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

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

#191

Post by anthk » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 8:55 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…

In Spain we talk about those PTSDs coloquially as "fantasmas del pasado" (ghosts from the past).

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

#192

Post by ithkuil » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 8:58 PM UTC

Ar-Curunir wrote: post #168

ithkuil wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not always. War was also a career, a way to provide to your (present, future) family by stealing resources from others (pillaging). Rulers often rewarded veterans with lands of the conquered etc.

That's precisely what war still is for many Americans too: a way to get cheap college, a guaranteed career, etc. Doesn't change the fact that it's still the poor being forced to take this option; the only difference is that it's the economy (controlled by the rulers) that's doing the coercion, instead of the rulers directly.

I don't think everything can be explained in such a top down way, as if there is a determined ruling class that subjugates a set of passive actors that don't have any role in the hole story.

Society is built by individuals that are ultimately driven by the same things, no matter what is your current place in the dominance hierarchy.

Thinking that the average peasant would not engage in aggressive behaviour if it were not for the "ruling class" to provide that incentive fails to explain how the ruling class emerged in the first place.

Humans compete. They compete for mates, for prestige, for resources.

Harmony and peace require effort to build and sustain, but they pay dividends. Prosperity benefits the rulers too.

Paradoxically, harmony and peace in ancient history was often the product of interests of the same ruling classes that engaged in the warring behaviour.

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

#193

Post by coffeeling » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:20 PM UTC

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…

You might be interested in a book called Personality: What makes you the way you are by Newcastle professor Daniel Nettle. It's a very readable intro to the system of categorizing personality used by academic researchers and that probably has more resolution than thinking in terms of HSP.

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

#194

Post by hinkley » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:44 PM UTC

clairity wrote: post #183

hinkley wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We went to look at a rescue Chihuahua which I was not enthused by (they are difficult to read, which I think leads to their reputation of being erratic, moody). This dog was a wreck. Profoundly terrified of men. Most chihuahuas bark when they're afraid, this one just sat, quaking, watching me the whole time. I self-identify as an animal magnet so this became a matter of principle to me. It was obvious fifteen minutes…

poor little chihuahua. hopefully someone took a chance on it! my dog also shook and was frozen scared when i first met her. she took a few minutes to take a single timid step forward. but she wasn't profoundly broken like a pair of similar-looking 6 month old siblings that were there at the same time (found in a separate hoarding situation). i saw each of them separately, and neither made any positive movements in th…

A trick I've subsequently learned is that if you crouch down all the way, many small dogs like to hide in the 'cave' made by your shins.

In general shrinking yourself makes most dogs like you a lot more, but the little dogs will bee-line for your legs.

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

#195

Post by blacksqr » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:54 PM UTC

GurnBlandston wrote: post #155

As a counterpoint, I'll recommend the excellent book Achilles in Vietnam . It explores Achilles' story in The Illiad and how it illustrates the stages he goes through while processing what he has experienced as a soldier.

Second that this is an excellent book, written by a doctor whose practice was treating PTSD in Vietnam veterans.

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

#196

Post by jonnycomputer » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 9:57 PM UTC

An underwhelming argument by the blogger. Introspection about motivation and emotion is also lacking in ancient texts; should we take that to imply that people didn't introspect, or have complex emotional lives? The role of literature has changed; if I look at a corpus of C++ and fail to see mentions of trauma, should I assume that no trauma occurred in the lives of the programmers who wrote and maintained the code? No, because one does not usually talk about such things in code. And, how easy would it be to miss evidence of psychological distress when it is described as visions and visitations of demons and angels? Read medieval hagiographic literature!

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

#197

Post by tathougies » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 10:06 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…

Well yes you're mostly right about losing a child.

But,

> There were established societal and religious ways to deal specifically with the death of a child. Think prescribed ceremonies that grant a form of closure and which pretty much all of your friends and neighbors subscribe to. Nothing like this exists today.

Still exists today. For one thing, the religions that were around then -- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc -- still exist today. For my wife and I, we had comfort with our Catholic grieving traditions, which are mostly the same as a thousand years ago.

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

#198

Post by golemiprague » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 10:17 PM UTC

I see here a lot of interesting assumptions as of why and whether differences exists between our days and the past but for any practical solution you don't need to go so far back to ponder the existence of PTSD, even today the rate of PTSD is very different among different societies. For example Israeli soldiers tend to have much less PTSD than Americans and the ones that have it are affected in different ways. It will be more interesting to test the theories brought here on those different societies and see if any of them make sense and what other differences might exist.

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

#199

Post by bbsanon » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

john-radio wrote: post #163

bbsanon wrote: post #161

I am a person who was physically and emotionally abused by peers as a child, who had a horrible, life changing experience on a psychedelic as a minor, and who has tinnitus and hyperacusis as a result of overexposure before 20. I am now decades older and my life turned out horribly. I have many of the symptoms of PTSD, so it’s reasonable to self diagnose as such. I’m self destructive and suicidal, in constant mental t…

I'm glad that you are here for now. Thanks for sharing about your experiences with PTSD, and sorry that you have had them.

Yeah me too. It was basically a suicide note.

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

#200

Post by stblack » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 10:49 PM UTC

One seminal work on the subject is No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry In War by Richard A. Gabriel.

One facet of difference, according to Gabriel, is range.

In the Ancient and Medieval world, a mile or two from the enemy was a comfort zone, at least for awhile. You could sleep soundly, there.

In more modern times, the comfort zone gets progressively and massively, further away.

Today, depending on armaments, can you sleep soundly when you're 50 or 100 miles from an enemy army? Are you safe, there? A fighter jet, presently 50 miles away, could strafe you and everyone around you mere minutes from now, in an incident that's over before you can get out of your sleeping bag.