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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?

#181

Post by blahbhthrow3748 »

wayoutthere wrote: post #167
BurningFrog wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >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?

Almost certainly by smell. I'm a trans woman, and when I started hormones, one of the first things my partner noticed was that my odor went from overpowering and musty to just kind of "stale". I can get away with wearing shirts 2 or 3 times between washings, or go without bathing for a day or two. That was definitely not possible before hormones (at least without offending the people around me). So I'd say yeah, if e…

Same here, after transition I smell very noticeably different. It's awesome to wash my clothes less often

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

#182

Post by Leherenn »

jeltz wrote: post #37
airza wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but I'm guessing that not a lot of the people who endured the latter situation lived , and they certainly were not doing a lot of writing about their experiences.

I would argue that we know that most people who did lived. Most people, even on the losing side, of ancient battles survived the experience. Formations tended to break and people flee long before all people were dead.

And usually, most of the killing happened after the rout.

Casualties during the battle proper would be surprisingly low.

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

#183

Post by clairity »

hinkley wrote: post #170
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…

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 the 20-30 minutes i spent with them. that was heartbreaking too.

luckily my dog is mostly well-adjusted now, outside of those occasional anxiety episodes.

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

#184

Post by Garlef »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #131
Mvandenbergh wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> In medical terms we're talking about ... trying to cause as much death and injury to each other ...

Are you sure about this? What do you base your statement on? I remember having read as a child an article in a science magazine claming that war in ancient times was far less deadly than war today; If I remember correctly, one of the reasons stated was that the participants were not intent on actually killing every soldier on the other side but rather on overpowering them or on making them surrender.

(Also: "trying to cause as much death and injury to each other" is not a medical term.)

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

#185

Post by marcus_holmes »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #115
marcus_holmes wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WW1 was also different for the troops experiencing it because of the technologies involved. There was a whole discussion here a few months back about how the WW1 battlefield (blasted trees, churned mud, etc) has shaped our expectations of what battlefields should look like. Before that, the battlefield itself was mostly untouched. Shell shock was a new phenomenon for soldiers from WW1 because it was a new experience…

>But then, if every woman has gone through multiple stillbirths, child deaths, and so on, then everyone is going to be messed up. What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma". >I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards. But if everybody is traumatized then nobody is, it's the local normal. Sure we can say they were "wrong" but that's just a reflec…

Yes. I think that's the point. No-one commented on it, because no-one considered themselves traumatised. It was normal.

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

#186

Post by JoeAltmaier »

Garlef wrote: post #184
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

> In medical terms we're talking about ... trying to cause as much death and injury to each other ... Are you sure about this? What do you base your statement on? I remember having read as a child an article in a science magazine claming that war in ancient times was far less deadly than war today; If I remember correctly, one of the reasons stated was that the participants were not intent on actually killing every s…

Hm. The burning, raping and pillaging afterward (e.g. 'sacking') might have seemed pretty rough to the people back then.

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

#187

Post by cthalupa »

saiya-jin wrote: post #136
DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think I have to at least somewhat agree with GP here. Obviously you need to come to terms with the relationship ending and move on in general, but I think there's some truth to making new memories in these places being beneficial. I would argue it isn't necessarily specific to a partner, however.

I don't frequently meet up with my ex's, but have caught up with them for lunch or other things from time to time. I don't really have any sort of emotional reaction to those - the relationship is over, I've got no desire to get back together with them, etc. And it's easy for me, because I know and accept that who we are now wouldn't work out, and that's why we broke up.

But memories don't always have that same perspective. They're a crystallized point in time, and maybe that point in time is before whatever happened or changed that resulted in the relationship not working out. To me those "ghosts" can be significantly tougher to deal with than interacting with the person in present day. Making more memories in those places doesn't make me forget, but it does help redefine it as just another memory in a long list of them. It gives me options of other things to remember.

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

#188

Post by pluto9 »

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…

I had a dog just like this when I was a kid. She was terrified of my father and all other adult males since the day we brought her home. She only began to recover years later as my brother and I, who she trusted, grew to resemble him.

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

#189

Post by suthakamal »

The mechanisation of war changed the very nature of war. In the first world war, row upon row upon row of men got off of landing boats, to be mowed down, row after row, by machine gun fire. It's not comparable to hundreds of soldiers going in to armed combat.

In earlier times, having a calvary was a strategic, forceful asset. It was, right up until mechanised warfare. Suddenly, there was no utility to a calvary.

It's impossible to talk about the human consequences of war without understanding how very different war was to a Roman soldier vs an American in Vietnam, or today's asymmetric battlefield.

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

#190

Post by RichardCA »

wayoutthere wrote: post #173
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 t…

Completely unscientific - but anecdotally, the Civil War was the first to have the "modern" template for PTSD.

And it was the first with rifles. If you look around for similar info about the War of 1812 and earlier it becomes harder to find.

https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY

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