A potential counterpoint - "Post-traumatic stress 'evident in 1300BC'"[1].
The technology, tools and languages available to humans has expanded a huge amount over recent centuries.
The question, I guess, is whether the psychological consequences of experiencing and processing reality (and, particularly, trauma) has changed as a result.
The featured article's pitch is that there's still way more historical writing about war, including ignoble stuff, and this imbalance still strongly suggests that PTSD was somehow much less common.
(It's also funny that the BBC article mentions the strong Herodotus PTSD example that the featured article treats as a repeatedly-rehashed outlier.)
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 able to give advice. In contrast, losing a child is extremely rare (in developed countries) today. This rarity breeds isolation, which makes everything worse.
(2) 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.
To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.
The whole thing raises interesting questions about our modern understanding of trauma. I think the most common modern statement on grief is that it's intensely personal and people should never feel that their grieving process is "wrong", at least not for a long time (years?) after the event. That at least seems different than past practice.
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 you know the relative's names).
Think about that for a second. Let's say you had a child who died at 6 months old. 1-2 years down the track you had another child and you'd use the same name.
We have totally different expectations of mortality than a century ago. A child born today in the developed world is incredibly likely to make it to adulthood. It's simply not conceivable than in an era of greater infant mortality that there weren't different attitudes to the death of a child.
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, stop doing a sport you did together,
2) replace these memories by doing exactly those things with your new partner. soon you will have forgotten about them. Instead what remains is that activity/place now being your memory and not associated to another person (or the 2 of you).
yes would be a very bad idea :-/ there would probably be better examples (dealing with a breakup was in retrospect a terrible use-case to make my point).
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?
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.
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.
This happened to Salvador Dali. His older brother, Salvador died a few months before he was born. I once (a long time ago, sorry I don't have a link) saw a documentary that claimed his fascination with counterfeit art had to do with his feeling like a copy of his brother.
Also, the individual person was not so much important, but the role they had to fullfill. You were the hoovesmiths son, yoou had to fit into that gap, like music or carpetering all you want.
The roles we switch so dynamically, where once a heave cloth you doned once your life and then wore them till the end.
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 think we should be more kind to our ancestors. Just because they lived in fucked up times, compared to our current standards, does not mean they experienced a different quality of suffering.
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
> 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.
This struck me when I was reading up on SIDS and wondering how people could go so long without realizing that, if you put your babies down to sleep wrong, something like 1 in 1000 of them will die.
And then you look at the historical statistics and realize that, depending on your time and place, something like 250-400 in 1000 infants died. And aside from how viscerally terrifying that thought is, it's no wonder you couldn't notice that extra 1 in 1000 until you fixed childhood plagues and nutrition. It was the terrifying scourge of the 80's, but just a drop in the bucket historically.
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 rather say
"hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year".
The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.
Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.:
“That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.”
Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly.
When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
> Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms.
There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune.
If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).
Everybody is different - for some alcoholics it will be incredibly healing in going to see a therapist or psychologist who validates their experience, lets them know that their pain from, for example, a life of abuse, is completely legitimate, and that the drive to seek something that soothed the pain is also legitimate - we are hard wired to avoid discomfort. We live in a society where addiction is demonized and people are ostracized for it. This does not help people to heal. Part of this healing is letting people know they are not "bad" or "wrong" for having these urges.
This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.
In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.
While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).
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 observer, at the other.
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).
Yes it's very interesting that two people came to the same conclusion of dismissal when there is no indication of dismissal.. it's almost like there is indication..
Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible. A support group doesn't make a condition more or less common. A support group makes you less alone, which is another way of saying you feel your emotions are validated and youre relationship to your emotion changes in that group. Some people need a support group to change their relationship to an emotion.
Or maybe you have come to identify validation of grief with its sacralization, and you don't accept someone saying at the same time "I understand you, it has happened to me as well" and "it will pass, there is a bigger picture in which this becomes less relevant".
> Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible.
There is a saying in Italy: "a shared misfortune is half a joy".
There's a recognized therapeutic value in literature. Reading novels doesn't validate your emotions- reading is unidirectional, there is nobody telling you "I understand you" from the pages of a novel. But you get in contact with characters who suffer, confront problems, overcome them or succumb to them. You can see their inner life, and recognize a commonality of human experience.
Conversely, social media are notorious for making people depressed: it can be as unidirectional as reading, but since people tend to show only the positive aspects of their life, it can make you feel your own life is especially bad.
I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics.
Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.
Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases.
This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.
FWIW I believe this has become a somewhat outdated view of how people historically dealt with the death of children. It appeals to a sort of historical logic without really being supported by the record.
Lazy citation: here are some askhistorians threads on evidence and how scholarship ended up going in this direction
In Ancient Greece a baby wasn’t named for 5 days after birth, so it wasn’t really considered a person until it survived 5 days. I’m sure this helped lessen trauma as many babies would die before this milestone.
I think mothers, and fathers, loved children as much or little back then as they do now. That being said, I do belivethat if something like loosing a child is bsaically a daily occurance, shared with family and friends, makes it easier to cope with it. Even if it is just by maybe getting a little numb.
As far as PTSD is concerned, I remember a commentary / documentation (I suck at keeping my sources, so...) that went a long these lines:
- War was more common, when everybody is kind of traumatized, society copes with it better
- soldiers were traumatized, but it seems less so when compared to modern war, which brings me to the last point:
- the most horrible war experience back then was battles (sieges, field battles,...), off battle, life for the soldier was as dangerous as a civilian's one. In modern war, the soldiers stress was constant, everywhere and the enemy (artillery, snipers, air craft,...) often invisible, increasing the stress levels a lot
I am no expert in psychology, but it does sound logical.
>It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past.
It doesn't mean they loved their children less. It means they had a different bar before they considered them full-fledged "children." In lots of cultures they don't name kids for a few days or weeks. In pre-modern China, infanticide within the first few days of birth was considered a normal, though regrettable, form of birth control. There's even the story about how Spartans used to leave children who were too sickly to the wolves.
You can see this sliding standard in modern times too with the abortion debate. Some evangelicals get VERY intense about the life of the fetus in utero. For some of the more hardcore ones, even very early stage miscarriages get funerals and the zygote gets regarded with all the honors that a child would have been. In their minds, an abortion is infanticide without a doubt. Meanwhile, other people think of it as a routine medical procedure and think the evangelical position is parodic on the level of "Every Sperm is Sacred."
But overall, the point isn't that they didn't feel the feelings. It's that they had better ways of processing and working through them.
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 be "character building" (e.g. corporal punishment; Roald Dahl's description of the process is worth reading) looks instead like a form of trauma inoculation. Get the trauma over with early. Bully anyone who shows signs of being negatively affected by the trauma. People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence.
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.
Edit: see also the comment upthread about "being haunted"; the pre-modern world was what Carl Sagan called the "demon haunted world". If you look at a some religious and spiritual practices as trauma-processing, a connection emerges. Parts of the 60s spiritual revival and Jungianism were trying to do this explicitly.
> "People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence."
Doesn't the plight of homeless veterans today demonstrate that PTSD and mental illness is not something that can be easily hidden, even under threat of violence?
Homelessness is an effective way of hiding the symptoms at the cost of hiding the whole human from society. How many homeless lives are in the historical record? To the extent that they are referenced at all, they will appear as beggars in the background of some wider historical event.
You can beat symptoms out of someone if you don't care whether they survive the process. Then you have no people with visible symptoms around cluttering up the place.
But that goes back to the author's point: some mention of many beaten-to-death veterans would've received mention in ancient works but doesn't. And that's setting aside the idea that beating up a veteran who's primary combat skill was close combat, unlike modern veterans, was something easily done.
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 for soldiers - artillery barrages just hadn't been that intense before.
Ancient hand-to-hand combat would have been horrific. Never mind trying to survive, just actively trying to hack someone else's body up with a sharp tool, when they're right there, would mess you up pretty bad. If, as TFA says, every able-bodied man in your entire society has experienced this, then every able-bodied man is going to be messed up.
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.
Also concussive blast damage was far, far more common from WW1 than in any previous war. The Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) caused by blast damage isn't externally visible, but is responsible for some of the common symptoms of PTSD[1]. We know there are forms of PTSD unrelated to blast-based TBI, but it's quite possible that pre-WWI soliders didn't experience PTSD as much because there weren't as many explosions. Combined with different social views & more traumatic lifestyles the (non-physical injury) trauma of war wouldn't be as great.
Also, surviving a battle injury was far less common before the discovery of antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. Infection from relatively minor wounds caused a much higher death rate. So the surviving soldiers were less likely to have experienced physical trauma and lived long enough to make it into accounts of their behavior afterwards.
I'm always dubious about this. "Decimation" was a horrific thing, inflicted on Roman Legions as punishment for cowardice. It meant killing one out of every ten soldiers. So it seems to me that that's the extreme upper bound of casualties - 10%. Anything more and running away to face decimation would improve your odds.
But the survivors might well have trauma from their actions not their injuries. Hacking another human to death is traumatic for normal people. The survivors would also have survivor guilt.
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 (I know some games have a more sophisticated model, but still).
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!
> What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma". I think you're right - everyone would be traumatized by modern standards.
I suspect that some of the harmful behaviors (we associate with PTSD) weren't socially abhorrent, in past eras.
eg: Societies generally condone some amount of mistreating other people. That particular outlet could have been fully acceptable, when done to marginal and lesser classes.
It seems to me that death in WW1 and later might be experienced as much more arbitrary. Instead of engaging in hand to hand combat with an enemy they can see, a shell just falls out of the sky and someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I suppose there could also be a sense in which, depending on the culture, a death in hand to hand combat might be viewed as glorious in a way that getting shot by a sniper or blown up by artillery wouldn't be.
