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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?

#171

Post by derefr »

sharkweek wrote: post #105
_wovb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My (limited, so please correct me if I’m saying something dumb) understanding here too is some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others. My therapist had me read a book called The Highly Sensitive Person by Dr. Elaine Aron after I told him I was struggling with things I felt a “normal” person should be able to handle just fine. The book made a lot of interesting points abou…

> some people are just wired different and can handle more traumatic situations than others.

I've heard it hypothesized that ADHD is adaptive/selected for in some contexts, because people with it are more resilient to stress, i.e. it takes more to make them scared/shocked/traumatized, just like it takes more to excite/motivate them. And so such people can respond "normally" to stressful situations where the other people around them tend to freeze up, thus potentially saving the rest of the group.

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

#172

Post by hinkley »

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…

I took an exercise class a while back and the instructor came in one day shaking.

On his way to class there was a bad motorcycle accident. Guy didn't die but had life-altering injuries, and the instructor was first on the scene. It was bad.

He was vibrating when he came in. I finally convinced him to do some extra shake-out exercises like we already do which helped a bit. After class our timing didn't line up, I was trying to slip him some cash and 'prescribe' him an evening doing something he loves to wind down.

He was trying to be macho about it and I was trying to get him to acknowledge that some fucked up shit just happened. Haven't seen him since the COVID thing so I don't know how he's doing.

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

#173

Post by wayoutthere »

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…

My theory is that modern "combat PTSD" didn't happen widely until barrel rifling enabled artillery and snipers to hit targets from incredible distances.

Before barrel rifling, if you weren't actively fighting, you weren't at too much risk of dying from an unseen enemy attack. You could let your guard down and take a rest when you needed to. But if artillery and snipers are on the board, death can come anywhere, any time. Soldiers are in "fight or flight" mode basically all of the time and they never get a break until their deployment is over. But by that point it's hard to turn off, so you end up with a bunch of traumatized soldiers poorly adapted to living in a peacetime society.

From what we know about trauma, the more time you spend in "fight or flight" the greater your chances of developing PTSD. This is why guerilla tactics are so effective against a standing army: if you make sure the enemy never feels safe, they will eventually become so traumatized that they leave.

People certainly got PTSD -- I'd be surprised if most women of certain eras weren't traumatized given the ever-present threat of rape -- but it was probably limited to the victims of war rather than the combatants.

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

#174

Post by rsynnott »

Spooky23 wrote: post #63
rsynnott wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Oh, sure; they did awful things. I'm just not sure that decimation is reasonable evidence for "Likewise, ancient culture and justice must be almost incomprehensible to us."; the Nazis did far, far worse, say.

For that matter, their behavior in Gaul isn't evidence of it either; again, we unfortunately have many recent parallels.

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

#175

Post by derefr »

brutos wrote: post #94
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…

My grandmother has nine children. Seven of those survived and two did not. This was very common in the area she lived then. To this day, however only in private moments, she talks about the two that did not make it. The loss of the two children many decades ago still brings her a lot of pain. She gave the name of one of the children that did not survive to a later child, however that never erased the suffering. I thi…

> Just because they lived in fucked up times, compared to our current standards, does not mean they experienced a different quality of suffering.

Perhaps it's more about "you can get used to anything." Happiness set-point theory, etc.

If you're always experiencing some low level of pain, then the pain soon stops being distracting. It still has pain qualia, if you focus on it; but those qualia no longer impact your life. You learn to function around/through that pain. It stops having relevance to your brain's decision-making process. It stops being processed consciously.

And someone who has learned to do that, if they experience a set, larger amount of pain (a tooth being extracted, say), will experience less subjective pain relative to someone not already experiencing that low constant underlying pain, because the relative amount of pain they experienced—the pain they haven't learned to ignore, the pain that leaps to conscious attention—will be less for them, than it is for the person who normally experiences no pain at all.

Now take that concept and apply it to mental anguish or guilt/shame. I would expect that it would imply that people who lived in times where everyone had all sorts of reasons to be anguished, and thus were low-level constantly anguished—would end up less likely to get PTSD, simply because there are fewer things in their lives that can truly "pin the needle" of anguish enough to cause PTSD, when the tare on their "enough anguish to rise to conscious attention" scale has been reset higher.

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

#177

Post by tptacek »

phkahler wrote: post #113
Uehreka wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

If that's really what you believe, I have bad news for you about computer science.

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

#178

Post by pdubs1 »

papeda wrote: post #128
pdubs1 wrote: post #120

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 inter…

I get that large sample sizes are impractical for experiments with monkeys, but I'm reluctant to draw conclusions from a study where all relevant groups have <= 10 participants.

Again, "See: Stress inoculation".

Don't worry about one particular study. Search for The Concept. Deduce for yourself its validity.

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

#179

Post by clairity »

BurningFrog wrote: post #165
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 As a complete side note, I've always wondered how dogs tell human males from females. Are we even sure they do?

pretty sure, and as others have noted, smell is probably the primary sense. i have a couple female neighbors she adores, and when they're nearby/coming home, she whimpers excitedly before i can hear anything. on the other hand, with a couple male neighbors she's slightly worried about, she'll do more of a grunt/growl.

but visual, and even auditory, cues are also used. size, posture, stance, and gait, are all pretty good (but not perfect) indications of human gender. she's alerted on ambigously dressed people over 100 ft away who were walking in a lumbering/macho way, but ignores or sometimes wags her tail for those who don't move that way.

edit: should note that sensing potential aggression/danger is probably a large component of this behavior too.

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

#180

Post by mcguire »

"We should expect to see signs of PTSD everywhere. It should be absolutely pervasive in a source-base produced almost entirely by, for and about combat veterans, in societies where military mortality exceeded modern rates by a robust margin. And it simply isn’t there."

Or perhaps it's so ubiquitous it's not mentioned. There are many about everyday life that don't appear in the historical record simply because they are so common.

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