend themselves to different mental states.

Obviously this is not the true experience of these things, but it seems safe to say gun warfare is vastly less perceivable/predictable than classic warfare. Even arrows are something you can at least see. Bullets are invisible and can hit you anywhere that isn't encased in concrete, rock, or metal. And then there's bombs...

How could anyone feel even a moment of agency or relief amongst bombs and bullets?

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

#159

Post by SkyBelow »

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…

A few other factors at play concerning losing children:

(3) More experience. The rate young child died was much higher, so not only were you likely to have other families to lean on, you had a much higher chance of having experienced this growing up or even having lost another child before.

(4) Less attachment. Children weren't valued the way they are today. The biggest example I can think of is the social expectations around proper treatment of children, such as the laws protecting children. There was far less social protections around children even just a couple of centuries ago. Laws basically allowed the parents to do as they wish to the child, short of murdering them. Abuse of a child did not spark the same emotional outrage that it does today (see the fate of orphans of the lowest class of society). We did value them more than compared to mammals who have more than one offspring at a time, but nothing near the modern day extent where 'for the children' has becoming a rallying cry strong enough to be worthy of political abuse.

(5) Greater expectation. People were faced with it being a far more real possibility. While in today's world I factually know that one of my children may die young from cancer, I don't emotionally consider it a possibility at all. But back then, with infant mortality rates being what they were, one was less likely to view it as an impossibility.

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

#160

Post by adamc »

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…

Thank you for rescuing her and making the world a better place.
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