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

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

#131

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:28 PM UTC

Mvandenbergh wrote: post #121

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…

One of the interesting comments from the AskHistorians FAQ on PTSD is that, in the classical world, PTSD like behaviour was more commonly associated with public shame rather than private guilt. They might have felt much less conflicted by killing because they did not come from a cultural background where killing your enemies is usually prohibited. Our justification as a culture for warfare starts with "of course, kil…

It wouldn't just be the killing. It would be the experience of watching friends and colleagues being dismembered and maimed around you.

We have a very sanitised and romantic notion of war. Battles are framed as "historical events", not as personal experiences which would be considered horrific by most people today.

In medical terms we're talking about gangs of (usually) thousands of armed men people trying to cause as much death and injury to each other as possible through physical trauma, stabbing, dismemberment, burning, drowning, and disemboweling - with almost certain infection and sepsis for the survivors. And relentless peer pressure to participate.

Sociopaths might thrive in that environment, but anyone with any empathy would find it challenging. Even if they viewed the enemy as subhuman, they would still have to deal with the extreme personal stress and the direct personal experience of uncommon brutality.

And the losers would experience all of that mingled with the usual psychological effects of failing to win.

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

#132

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:37 PM UTC

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…

I think you might be onto something. Today's folks, me including, take suffering, be it physical or psychical as something exceptional, the worst of the worst situation in life and will do just about anything to get rid of it. And in many cases we have some ways to help with it.

Compare it to times where you had to simply endure suffering (and everybody suffered somehow), be it headache, badly healed fracture, being gang raped during some war/raid by bandits, seeing your wife/child dying during childbirth and so on. And nowhere to escape to. Apart from alcohol/natural drugs which produced many addicts - drunks were part of many societies since ever and story was often the same as today

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

#133

Post by daddylonglegs » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:42 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #44

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 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…

> I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous?

I agree. I think that a society with high infant mortality would (will?) look traumatised (to the extent of seeming alien) to those of us raised with very safe childhoods.

As evidence I would offer "Death without Weeping" by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who spent years working in shanty towns in the 1960s and wrote a book. http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...

> WW1 was in some ways unique in that the West had experienced a long period of peace. There were colonial occupations and thousands of troops dying overseas, mostly of disease, but not in Europe itself.

Yes, also some of the comments to the blog post point out that the experience in WW I was new with prolonged periods of exposure to sudden dangers that emphasized the helplessness of the soldiers (descriptions of artillery bombardments often mention this helplessness). Others have mentioned the effects of concussive injuries and the huge scale of the war thanks to modern logistics. The US civil war (50 years previously) had some of the technological elements and scale of WWI but I don't think anyone in Europe was prepared for what was to come.

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

#134

Post by en-us » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:43 PM UTC

stared wrote: post #109

Animals do feel PTSD, see https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnbeh.2012.0002... (an evolutionary advantage, to avoid things that an organism barely survived). There are rat models, in which there are similarities up to particular neurobiological changes. Anecdotally, quite a few friends who took a dog from a shelter, and it had PTSD (likely due to maltreatment by the previous owners, or abandonment) trigger…

To add to this, there is a book called The Body Keeps the Score that dedicates several of its chapters to exploring the physiological consequences of trauma. Some of the changes are quite profound and I have a hard time believing that just one or two hundred years of evolution would have an appreciable effect in this matter. We can't teleport a combat veteran from antiquity into an fMRI but either the findings would be the same or something very profound changed in the human brain in a very short period of time and it went unnoticed.

I think it is far more likely that people either didn't discuss these things due to stigma, or they conceptualized it as the haunting of demons and ghosts since severe cases of PTSD can cause split personalities and convulsions and things like that.

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

#135

Post by _wovb » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:43 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…

Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors.

And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies.

I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many, many generations of humanity. It most likely wasn't called "trauma" (until perhaps recently).

I also believe that our current understanding of this phenomenon has reached a level of sophistication that we've never had before, and this is bolstered by various advances in culture, science, and policy. For example, the legal use of entheogens as a medically prescribed treatment for PTSD (of course, these could be used to treat PTSD hundreds of years ago, and there were and are beautiful traditions around this -- the models were just different, though).

We may have been less trauma-naive and less trauma-generating at some point in our collective history; I wonder about the level of holism of the models of trauma at that time.

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

#136

Post by saiya-jin » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:45 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #14

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…

that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories with something new. Less drastic / and practical examples: Say you went through a really bad breakup and your partner let you down by cheating on you with your best friend. You still love them and really want to those memories gone. You got 2 options: 1) stop listening to favorite songs, no longer visit specific restaurants or pubs, st…

That's... pretty dumb way of dealing with breakup, and I can't see it reliably working as you describe. Humans are way more complicated than that.

What has at least a reasonable chance of working in similar situation - come to peace with whatever happened and simply move on. It doesn't matter anymore. Don't cover bad memories with new shiny ones and pretend those old ones aren't there - of course they are, till your last breath they will be.

It really doesn't matter who did what and who hurt who once things are over, it's over. Process things, expose yourself to them (at least for me it works, weird as it may sounds smoking weed and mulling things over and over makes them closed quite effectively in relatively short time - but that's my own unique mindset, no clue why it works like that). They are your emotions after all, part of you. No point trying to act differently.

How to know you really processed them? For example meeting your ex won't trigger any stupid emotional reaction. Imagine granny meeting grandpa when they are 80, would they still hold grudges? What would be the point?

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

#137

Post by Ar-Curunir » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:46 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…

> At the very least, I would argue historic wars had more contextual meaning with them, fighting for one's land, nation, loved ones were more immediate and connected to the action,

War has been the same across millennia: rulers getting into fights and forcing the ruled to fight for these wars for them.

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

#138

Post by clairity » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:55 PM UTC

_wovb wrote: post #84

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…

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 very overbearing/masculine person in tight quarters, based on her uncontrollable fear reactions, which almost always happen at home. outside, she's generally friendly toward women, mildly curious/cautious of kids, and fearful/cautious of men. we've largely worked through the diarrhea, though sometimes it triggers if she thinks i'm mad at her for any period of time, even if i get angry for reasons totally unrelated to her.

she still sometimes exhibits extended bouts of panting, scratching, and self-nibbling as she tries to regulate the autonomous fear reaction. distraction, petting, hugging, and other countermeasures sometimes but often don't work in calming her down. it still breaks my heart every time, even 2 years on.

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

#139

Post by Udik » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 4:57 PM UTC

king_panic wrote: post #119

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…

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 obser…

It's interesting that both you and the other commenter took the second option for a dismissal of the grieving person's emotions. Which is not, and there is no indication in the text that it is one. It does acknowledge the pain (also by explicitly sharing a personal experience) and then proceeds to reframe it into some common occurrence that can be overcome in due time.

I think the keyword here is "common". Negative experiences become especially bad when they're perceived as unique, extraordinary. Framing them as normal facts of life helps dealing with them (think of support groups: they reframe personal experiences that might feel uniquely terrible into normal experiences inside the group).

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

#140

Post by acituan » Mon, Apr 27, 2020, 5:00 PM UTC

_wovb wrote: post #135

acituan wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Great points on being raised by more adults, rites of passage, and the context in which combat PTSD occurred. I don't disagree - these were definitely (sometimes powerfully) mediating factors. And yes, it's an open question as to the degree of suppression of PTSD and natural traumatic resolution in pre-industrial societies. I do also agree that there has been a deep phenomenological understanding of trauma for many,…

That’s a good point, we had the necessary pieces scattered across cultures and time but not all at one place. Looking forward to the integration modern psychology can afford us.