>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 reflection of our current cultural norms. What is right and wrong or traumatic or not is a matter of cultural norms and social consensus. The reason we give a crap over whether or not people are traumatized is because it makes them "messed up" and affects their ability to function normally in society. If people are able to function normally in society, are not "messed up" according to the people around them and don't consider themselves traumatized are they really traumatized?
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office and say the past was horrible but it's only horrible because we have a different frame of reference. For the people who lived it it was just how things are. I think it's kind of paternalistic to say the people of the past were all/mostly traumatized because it's not like they had any other options, the things they had to experience were unavoidable facts of life.
WWI had the technology to be profoundly violent. Ok, there were cannons in ships and in the Civil War for example, but I suspect that WWI (and later wars) had a bigger technological dependency.
Technologies that are loud, flashy and destructive: tanks, bombs, machine guns, grenades, etc.
> 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.
> 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.
a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economics, drug addiction, social media, you name it.
And because we get more done by specializing, everyone has to be as disconnected as we can afford. And although there was always a hidden price on it, now the price is obvious: Friendship is expensive, and your friends also have to pay, for it to work.
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender.
Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know.
Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun.
I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.
That's interesting; I never felt that programming was an isolated job. The offices I worked at always had plenty of socialization, both in interaction for work purposes (with not just other programmers, but also other people on the company and even quite a few clients) and during breaks, lunches, post-work outings, etc.
I guess this might be different in a large org with impermeable "silos", where you just talk to your direct teammates and work comes in the form of tickets. I mostly worked in small companies (under 50 people), with little bureaucracy, and specialization is a little less strict.
Today, 15-20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriage. Not so rare. I wonder how many of those parents would have even known they were pregnant prior to modern medicine.
War was also much less intense and drawn out even up to say the Napoleonic war.
If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week
> To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.
I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly.
In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.
Don't forget that WW1 was one of the first wide scale wars where it was common to be "blown up", and for some people, several times. Today we know that the actual act of being in a shockwave has long term real physical effects on the brain based on studies on soldiers blown up by IEDs. I wonder how much different that type of trauma is from trauma incurred by witnessing something.
You don't have to go back far in time, 1918 my grandfathers on both sides lost entire families to the Spanish flu. And then some more in the wars. My granddad was a survivor, but he was scarred enough, that he exhibited some of the symptoms of PTSD. But, there was a collective loss and people thought in terms of a society. Do we have a social support structure left in this country?
I've been to Egypt a couple of times, and did a trip to the Valley of the Kings. One of the tombs (I forget which) was for a child of a pharoah that had died. The pictures on the wall were of his father the pharoah going round introducing his child to the gods he would meet in the afterlife. I found that pretty moving.
Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.
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.
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.
Yeah, it's just a hypothesis; but based on my own experience with non-combat PTSD it makes sense to me that being unable to shut off the constant hypervigilance in the absence of a threat could easily be a common thread.
The American Civil War was the first "modern" war as it made use of a lot of new technology that had been developed in the early industrial revolution, but barrel rifling is probably the most relevant to the experience of an individual soldier (as opposed to railroads, steam ships or the telegraph, each of which revolutionized the strategic dynamics of war).
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.
One interesting thing that pops up on reddit every now and then is that pregnancy going wrong is surprisingly common, yet it's not talked about that way at all - most people talking about it seem surprised that it's actually somewhat common. It's like pregnancy going wrong is reserved for specifically infertile/something people, rather than the dice roll not being 9 wins to 1 loss in the first place.
Really interesting, tho I wish he cited or talked to some psychologists as well!
I wonder if the specific tools of war are a factor as well — the suddenness of explosions and bullets might provide a significantly more traumatic experience than spear sword and trebuchet, the pace of humvees and airplanes more shock than feet and horses.
I doubt that standing there as a poor peasant with a spear, while getting charged by a horde of knights on massive battle horses in full armour is any less traumatic than the crack of a snipers bullet whizzing over ones head.
And medieval combat was quite a gruesome affair, cleaving people into peaces with axes and swords, in an age without proper medical care...
What has changed though, is the staying power of armies which nowadays can stay in contact for long times with somewhat low intensity fighting going on all the time. This of course changes the whole psychology aspect, its not the stress of one battle going on for a day or so, but the stress of a battle going on for weeks.
Mmmm I'm deeply wary of an absence of evidence about a condition which civilization today still can't actually acknowledge properly existing being evidence of its absence.
"Gun cleaning" accidents, as the socially accepted cover for male suicide by people everyone wants to ignore were suffering from depression or PTSD.
> "Gun cleaning" accidents, as the socially accepted cover for male suicide by people everyone wants to ignore were suffering from depression or PTSD.
There's no doubt that happens, but on the other hand gun cleaning injuries (e.g. to limbs) are far from unheard of, as well as people accidentally putting holes in their house. Those are doubtlessly accidents, so I have no doubt that some of the "gun cleaning fatal accidents" truly were accidents. Any of these accidents should be prevented by dogmatically following basic safety procedures, but obviously sometimes some people don't. And sometimes, that has fatal consequences.
> This of course changes the whole psychology aspect, its not the stress of one battle going on for a day or so, but the stress of a battle going on for weeks.
All quiet on the western front describes this phenomenon quite well. The continues stress of being on or near the front lines with constant shelling all around you. The artillary barages where so severe that areas of the ground are poisoned with metals from artillery shells..
To give you an idea about the frequency of shells getting fired.[1]
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.
A counterpoint is that war could also be anguishing slow. An enemy could be moving across a land for months or even years and you would just get occassional news and rumours as they got ever closer. People knew that the enemy was coming, but not neccessarily when. That is a different kind of stress.
Edit: one thing covered in the video, but not mentioned in the article is the different experience of what war means in modern times. From WW1 (actually, a bit earlier), modern high explosives mean that soldiers spend days, weeks, even months under high stress and constant threat of death. Ancient soldiers tended to participate in violent, but relatively short battles (a day or two at most). The vast majority of the time, they were not under the same levels of stress.
If you're so inclined to go down a rabbit hole of 100+ hours of content, I highly suggest having a listen to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History [1]. Dan is particularly interested in military history, especially ancient military history. He has an episode on Caesar's conquest of Gaul (which he argues in any kind of modern context would be called a genocide) as well as a series on the great Persian kings, called the King of Kings. This is specifically about the Achaemenid Empire talking about Cyrus II, Darius, Xerxes and the likes.
Now as Dan would say, he doesn't find scientific and technological advancements particularly interesting (from a historical perspective). Like if Edison didn't invent the light bulb, someone else would've.
What he finds far more interesting is historical events that could've completely changed the course of history and one of those was the Battle of Marathon [2]. This was a battle between the Persians and the Greeks that the Greeks somehow won. Had they lost it would've changed the entire history of Europe given how important Greek culture was to everyone from the Romans on. Bear in mind when this happened, Rome was a small regional power at best.
He talks about the psychology of ancient warfare. One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them. From a gun at a distance is completely different to hand-to-hand combat.
At this time, the Greeks fought with spears that were very broad. Stab someone in the guts with one of those and their insides would literally spill out to the point where the likes of Herodotus described the ground at Marathon as being soaked red in blood.
Likewise, ancient culture and justice must be almost incomprehensible to us. Fun fact: the origin of the word "decimate". 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.
How did people cope with these things? How would PTSD fit into this world?
Decimation was a military punishment. I cannot think of any time it was used on civilians. It was employed not just for mutiny, but for desertion and cowardice. If your unit panicked and routed during a battle, it might very well be subjected to decimation later - probably a powerful motivator.
This excellent blog series [0] goes in to a little more details on the Roman Conquest, in the specific context of many cultures glorifying the primitive other as being morally pure and more capable fighters. Genocide is the only word to use. I previously had no idea just how, erm, effective the Romans were.
> historical events that could've completely changed the course of history
The battle of Teutoburg Forest [1][2] is another one. Had the Roman general Varius not fallen in to Arminius ambush, things might have been vastly different. The Romans never again had a solid footing beyond the Rhine and the battle was used again and again to forge German identity.
> One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them.
This same effect is discussed extensively in the book On Killing [3] and similar conclusions can be drawn from the Milgram Experiment [4]. On Killing also mentions that stabbing weapons are psychologically harder to use than slashing weapons. It specifically mentions the Roman Gladius.
> [The battle of Teutoburg Forest] was used again and again to forge German identity
Interestingly, the defeat of Vercingetorix was also used as a mean of forging the French identity, so even a defeat can be used this way (though if Caesar had failed to invade Gaul, history might have been quite different too). Also in regard of using Teutoburg to build a national identity, the series on the Fremen Mirage [0] on the same blog talk about that idea too.
> 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 usually used for mass desertion. Thousands of people were executed for individual desertion during WW1, so you could argue that it's not THAT exotic a punishment.
The Roman Empire _did_ do various nasty things to rebellious provinces (Judea is particularly notable), but again, really nothing that we haven't seen in 20th century wars, unfortunately.
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.
Your example of massacring the population of rebelling provinces can be found much closer to our time. Punishing rebels like that has been common throughout history.
There are many 'trolls' around here (comes with the popularity), who will downvote based on opinion to begin with, instead of writing a counter-argument (or their "problem" with the post is simplistic, first-degree, unsophisticated).
Ignore them. Those who come to read/learn usually do. We read arguments, rebuttals or agreements, and seldom consider scores at face value.
Also, engagement is probably the real salience of votes, whether up or down: it means someone got 'triggered' enough to click, and that usually means you touched something (assuming the comment isn't misleading, factually wrong, etc).
Typically, a post such as yours is interesting, and warrants no downvotes whatsoever.
The way I see it, in the ancient world, PTS"D" served a purpose... If you saw "some shit" like your tribesmate getting mauled by a bear/tiger, it was helpful to your survival to be on high alert if you ever encountered a situation similar to the one where that happened. The complex of stimili was imprinted to a certain synapse pathway, and anytime you felt like you were in the same situation as before, you would want to be on extra-high-alert fight or flight mode.
I'm sorry but this has to be the most un-scientific account I've read on the topic (granted, I read few), and it's incredibly misleading.
- Humans did not change biologically enough in 10,000 years, let alone 2,000, to produce a meaningfully different psychology. Take a a child born 2,000 years ago, raise them today, and you'll get just a regular human being. Same thing backwards.
- The entirety of the author's 'hypothesis' (sic) rests upon ignoring that nurture, context, is highly determinant in forming psychological references, relative perceptions, hence reactions, profiles. This is wrong, nature isn't 100%, you simply can't take two identical beings, put them in vastly different contexts and hope they present the same behaviors and perceptions. It makes no sense. Hello Darwin, wish you were here.
- “the absence of evidence”... Again, wrong. Historical psychology is a thing. Author may be well-meaning, but they should adopt a transdisciplinary approach if they are to talk about multiple disciplines at once. Find a good psychologist, work together as one on the topic long enough to form a legitimate hypotheses, then maybe make some conclusions.
- It seems the author also neglected to take into account philosophy, which used to be 99% practical back then. Recipes for good living. Guess why it was widely taught and shared, pretty much the basis of any education, throughout life. Guess why Seneca wrote his letters. What's the point of ignoring just about the closest thing to psychology sessions? Why is Stoicism not in that essay?
I feel like I've just read a mathematician trying, painfully, to speak of epidemiology. (forgive the "modern" reference, I think it's fitting as we speak)
Whatever your core expertise, armchair-other disciplines is a slippery slope. I guess the author somehow mistook his own intelligence for knowledge in psychology.
Say whatever you want about our past, you won't find a psychologist or biologist to tell you we've changed in any way, shape or form "inside". The context, however, ah, the context. Well for that, this thread on HN is much more eloquent, I must say. It's almost as if people collectively had insight! (because this is written: "/s", of course they do, and I wish the author didn't simply write solo or fail to question or quote others.
Here's food for thought: the very fact of "talking about your feelings" is very modern, that's a totally different context. We just didn't dwell on that topic as much in history (hence why, perhaps, some literature became so notorious, because it spoke of something that people weren't used to). It was "fluff". Hence why, when we made "emotions" a matter of science, it became a more acceptable topic, not just for a few who dared. It became "mainstream". (I'm NOT a specialist, so don't quote me on this but Freud, Jung, positivism, is probably where/when to look for a major shift; before that it was "magic", fluff, but it doesn't mean it wasn't "real", like belief in supernatural forces is "magic" but real to the psyche).
Imagine that, in the future, we turn some (currently) elusive aspect of our psyche (like belief indeed), into a form of science, of applied psycho-bio-model-mechanics (like we do cognitive sciences today, a scientific progress over prior centuries). Now imagine some author versed in history but oblivious to psychology and biology, centuries from now, claiming in some random short post that people in the 21st century did not experience any tension in that regard because they didn't have words for it. Well, we may not have the words indeed, not yet; but we certainly experience the tensions with beliefs (supernatural or otherwise), heck we made wars because of it. Just like kings of old have waged war because their feelings commanded them to.
Your own first two points are in conflict. Either humans from the past raised in today's world would be like today's humans, or like the past's humans. Pick one.
Biology did not change. Perceptions and expression of it did change. It does not mean the inner biological processes are any different, just the way you consciously select what to say about them. Absence of words (context) means you cannot express certain things; does not mean you don't actually feel them. Romantic love for instance is a quite modern thing, the way we speak of it today. Does not mean people did not feel it before.
Please reconsider your take and vote, you misinterpreted my points I'm afraid. Or at least, make a worthy counter-argument, a click is simply too easy IMHO.
Oh, I didn't downvote you. I replied instead. I'm used to systems that punish voting and replying in the same thread. Indeed, I won't ever downvote folks like you, since I'm usually punished by that very same system. Instead, I will shove words into your ears and drag you, kicking and screaming, to reason.
I gave you a worthy counter-argument; I gave you a single-sentence dilemma which was intended to refute your entire platform. You may want to re-read Pirsig's thoughts on dilemmas [4] before you reply.
The entirety of psychology, as a theory, is based upon cultural assumptions about inner experiences. There are important arguments against the ideas that people have inner experiences [0], that people are thinking when they talk [1], that therapy is effective due to its design rather than due to being a safe place to reflect [2], and even that mental disorders exist as opposed to being part of the spectrum of the human condition [3].
If you cannot tackle these foundational issues at all times, then your arguments ought to be considered no more strongly than the original author, by your own words, since you are not a psychologist either.
Great food for thought. You do in effect widen the topic so much, the very axioms underlying my assumptions, and that's extremely valuable to me. I think I see your point, now. you took me off-guard, I wasn't expecting this direction and failed to see what you meant.
I will yield to your logic (in particular the last sentence). I may deplore that it makes the whole topic kind of moot, but that's my feelings, not an argument whatsoever (my bias shows I suppose).
Now, I will just reaffirm that I'm parroting much more expert views. Such topics are one of my pet peeves, been thinking about it quite deeply since I was 12-ish (37 now). Lots of reading over the years. Lots of discussions with 'experts'. I've no professional qualification in psychology however, that's true.
All these questions, "did we cognitively think differently?", "did we feel differently?", "were we in any way significantly different that a modern psychologist couldn't do their thing on a Classic Roman?", "have we changed so much that someone from the past would be lost in the modern world if they were raised in it?"... they all met a resounding "no".
That's what I was trying to express. Based on this unanimous, quite consensual view, how could something as "simple" and common as PTSD not exist back then? It's a really extraordinary claim, thus the burden of proof falls on the claimant, I reckon.
Whether or not we are zombies (I think we are, to a much larger extent than we'd be comfortable admitting for now), that zombie today is exactly the same as all zombies prior, and yet to come, for a long, long time (year 10,000 is too soon, 50,000 might be a low threshold unless we dramatically sped up genetic mutations and selection).
I don't have much more to say. I could probably write a short novel, but what's the point. I'm not even defending the point, just stating consensus. It is, as you correctly imply, not my place to put forward or argue such ideas with authority. But you'll have to go against the whole field of psychology to counter it (I will be eating popcorn as you drag them to reason ;-) )
Hopefully, this tempers a possibly exaggerated authority I may have suggested in my OP. I'll blame my writing style now and learn my lesson, I'll be more cautious and reasonable next time.
(I also stand corrected about the downvoting, so that's on me, my bad. Much respect for your approach, then.)
Now, I'm off reading all these nice links. Thanks again (upvoted both your posts, for a solid contribution to discussion, regardless of my opinion).
> The entirety of the author's 'hypothesis' (sic) rests upon ignoring that nurture, context, is highly determinant in forming psychological references, relative perceptions, hence reactions, profiles.
Huh? The author's hypothesis is that nurture and context were all-important in helping people avoid PTSD.
And I claim, or rather parrot, that it's wrong to think that because words were not spoken or did not exist, the thing they would eventually come to designate ("PTSD") did not exist.
Romantic love is another good example. It never was spoken in modern terms before the 16th century give or take. Which is far from being equivalent to say "nope, they didn't speak of it like that, so people never experienced romantic love before the 16th century!"
The author's view is just as flawed, afaik. PTSD and every other psychological trait known in modern times did exist for much longer than recorded history, that's what most historical psychologists have concluded (it's not open to debate...), just in different terms (words), perceptions, value (in a larger hierarchy).
Edit: think of it this way. Were feelings "important" in the past? Certainly nowhere near as much as they are today, in our perception. Most were not even spoken, there simply were no words most of the time (or unknown to layman people). Did feelings exist forever, however? Absolutely, yes.
Your claims lack evidence. The article was all about surveying the available evidence for indications that PTSD was or was not a thing experienced by soldiers in the past at a rate similar to today. What is more, when he decides that the evidence does not support that, he suggests that the feelings experienced by soldiers have not changed, but that in ancient societies there were different mechanisms by which they were processed such that those same feelings did not produce what we call PTSD, at least not at the rate it does today.
Not only do you have no evidence or arguments (except vague claims to authority), but your claims do not even contradict the original article.
EDIT: please do read crazygringo's thread above, people in there have much more substance that I could in my short/quick write-up above. In particular, palimpsests' view is very close to what I've heard again and again from people with relevant experience.
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Did I make a fool of myself by failing to comprehend what I read and then arguing exactly the same?
Then, I will just shut up and read again.
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Somehow, a bit tangential to the topic:
About evidence or argument, appeal to authority, I do think it's a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", and the author's claim is extraordinary. Mine is really just consensus from the field of historical psychology. I've never heard an expert arguing otherwise. I could probably google a few links, but randomly sticking "proof" on a non-problem seems... pointless. I shouldn't have to prove that flat geometry yields 180° triangle, it's whoever claims otherwise that bears the burden of substantiating it.
I just won't spend that particular time, since the author's claim is weird, not mine. Triangles add up to 180. Human biology and psychology did not change in recorded history. There's nothing 'new' in our heads besides what we intake from the context.
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But I hear you and will re-read that piece later, with a colder head. Maybe I was put off by some emotional bias and got 'triggered' by the claim (no PTSD in the past... huh?), which led me to interpret, thus fail to comprehend what I read. That much is 100% possible and I've no ego problem in admitting that.
One thing I'd question here is that conditions during the second Punic War were normal. They very much weren't; it was an existential crisis. My impression was that for most of its history, Rome's armies simply weren't particularly large. And that re-integration into civilian life may not have been as common as all that; terms of military service were very long, and there was a tendency to form soldier colonies as a solution for dealing with pensioned-off soldiers.
These societies were also far, far more violent than ours. The sort of random violence that might be attributed to PTSD today would likely be part of the background noise in Medieval Italy, say.
Another interesting angle on this question comes from the Jaynes bicameral mind hypothesis [0].
Given that a major component of PTSD is moral injury -- e.g., I can't believe someone intentionally did that to me / I can't believe I had to do that to someone else -- I wonder whether (if the bicameral mind theory is true which I think it is) ancient warriors experienced PTSD not as internal angst but rather as a "dialogue among the gods" that happened in one's head following stress.
Emperor Ashoka of Magadha (India) fought a bloody war against the kingdom of Kalinga. The carnage wrought by war moved him deeply . He converted to Buddhism and he is responsible for spreading Buddhism to much of Asia. Was this because of PTSD ? The sorrow and remorse he felt was real and changed him from a ambitious emperor to a deeply spiritual person.
Sometimes I think PTSD is the standard human experience. Industrialization, certain civil/human rights, and psychology insights have changed that some.
I always wondered if Achilles was struggling with PTSD during The Iliad. He had seen so much fighting and bloodshed that he became depressed and sat in his tent, refusing to budge. Maybe the anger at Paris was just a front.
The first hysterical blindness was documented by Herodotus in the battle of Marathon, "Epizelos the son of Cuphagoras, while fighting in the close combat and proving himself a good man, was deprived of the sight of his eyes, neither having received a blow in any part of his body nor having been hit with a missile, and for the rest of his life from this time he continued to be blind"
I wonder if PTSD is particularly likely when the terrible events occur spontaneously without obvious warning. Modern weaponry that allows one to die without an enemy visible probably exacerbates things. In the olden days you'd be charging towards the enemy for at least a while before you witnessed your comrades getting killed.
On Killing[0] covers some of this. The author argues that extended demob times in WW2 helped; supposedly, this is why people leaving Iraq and elsewhere end up "doing nothing in Kuwait" for weeks on end cleaning equipment.
People generally seem to remember the 'height' of an experience and the last parts of it. So an experience at a dentist where the last part of the procedure is a mild bit of additional drilling is 'better' than one that ends on a painful 'note'.
One book that explores this topic from a clinical perspective, supported by faithful translations from The Iliad, is "Achilles in Vietnam" [1] by Dr. Jonathan Shay [2].
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 experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts.
> Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals.
> Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the "ghosts" in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares.
> The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits.
Purely anecdotally, as a pet owner this doesn't surprise me at all. I have two rescue cats that, from the descriptions from the fosters, had very stressful lives before I got them (attacks from dogs, being attacked by other cats in a feral cat colony, etc). I've also cats that had a very relaxed prior life. The differences in their behaviors is stark; one of the rescues displays a lot of stress behavior whenever there are loud noises or anything surprising. One of them has calmed down a lot, but those behaviors still pop up pretty regularly.
I don't know enough about animal psychology or their inner worlds to say, "that's PTSD," (I do think, mind, that animals experience emotions, but how that experiences compares to human emotion, I don't know) but there sure seems to be something about reliving trauma there.
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 should it be universal ;-)
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 this, we are refining the therapeutic modalities that are most efficacious for treating trauma. See all the latest literature by Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté.
So I wouldn’t really expect these societies to know what to look for - in fact, it could have been so ubiquitous that the symptoms (and/or suppression of them e.g. regular intoxication) were normalized.
Given how warlike they were as he described in the article, it could be like asking a fish to describe water.
We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize. I can’t see why humans would be any different.
Also, many different cultures have historically had taboos around the expression and natural resolution of PTSD. I don’t know about the culture of society around the age he is speaking of in this regard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a normal aspect of life back then, too.
Stupid question here, but isn't it possible that experiencing violence and death isn't as highly stressful/traumatic if it's to you like water is to a fish, to borrow your phrase? Especially if you have some sort of belief in an afterlife to console you. Just a question from someone who knows very little about this.
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. Events can affect each of us very differently."
The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards.
Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.
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 about what it means to be sensitive (broad sense of the word) to the world around us.
This is definitely correct! Everybody is equipped differently to cope with life. The environments we grow up in make a huge difference in this. And they vary tremendously.
> 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.
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.
I like that definition, but is the response "unresolved," or just "unhelpful?" Maybe "unresolved" has a different meaning in your specialty though.
I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.
My suspicion is that it's more about puncturing a worldview -- having your sense of natural order invalidated -- or a feeling of utter lack of agency or control, quite possibly both. Overwhelming sensory inputs quite possibly as well, especially painful or disturbing ones, though it may be a component of both the previous. The grief response seems mostly about an upset world-model. Loss of agency seems to be more strongly associated with PTSD.
It's possible that if you grew up in an environment in which death was commonplace, but you experienced, or even just believed in, a sense of agency, you'd experience fewer manifestations of grief or PTSD than we'd consider typical now.
Though perhaps not. I suspect many older psychological disturbances -- nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, melancholia and nostalgia (in their original senses) would map strongly to present notions of PTSD and depresion.
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 and psychotherapy is perhaps the only dominant vessel for us in rediscovering those.
Peter Levine's most famous example is a polar bear that shakes a potentially traumatic stimulus off after being shot with tranquilizer. He argues even non-human mammals have the instinctive know-how to deal with trauma. Why humans would be lagging behind other than undue suppression of their instincts on how to deal with it? If anything, our modern society that puts so much stake at "being in control" is a hindrance to post-traumatic resolution than historical societies would be.
A crucial requirement for traumatic retention is a sense of loss of control that accompanies hyperarousal. No perceived lack of control = no trauma. In the context of combat PTSD, there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces (both for soldiers and civillians). 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, as opposed to being flown to a foreign country for less-than-well understood purposes.
Even for complex-PTSD, nuclear and even single parent households being a recent state of affairs, I would argue historically having multiple adult figures in one's childhood context prevented a problematic relationship with a single adult dominating the development experience of the child. Also those children had more access to natural world early on (unsupervised play time), developed competencies (e.g. working in the farm with parents) and afforded many other developmental freedoms, therefore likely to have developed trauma resilience. What was a rite-of-passage ritual supervised by the elders if not a training program for developing trauma resilience?
I would say it might as well be our current world that is more trauma-naive, trauma-generating and trauma-retaining than historical ones. We have the collective wisdom on how to deal with it, but insurance doesn't pay for it and you gotta show up at the office the next day.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces
Certainly, in historical warfare, you faced off against an enemy. There were far fewer devices that could be highly lethal and completely unseen. Even stuff as simple as IEDs is awful, but airstrikes, artillery, etc. probably contribute to that sense of no control. And the counters to them are, generally, prolonged periods of hyper-awareness, continually scanning for threats.
Well said. Though as I was re-reading your comment I remembered the incidence of PTSD among drone operators. Even though they have the perfectly controlled physical environment, they seem to be negatively effected too. I doubt their triggers are similar (like fireworks reminding gunfire) though.
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.
Sounds like you did your best to be of support. I’m curious about the particulars of the shaking exercise you recommended. I have heard of one called TRE (trauma release exercises), perhaps something similar?
There’s some static strength involved and so it’s not uncommon to “shake out” your limbs as part of a warm up or a transition between sections.
And I was trying not to lecture this young(er) instructor in front of a room of his regular students, so I didn’t feel I could do more than encourage him to dump some more adrenaline. He was trying to laugh it off, which parts of my extended family are notorious for. Nobody talks about anything.
> "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.
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.
It’s very common. Growing up I had a dog that absolutely hated Mexicans because we had a Mexican gardener and the dog was very territorial. As you could imagine, it was difficult to get enough exposure to extinguish the reaction.
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 even humans can tell the difference in most cases then a dog definitely would.
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.
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 in that this dog wasn't coming home with us, but the rescue person was invested in getting this dog exposed to more people so we just chatted while I sat on the floor cross legged, keeping my voice level, all of my gestures slow and exaggerated, and not making eye contact with the dog.
It took 90 minutes for that dog to interact with me, and he just came over and plopped down next to me, leaning against my thigh. After that, we were cool. I only hope that meant the next people didn't take an hour and a half to get that far.
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.
yes, crouching makes you smaller/less threatening. puppies/little dogs at the dog park (when that was open) use it as a little fort against the bigger dogs. much fun =)
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.
I'm not sure that is actually a counterpoint. It think they are somewhat in agreement. The blog states that there is very little evidence that people of the ancient and medieval world experienced PTSD from combat the way modern soldiers do.
The askshistorians poster focuses on two points:
- Combat and violence were normalized, and there was little moral or ethical ambiguity surrounding it. Unlike today.
- PTSD seemed to come from public perception of the acts and the resulting shame, rather than the acts themselves. Also unlike today.
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, killing is bad, but..." and then looks into when it is allowable.
Many of the examples we have of things that look like PTSD are from failed rebels, people who were involved in civil wars, or people who had been disgraced. That would mean that they experienced the same sort of reaction to a stressor that they couldn't process but that the type of stressor that might trigger such a reaction was fundamentally different.
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.
> 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.)
I would suggest that some forms of medieval entertainment would cause PTSD in a modern person. From public executions, through bear baiting[1] and cat torture[2].
The (unstated) assumption the people in the past "were just like us" emotionally, deserves closer scrutiny.
I believe that the magnitude of trauma inflicted by a certain experience is relative to what is considered to be the norm in the time and place. The norms of "ancient" people were different from those of the 21st century
Even butchering livestock for food, more or less a routine household chore in the past, is sufficiently alien today to most that it would likely cause PTSD if they had to do it.
One is real, with sights and smells linked to millennia of instinct and the knowledge that you yourself are the primary agent of what is occurring to the livestock.
The other you know is fiction which you can criticize the script, special effects, and cinematography of from a comfortable chair, often with friends.
I think they compare for some people. I can handle real world situations better than movies. I think it's because the movie only stimulus some senses (sight and hearing) whereas the real world experience is complete.
I can relate to not being traumatized with any of those practices but at the same time being easily traumatized from watching the dismembering of a close family member; that is to say that is not only the nature of the act that traumatize us but to whom is done.
And I pay to see similar depictions in horror movies, I don't think either proves much about the damage from something traumatic happening to a family member or close friend.
It's true, we didn't have the same theory of other minds for those animals in those times. For a long time, bears in particular were so feared that their modern names actually come from ways to avoid referring to them directly [0]:
> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear—arkto—with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism.
And it's well-known that housecats have been distrusted in various ways throughout the years [1], although not all societies have been abusive towards them. It is only very recently in our history that we have seen them not just as divine harbingers or adorable pets, but also as sapient intelligences with their own desires and goals. Indeed, it is only just now, in our lifetimes, that we have moved from a theory of us taming housecats to a theory of self-domestication [2].
What I'm getting at is that these folks in the past did not have the same empathy for animals that we do, and so they had not just different cultural values, but also different mental attitudes towards their (mis)treatment. When people say phrases like, "tigers are wild animals," or "dogs are unclean," they are not just indicating a cultural value but also how they personally empathize (or don't!) with different species.
None of this is to especially contradict your point. Their norms then were not our norms today. I merely would suggest that different norms lead to different abilities to empathize.
I didn't see anyone mentioning this but it would partially explain both the "there wasn't more in a violent world so it's weakness/was normal" arguments as well as the "we haven't changed genetically so!" arguments.
Today we have much less violence than ever before, we live more comfortable lives, people are healthier and mistreating others is often illegal and pushed back against from both governments and the population itself.
Because of that people who experience horrible events are less likely to have anyone around them with that shared experience.
We have, afaik, less occurrence of PTSD when something horrible happens to an entire community, and less mental illness when an entire community is facing a difficult situation.
But for an individual experiencing horrible and horrifying events you not only have the event itself, but a total lack of anyone even remotely close to having had the same experience.
I have a relative with diagnosed (you really have to specify it) PTSD and I have absolutely no experience remotely close to the ones this person has faced, in an environment where there was no escape (family). Afterwards noone seem to understand their reactions, fears (people, loud noises) and feelings, but apparently feel that they are qualified to give advice and to just do things because 'there is no way you are actually physically being limited by your body and I know exactly how you feel because I have the exact same because my dad used to yell at me when I refused to take out the trash now and then'.
This reaction is of course commonplace online, and online help groups have plenty of undiagnosed people who don't seem to be limited in any unusual way or have had any traumatic event, but who then cause stress for those who don't have coworkers or friends or can go do things in public and who really need the online space.
But it's also closer to the reaction and acting most people in real life have to it, and in some cases even mental health professionals, than it is to having had a similar experience.
There just seems to be a too large gap between people who have it average by todays standards and thise who've faced horrible traumas.
I notice a lot of stress in my daily life today with the covid-19 pandemic, where I'm in Sweden where life seems to be going along as normal, while I'm in three separate risk groups, two for serious illnesses and one for the immunosupressants used to treat them, and where I get questioned by my doctors, friends and family as to why I don't want to go to thr clinic or socialize. I can't walk further than a block away because noone keeps any distance and joggers come brushing by from behind. It feels like this is also caused by the different experience. "Why can't they keep their distance, aren't we supposed to do that? Why do they assume I'm not in a risk group and assume that none they see could possibly be?". And this is still an experience they know a lot of people are having and know a lot about through media.
I just think having others that you share your overall experience with helps a lot, and with much better lives in average the distance between those who have it OK and those who have it the worst has increased.
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) triggered by certain actions (leaving along, shouting, raising one's hand, the smell of alcohol, etc).
In this context, the presumption that humans a few hundreds, or thousands, years ago didn't experience PTSD is... strange.
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.
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 intermittent stress exposure early in life induces the development of subsequent stress resistance in human and nonhuman primates."
"People with the capacity to maintain healthy emotional functioning in the aftermath of stressful experiences are said to be resilient, or stress resistant (1, 2).
"Researchers have sought to identify attributes associated with stress resistant individuals, with the expectation that understanding the etiology of stress resistance may lead to the prevention of stress-related psychiatric disorders.
"One intriguing finding to emerge from this retrospective research has been that stress resistance is associated with childhood exposure to mildly stressful events (1, 3)."
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.
I am an United States Navy Corpsman and a veteran of a combat deployment. I am very thankful to see comments here disputing the author's claim that there are no signs of PTSD in the ancient world.
I do not have the classic "first page" symptoms from the DSM-V, as I like to call them. These are the flashbacks, intrusive memories, noise sensitivity - the common image of classic PTSD. I believe I do not have them because I never personally compromised my own value system and caused harm to innocent people. I did, however, witness milder events to an extent frequent and prolonged enough to cause a deep unmovable certainty that the world is tragically fucked up. That lead me to have all kinds of angsty aggressions in the direction of "the system" or "the world" at large. This anxious, overdriven fearful discontent lead me to be fully certain that life was tragic, and all around convinced that there was a conspiracy to make it so. It has taken over a decade for those certainties to subside. Some of it was immaturity, most of it was evidence.
My Marine battalion made front page NYT news for its suicide rate. Many Marines have not had the experience I had. I believe this is because they were younger than I was (25) and many went on one or even two combat deployments to Iraq prior to ours. They have done a sadly effective job at killing themselves. I believe the reason for this (with no evidence) is because these men were prone to enjoying and seeking opportunities to kill.
Apart from that guessing game, I also believe that the symptoms of PTSD are all-around easy to suppress and make look like other things. Most of the behavior associated with "toxic masculinity" as it is currently being called can be instead directed towards a PTSD diagnosis or some kind of traumatic reaction. I am sure of this. So the fact that the ancient world had all these orders and so forth with vows and tight-knit little clans are all a sign to me that they were just like the soldiers returning from WWII who became bikers; they were rattled badly. They had to put on that cold, tightly-wound demeanor by force of the nervousness that lay underneath. All those sovereign military orders and all that? They were all PTSD clubs.
In opposition to this ideal, there is a book titled "On Killing" which describes why not all killers are susceptible to PTSD. I believe the book is fairly accurate in its claim, however it does exactly what those old military orders did: it creates a warrior ethos which allows for an in-group admission of the experiences while keeping the out-group afraid of the warriors. According to the book, there is a subsection of humanity that are naturally capable of killing without it being contrary to their values. They do not revel in it as some do. They are not triggered by it as many are. This is the chivalrous vision of being a trigger-puller.
My experience of events which ought to be traumatic is mostly that they only return to bother us if there is some behavior that was contrary to the individuals values. Those vary. To move the slider as far to the (?) as is necessary to justify killing on moral, religious, personal, political/tribal/cultural grounds, and showering killers in rewards after the fact, including great tales of valour, etc that make all those sacrifices worthy: that is the means of shielding the society from the reality of there being a fraction of the people who are extremely fucked up from having hacked/shot/blown people to pieces.
One final note: it was far more common to die from wounds and disease. Many people just plain didn't survive the wars due to wounds and plagues. Or they were assimilated somewhat into their enemies worlds and never returned to exactly the same place where people could say: "holy shit, you're different."
> [traumatic events] only return to bother us if there is some behavior that was contrary to the individuals values.
Or perhaps, a bit more generally, if the event causes a significant degree of cognitive dissonance. This would include behavior by one who later suffers PTSD, as you say, but it might also include events that were simply totally outside what a victim expected could possibly happen to them.
Dude is resting his shoe-clad feet on a stack of Babylon 5 DVDs like an ottoman. Excuse me while I go wash my eyes.
WTF dude!?
- - - -
> I’d say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do.
Yeah, no shit Sherlock! The entirety of civilization back the was a horror show. People have been psychotic since the Younger Dryas. The reason there's "vanishingly little evidence" of PTSD is because everybody had it, all the time.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadThe technology, tools and languages available to humans has expanded a huge amount over recent centuries.
The question, I guess, is whether the psychological consequences of experiencing and processing reality (and, particularly, trauma) has changed as a result.
[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30957719
(It's also funny that the BBC article mentions the strong Herodotus PTSD example that the featured article treats as a repeatedly-rehashed outlier.)
(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 able to give advice. In contrast, losing a child is extremely rare (in developed countries) today. This rarity breeds isolation, which makes everything worse.
(2) 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.
To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.
The whole thing raises interesting questions about our modern understanding of trauma. I think the most common modern statement on grief is that it's intensely personal and people should never feel that their grieving process is "wrong", at least not for a long time (years?) after the event. That at least seems different than past practice.
[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/642999?seq=1
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 you know the relative's names).
Think about that for a second. Let's say you had a child who died at 6 months old. 1-2 years down the track you had another child and you'd use the same name.
We have totally different expectations of mortality than a century ago. A child born today in the developed world is incredibly likely to make it to adulthood. It's simply not conceivable than in an era of greater infant mortality that there weren't different attitudes to the death of a child.
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, stop doing a sport you did together,
2) replace these memories by doing exactly those things with your new partner. soon you will have forgotten about them. Instead what remains is that activity/place now being your memory and not associated to another person (or the 2 of you).
Please avoid this oversimplification of human psyche.
We are not fruit flies, we are thousands of times more complex than "replacing your bad memories"
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?
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.
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.
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)
The roles we switch so dynamically, where once a heave cloth you doned once your life and then wore them till the end.
I think we should be more kind to our ancestors. Just because they lived in fucked up times, compared to our current standards, does not mean they experienced a different quality of suffering.
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
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.
This is apparently the backstory as to why the musician Richard D James called himself "Aphex Twin"
And then you look at the historical statistics and realize that, depending on your time and place, something like 250-400 in 1000 infants died. And aside from how viscerally terrifying that thought is, it's no wonder you couldn't notice that extra 1 in 1000 until you fixed childhood plagues and nutrition. It was the terrifying scourge of the 80's, but just a drop in the bucket historically.
"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 rather say
"hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year".
The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.
“That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.”
Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly.
When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune.
If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).
This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.
In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.
While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).
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 observer, at the other.
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).
Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible. A support group doesn't make a condition more or less common. A support group makes you less alone, which is another way of saying you feel your emotions are validated and youre relationship to your emotion changes in that group. Some people need a support group to change their relationship to an emotion.
> Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible.
There is a saying in Italy: "a shared misfortune is half a joy".
There's a recognized therapeutic value in literature. Reading novels doesn't validate your emotions- reading is unidirectional, there is nobody telling you "I understand you" from the pages of a novel. But you get in contact with characters who suffer, confront problems, overcome them or succumb to them. You can see their inner life, and recognize a commonality of human experience.
Conversely, social media are notorious for making people depressed: it can be as unidirectional as reading, but since people tend to show only the positive aspects of their life, it can make you feel your own life is especially bad.
Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.
This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.
Lazy citation: here are some askhistorians threads on evidence and how scholarship ended up going in this direction
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_...
It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past.
I wonder if your opinion is from someone with kids or not.
As far as PTSD is concerned, I remember a commentary / documentation (I suck at keeping my sources, so...) that went a long these lines:
- War was more common, when everybody is kind of traumatized, society copes with it better - soldiers were traumatized, but it seems less so when compared to modern war, which brings me to the last point: - the most horrible war experience back then was battles (sieges, field battles,...), off battle, life for the soldier was as dangerous as a civilian's one. In modern war, the soldiers stress was constant, everywhere and the enemy (artillery, snipers, air craft,...) often invisible, increasing the stress levels a lot
I am no expert in psychology, but it does sound logical.
It doesn't mean they loved their children less. It means they had a different bar before they considered them full-fledged "children." In lots of cultures they don't name kids for a few days or weeks. In pre-modern China, infanticide within the first few days of birth was considered a normal, though regrettable, form of birth control. There's even the story about how Spartans used to leave children who were too sickly to the wolves.
You can see this sliding standard in modern times too with the abortion debate. Some evangelicals get VERY intense about the life of the fetus in utero. For some of the more hardcore ones, even very early stage miscarriages get funerals and the zygote gets regarded with all the honors that a child would have been. In their minds, an abortion is infanticide without a doubt. Meanwhile, other people think of it as a routine medical procedure and think the evangelical position is parodic on the level of "Every Sperm is Sacred."
But overall, the point isn't that they didn't feel the feelings. It's that they had better ways of processing and working through them.
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 be "character building" (e.g. corporal punishment; Roald Dahl's description of the process is worth reading) looks instead like a form of trauma inoculation. Get the trauma over with early. Bully anyone who shows signs of being negatively affected by the trauma. People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence.
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.
Edit: see also the comment upthread about "being haunted"; the pre-modern world was what Carl Sagan called the "demon haunted world". If you look at a some religious and spiritual practices as trauma-processing, a connection emerges. Parts of the 60s spiritual revival and Jungianism were trying to do this explicitly.
Doesn't the plight of homeless veterans today demonstrate that PTSD and mental illness is not something that can be easily hidden, even under threat of violence?
You can beat symptoms out of someone if you don't care whether they survive the process. Then you have no people with visible symptoms around cluttering up the place.
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 for soldiers - artillery barrages just hadn't been that intense before.
Ancient hand-to-hand combat would have been horrific. Never mind trying to survive, just actively trying to hack someone else's body up with a sharp tool, when they're right there, would mess you up pretty bad. If, as TFA says, every able-bodied man in your entire society has experienced this, then every able-bodied man is going to be messed up.
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.
Also, surviving a battle injury was far less common before the discovery of antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. Infection from relatively minor wounds caused a much higher death rate. So the surviving soldiers were less likely to have experienced physical trauma and lived long enough to make it into accounts of their behavior afterwards.
[1] https://blastinjuryresearch.amedd.army.mil/assets/docs/newsH...
But the survivors might well have trauma from their actions not their injuries. Hacking another human to death is traumatic for normal people. The survivors would also have survivor guilt.
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 (I know some games have a more sophisticated model, but still).
I suspect that some of the harmful behaviors (we associate with PTSD) weren't socially abhorrent, in past eras.
eg: Societies generally condone some amount of mistreating other people. That particular outlet could have been fully acceptable, when done to marginal and lesser classes.
I suppose there could also be a sense in which, depending on the culture, a death in hand to hand combat might be viewed as glorious in a way that getting shot by a sniper or blown up by artillery wouldn't be.
>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 reflection of our current cultural norms. What is right and wrong or traumatic or not is a matter of cultural norms and social consensus. The reason we give a crap over whether or not people are traumatized is because it makes them "messed up" and affects their ability to function normally in society. If people are able to function normally in society, are not "messed up" according to the people around them and don't consider themselves traumatized are they really traumatized?
It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office and say the past was horrible but it's only horrible because we have a different frame of reference. For the people who lived it it was just how things are. I think it's kind of paternalistic to say the people of the past were all/mostly traumatized because it's not like they had any other options, the things they had to experience were unavoidable facts of life.
WWI had the technology to be profoundly violent. Ok, there were cannons in ships and in the Civil War for example, but I suspect that WWI (and later wars) had a bigger technological dependency.
Technologies that are loud, flashy and destructive: tanks, bombs, machine guns, grenades, etc.
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.
highly related: the opposite of addiction isnt sobriety, its connectedness.
https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...
a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economics, drug addiction, social media, you name it.
Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender.
Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know.
Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun.
I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.
I guess this might be different in a large org with impermeable "silos", where you just talk to your direct teammates and work comes in the form of tickets. I mostly worked in small companies (under 50 people), with little bureaucracy, and specialization is a little less strict.
Today, 15-20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriage. Not so rare. I wonder how many of those parents would have even known they were pregnant prior to modern medicine.
If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week
I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly.
In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-powe...
Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.
(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.
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.
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
The American Civil War was the first "modern" war as it made use of a lot of new technology that had been developed in the early industrial revolution, but barrel rifling is probably the most relevant to the experience of an individual soldier (as opposed to railroads, steam ships or the telegraph, each of which revolutionized the strategic dynamics of war).
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.
I wonder if the specific tools of war are a factor as well — the suddenness of explosions and bullets might provide a significantly more traumatic experience than spear sword and trebuchet, the pace of humvees and airplanes more shock than feet and horses.
And medieval combat was quite a gruesome affair, cleaving people into peaces with axes and swords, in an age without proper medical care...
What has changed though, is the staying power of armies which nowadays can stay in contact for long times with somewhat low intensity fighting going on all the time. This of course changes the whole psychology aspect, its not the stress of one battle going on for a day or so, but the stress of a battle going on for weeks.
"Gun cleaning" accidents, as the socially accepted cover for male suicide by people everyone wants to ignore were suffering from depression or PTSD.
There's no doubt that happens, but on the other hand gun cleaning injuries (e.g. to limbs) are far from unheard of, as well as people accidentally putting holes in their house. Those are doubtlessly accidents, so I have no doubt that some of the "gun cleaning fatal accidents" truly were accidents. Any of these accidents should be prevented by dogmatically following basic safety procedures, but obviously sometimes some people don't. And sometimes, that has fatal consequences.
All quiet on the western front describes this phenomenon quite well. The continues stress of being on or near the front lines with constant shelling all around you. The artillary barages where so severe that areas of the ground are poisoned with metals from artillery shells..
To give you an idea about the frequency of shells getting fired.[1]
[1] https://codatocoda.com/blog/making-a-new-world-armistice-sou...
Casualties during the battle proper would be surprisingly low.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/militaryhist...
Edit: one thing covered in the video, but not mentioned in the article is the different experience of what war means in modern times. From WW1 (actually, a bit earlier), modern high explosives mean that soldiers spend days, weeks, even months under high stress and constant threat of death. Ancient soldiers tended to participate in violent, but relatively short battles (a day or two at most). The vast majority of the time, they were not under the same levels of stress.
Now as Dan would say, he doesn't find scientific and technological advancements particularly interesting (from a historical perspective). Like if Edison didn't invent the light bulb, someone else would've.
What he finds far more interesting is historical events that could've completely changed the course of history and one of those was the Battle of Marathon [2]. This was a battle between the Persians and the Greeks that the Greeks somehow won. Had they lost it would've changed the entire history of Europe given how important Greek culture was to everyone from the Romans on. Bear in mind when this happened, Rome was a small regional power at best.
He talks about the psychology of ancient warfare. One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them. From a gun at a distance is completely different to hand-to-hand combat.
At this time, the Greeks fought with spears that were very broad. Stab someone in the guts with one of those and their insides would literally spill out to the point where the likes of Herodotus described the ground at Marathon as being soaked red in blood.
Likewise, ancient culture and justice must be almost incomprehensible to us. Fun fact: the origin of the word "decimate". 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.
How did people cope with these things? How would PTSD fit into this world?
EDIT: the way some downvote on HN makes me sad.
[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Marathon
> historical events that could've completely changed the course of history
The battle of Teutoburg Forest [1][2] is another one. Had the Roman general Varius not fallen in to Arminius ambush, things might have been vastly different. The Romans never again had a solid footing beyond the Rhine and the battle was used again and again to forge German identity.
> One thing he notes is that the closer someone is to someone, the harder it is for them to (psychologically) kill them.
This same effect is discussed extensively in the book On Killing [3] and similar conclusions can be drawn from the Milgram Experiment [4]. On Killing also mentions that stabbing weapons are psychologically harder to use than slashing weapons. It specifically mentions the Roman Gladius.
0 - https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
1 - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000f69q
2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest
3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
4 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Interestingly, the defeat of Vercingetorix was also used as a mean of forging the French identity, so even a defeat can be used this way (though if Caesar had failed to invade Gaul, history might have been quite different too). Also in regard of using Teutoburg to build a national identity, the series on the Fremen Mirage [0] on the same blog talk about that idea too.
[0] https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
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 usually used for mass desertion. Thousands of people were executed for individual desertion during WW1, so you could argue that it's not THAT exotic a punishment.
The Roman Empire _did_ do various nasty things to rebellious provinces (Judea is particularly notable), but again, really nothing that we haven't seen in 20th century wars, unfortunately.
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.
For that matter, their behavior in Gaul isn't evidence of it either; again, we unfortunately have many recent parallels.
- 1750s Dzungar genocide
- 1860s Circassian genocide
- 1900s Herero and Namaqua genocide
There are many 'trolls' around here (comes with the popularity), who will downvote based on opinion to begin with, instead of writing a counter-argument (or their "problem" with the post is simplistic, first-degree, unsophisticated).
Ignore them. Those who come to read/learn usually do. We read arguments, rebuttals or agreements, and seldom consider scores at face value.
Also, engagement is probably the real salience of votes, whether up or down: it means someone got 'triggered' enough to click, and that usually means you touched something (assuming the comment isn't misleading, factually wrong, etc).
Typically, a post such as yours is interesting, and warrants no downvotes whatsoever.
- Humans did not change biologically enough in 10,000 years, let alone 2,000, to produce a meaningfully different psychology. Take a a child born 2,000 years ago, raise them today, and you'll get just a regular human being. Same thing backwards.
- The entirety of the author's 'hypothesis' (sic) rests upon ignoring that nurture, context, is highly determinant in forming psychological references, relative perceptions, hence reactions, profiles. This is wrong, nature isn't 100%, you simply can't take two identical beings, put them in vastly different contexts and hope they present the same behaviors and perceptions. It makes no sense. Hello Darwin, wish you were here.
- “the absence of evidence”... Again, wrong. Historical psychology is a thing. Author may be well-meaning, but they should adopt a transdisciplinary approach if they are to talk about multiple disciplines at once. Find a good psychologist, work together as one on the topic long enough to form a legitimate hypotheses, then maybe make some conclusions.
- It seems the author also neglected to take into account philosophy, which used to be 99% practical back then. Recipes for good living. Guess why it was widely taught and shared, pretty much the basis of any education, throughout life. Guess why Seneca wrote his letters. What's the point of ignoring just about the closest thing to psychology sessions? Why is Stoicism not in that essay?
I feel like I've just read a mathematician trying, painfully, to speak of epidemiology. (forgive the "modern" reference, I think it's fitting as we speak)
Whatever your core expertise, armchair-other disciplines is a slippery slope. I guess the author somehow mistook his own intelligence for knowledge in psychology.
Say whatever you want about our past, you won't find a psychologist or biologist to tell you we've changed in any way, shape or form "inside". The context, however, ah, the context. Well for that, this thread on HN is much more eloquent, I must say. It's almost as if people collectively had insight! (because this is written: "/s", of course they do, and I wish the author didn't simply write solo or fail to question or quote others.
Here's food for thought: the very fact of "talking about your feelings" is very modern, that's a totally different context. We just didn't dwell on that topic as much in history (hence why, perhaps, some literature became so notorious, because it spoke of something that people weren't used to). It was "fluff". Hence why, when we made "emotions" a matter of science, it became a more acceptable topic, not just for a few who dared. It became "mainstream". (I'm NOT a specialist, so don't quote me on this but Freud, Jung, positivism, is probably where/when to look for a major shift; before that it was "magic", fluff, but it doesn't mean it wasn't "real", like belief in supernatural forces is "magic" but real to the psyche).
Imagine that, in the future, we turn some (currently) elusive aspect of our psyche (like belief indeed), into a form of science, of applied psycho-bio-model-mechanics (like we do cognitive sciences today, a scientific progress over prior centuries). Now imagine some author versed in history but oblivious to psychology and biology, centuries from now, claiming in some random short post that people in the 21st century did not experience any tension in that regard because they didn't have words for it. Well, we may not have the words indeed, not yet; but we certainly experience the tensions with beliefs (supernatural or otherwise), heck we made wars because of it. Just like kings of old have waged war because their feelings commanded them to.
That, my friend, is ethno...
Biology did not change. Perceptions and expression of it did change. It does not mean the inner biological processes are any different, just the way you consciously select what to say about them. Absence of words (context) means you cannot express certain things; does not mean you don't actually feel them. Romantic love for instance is a quite modern thing, the way we speak of it today. Does not mean people did not feel it before.
Please reconsider your take and vote, you misinterpreted my points I'm afraid. Or at least, make a worthy counter-argument, a click is simply too easy IMHO.
I gave you a worthy counter-argument; I gave you a single-sentence dilemma which was intended to refute your entire platform. You may want to re-read Pirsig's thoughts on dilemmas [4] before you reply.
The entirety of psychology, as a theory, is based upon cultural assumptions about inner experiences. There are important arguments against the ideas that people have inner experiences [0], that people are thinking when they talk [1], that therapy is effective due to its design rather than due to being a safe place to reflect [2], and even that mental disorders exist as opposed to being part of the spectrum of the human condition [3].
If you cannot tackle these foundational issues at all times, then your arguments ought to be considered no more strongly than the original author, by your own words, since you are not a psychologist either.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/other-minds/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo_bird_verdict
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanism
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Horns_of_a_dilemma
Great food for thought. You do in effect widen the topic so much, the very axioms underlying my assumptions, and that's extremely valuable to me. I think I see your point, now. you took me off-guard, I wasn't expecting this direction and failed to see what you meant.
I will yield to your logic (in particular the last sentence). I may deplore that it makes the whole topic kind of moot, but that's my feelings, not an argument whatsoever (my bias shows I suppose).
Now, I will just reaffirm that I'm parroting much more expert views. Such topics are one of my pet peeves, been thinking about it quite deeply since I was 12-ish (37 now). Lots of reading over the years. Lots of discussions with 'experts'. I've no professional qualification in psychology however, that's true.
All these questions, "did we cognitively think differently?", "did we feel differently?", "were we in any way significantly different that a modern psychologist couldn't do their thing on a Classic Roman?", "have we changed so much that someone from the past would be lost in the modern world if they were raised in it?"... they all met a resounding "no".
That's what I was trying to express. Based on this unanimous, quite consensual view, how could something as "simple" and common as PTSD not exist back then? It's a really extraordinary claim, thus the burden of proof falls on the claimant, I reckon.
Whether or not we are zombies (I think we are, to a much larger extent than we'd be comfortable admitting for now), that zombie today is exactly the same as all zombies prior, and yet to come, for a long, long time (year 10,000 is too soon, 50,000 might be a low threshold unless we dramatically sped up genetic mutations and selection).
I don't have much more to say. I could probably write a short novel, but what's the point. I'm not even defending the point, just stating consensus. It is, as you correctly imply, not my place to put forward or argue such ideas with authority. But you'll have to go against the whole field of psychology to counter it (I will be eating popcorn as you drag them to reason ;-) )
Hopefully, this tempers a possibly exaggerated authority I may have suggested in my OP. I'll blame my writing style now and learn my lesson, I'll be more cautious and reasonable next time.
(I also stand corrected about the downvoting, so that's on me, my bad. Much respect for your approach, then.)
Now, I'm off reading all these nice links. Thanks again (upvoted both your posts, for a solid contribution to discussion, regardless of my opinion).
Huh? The author's hypothesis is that nurture and context were all-important in helping people avoid PTSD.
Romantic love is another good example. It never was spoken in modern terms before the 16th century give or take. Which is far from being equivalent to say "nope, they didn't speak of it like that, so people never experienced romantic love before the 16th century!"
The author's view is just as flawed, afaik. PTSD and every other psychological trait known in modern times did exist for much longer than recorded history, that's what most historical psychologists have concluded (it's not open to debate...), just in different terms (words), perceptions, value (in a larger hierarchy).
Edit: think of it this way. Were feelings "important" in the past? Certainly nowhere near as much as they are today, in our perception. Most were not even spoken, there simply were no words most of the time (or unknown to layman people). Did feelings exist forever, however? Absolutely, yes.
Not only do you have no evidence or arguments (except vague claims to authority), but your claims do not even contradict the original article.
___
Did I make a fool of myself by failing to comprehend what I read and then arguing exactly the same?
Then, I will just shut up and read again.
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Somehow, a bit tangential to the topic:
About evidence or argument, appeal to authority, I do think it's a case of "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof", and the author's claim is extraordinary. Mine is really just consensus from the field of historical psychology. I've never heard an expert arguing otherwise. I could probably google a few links, but randomly sticking "proof" on a non-problem seems... pointless. I shouldn't have to prove that flat geometry yields 180° triangle, it's whoever claims otherwise that bears the burden of substantiating it.
I just won't spend that particular time, since the author's claim is weird, not mine. Triangles add up to 180. Human biology and psychology did not change in recorded history. There's nothing 'new' in our heads besides what we intake from the context.
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But I hear you and will re-read that piece later, with a colder head. Maybe I was put off by some emotional bias and got 'triggered' by the claim (no PTSD in the past... huh?), which led me to interpret, thus fail to comprehend what I read. That much is 100% possible and I've no ego problem in admitting that.
Apologies to the author if that's been the case.
These societies were also far, far more violent than ours. The sort of random violence that might be attributed to PTSD today would likely be part of the background noise in Medieval Italy, say.
Given that a major component of PTSD is moral injury -- e.g., I can't believe someone intentionally did that to me / I can't believe I had to do that to someone else -- I wonder whether (if the bicameral mind theory is true which I think it is) ancient warriors experienced PTSD not as internal angst but rather as a "dialogue among the gods" that happened in one's head following stress.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak%E2%80%93end_rule
People generally seem to remember the 'height' of an experience and the last parts of it. So an experience at a dentist where the last part of the procedure is a mild bit of additional drilling is 'better' than one that ends on a painful 'note'.
[1] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/26751
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Shay
> 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 experiencing intrusive memories were said to be haunted by ghosts. These individuals show up in historical, philosophical, and even medical texts.
> Josephus, who was an outsider to Roman culture, also describes this phenomenon in his history of The Great Revolt. Those haunted by ghosts are constantly depicted showing many symptoms which would be familiar to the modern PTSD sufferer. Insomnia, depression, mood swings, being easily startled, frequent eye movement, alertness all day and night, paranoia, avoidance of crowds, suicidal thoughts/attempts, loss of appetite, shaking/shivering, self-hatred, and impulsive violence have all turned up in association with these individuals.
> Since in almost every case the person experiencing these things had made himself an object of public shame, the "ghosts" in question often came in the form of those he had killed or wronged in the past. These would either appear spontaneously to the sufferer, or would come in the form of vivid, frightening nightmares.
> The key component to these experiences, as with modern cases of PTSD, was that the sufferer had no control over his own symptoms. Thoughts or vivid memories would occur unexpectedly and uncontrollably. It is easy to see why the Romans, who were religiously superstitious to begin with, would attribute such things to the foul play of malicious spirits.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1j6ssm/are_t...
I don't know enough about animal psychology or their inner worlds to say, "that's PTSD," (I do think, mind, that animals experience emotions, but how that experiences compares to human emotion, I don't know) but there sure seems to be something about reliving trauma there.
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 should it be universal ;-)
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 this, we are refining the therapeutic modalities that are most efficacious for treating trauma. See all the latest literature by Peter Levine, Bessel van der Kolk, Gabor Maté.
So I wouldn’t really expect these societies to know what to look for - in fact, it could have been so ubiquitous that the symptoms (and/or suppression of them e.g. regular intoxication) were normalized.
Given how warlike they were as he described in the article, it could be like asking a fish to describe water.
We know for a fact that mammals get PTSD after being in highly stressful experiences that they are unable to metabolize. I can’t see why humans would be any different.
Also, many different cultures have historically had taboos around the expression and natural resolution of PTSD. I don’t know about the culture of society around the age he is speaking of in this regard, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a normal aspect of life back then, too.
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. Events can affect each of us very differently."
The context in which these events happen plays a huge role in whether or not someone develops symptoms of PTSD afterwards.
Spiritual beliefs can play an important role in acceptance of death and therefore it not being a terrifying experience.
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 about what it means to be sensitive (broad sense of the word) to the world around us.
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.
I thought when someone experiences trauma, it makes their brain sensitize to preceding stimuli and unconsciously produce a strong response, in an attempt to avoid similar trauma. This would increase survival odds in life-threatening environments. The problem being that heightened sensitivity to similar stimuli and automatic strong responses are usually detrimental to living a safe, modern life.
It's possible that if you grew up in an environment in which death was commonplace, but you experienced, or even just believed in, a sense of agency, you'd experience fewer manifestations of grief or PTSD than we'd consider typical now.
Though perhaps not. I suspect many older psychological disturbances -- nervous exhaustion, mental breakdowns, melancholia and nostalgia (in their original senses) would map strongly to present notions of PTSD and depresion.
Peter Levine's most famous example is a polar bear that shakes a potentially traumatic stimulus off after being shot with tranquilizer. He argues even non-human mammals have the instinctive know-how to deal with trauma. Why humans would be lagging behind other than undue suppression of their instincts on how to deal with it? If anything, our modern society that puts so much stake at "being in control" is a hindrance to post-traumatic resolution than historical societies would be.
A crucial requirement for traumatic retention is a sense of loss of control that accompanies hyperarousal. No perceived lack of control = no trauma. In the context of combat PTSD, there is a large difference between modern warfare technologies and historical warfare in terms of the loss of control it induces (both for soldiers and civillians). 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, as opposed to being flown to a foreign country for less-than-well understood purposes.
Even for complex-PTSD, nuclear and even single parent households being a recent state of affairs, I would argue historically having multiple adult figures in one's childhood context prevented a problematic relationship with a single adult dominating the development experience of the child. Also those children had more access to natural world early on (unsupervised play time), developed competencies (e.g. working in the farm with parents) and afforded many other developmental freedoms, therefore likely to have developed trauma resilience. What was a rite-of-passage ritual supervised by the elders if not a training program for developing trauma resilience?
I would say it might as well be our current world that is more trauma-naive, trauma-generating and trauma-retaining than historical ones. We have the collective wisdom on how to deal with it, but insurance doesn't pay for it and you gotta show up at the office the next day.
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.
War has been the same across millennia: rulers getting into fights and forcing the ruled to fight for these wars for them.
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.
Certainly, in historical warfare, you faced off against an enemy. There were far fewer devices that could be highly lethal and completely unseen. Even stuff as simple as IEDs is awful, but airstrikes, artillery, etc. probably contribute to that sense of no control. And the counters to them are, generally, prolonged periods of hyper-awareness, continually scanning for threats.
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.
And I was trying not to lecture this young(er) instructor in front of a room of his regular students, so I didn’t feel I could do more than encourage him to dump some more adrenaline. He was trying to laugh it off, which parts of my extended family are notorious for. Nobody talks about anything.
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.
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.
As a complete side note, I've always wondered how dogs tell human males from females.
Are we even sure they do?
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 even humans can tell the difference in most cases then a dog definitely would.
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.
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 in that this dog wasn't coming home with us, but the rescue person was invested in getting this dog exposed to more people so we just chatted while I sat on the floor cross legged, keeping my voice level, all of my gestures slow and exaggerated, and not making eye contact with the dog.
It took 90 minutes for that dog to interact with me, and he just came over and plopped down next to me, leaning against my thigh. After that, we were cool. I only hope that meant the next people didn't take an hour and a half to get that far.
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.
In general shrinking yourself makes most dogs like you a lot more, but the little dogs will bee-line for your legs.
atomato at gmail
The askshistorians poster focuses on two points:
- Combat and violence were normalized, and there was little moral or ethical ambiguity surrounding it. Unlike today.
- PTSD seemed to come from public perception of the acts and the resulting shame, rather than the acts themselves. Also unlike today.
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, killing is bad, but..." and then looks into when it is allowable.
Many of the examples we have of things that look like PTSD are from failed rebels, people who were involved in civil wars, or people who had been disgraced. That would mean that they experienced the same sort of reaction to a stressor that they couldn't process but that the type of stressor that might trigger such a reaction was fundamentally different.
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.
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.)
The (unstated) assumption the people in the past "were just like us" emotionally, deserves closer scrutiny.
I believe that the magnitude of trauma inflicted by a certain experience is relative to what is considered to be the norm in the time and place. The norms of "ancient" people were different from those of the 21st century
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear-baiting
[2] https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/ritualistic-cat-tortur...
The other you know is fiction which you can criticize the script, special effects, and cinematography of from a comfortable chair, often with friends.
I don't think the two really compare.
> This terminology for the animal originated as a taboo avoidance term: proto-Germanic tribes replaced their original word for bear—arkto—with this euphemistic expression out of fear that speaking the animal's true name might cause it to appear. According to author Ralph Keyes, this is the oldest known euphemism.
And it's well-known that housecats have been distrusted in various ways throughout the years [1], although not all societies have been abusive towards them. It is only very recently in our history that we have seen them not just as divine harbingers or adorable pets, but also as sapient intelligences with their own desires and goals. Indeed, it is only just now, in our lifetimes, that we have moved from a theory of us taming housecats to a theory of self-domestication [2].
What I'm getting at is that these folks in the past did not have the same empathy for animals that we do, and so they had not just different cultural values, but also different mental attitudes towards their (mis)treatment. When people say phrases like, "tigers are wild animals," or "dogs are unclean," they are not just indicating a cultural value but also how they personally empathize (or don't!) with different species.
None of this is to especially contradict your point. Their norms then were not our norms today. I merely would suggest that different norms lead to different abilities to empathize.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear#Etymology
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_depictions_of_cats
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-domestication
Today we have much less violence than ever before, we live more comfortable lives, people are healthier and mistreating others is often illegal and pushed back against from both governments and the population itself.
Because of that people who experience horrible events are less likely to have anyone around them with that shared experience.
We have, afaik, less occurrence of PTSD when something horrible happens to an entire community, and less mental illness when an entire community is facing a difficult situation.
But for an individual experiencing horrible and horrifying events you not only have the event itself, but a total lack of anyone even remotely close to having had the same experience.
I have a relative with diagnosed (you really have to specify it) PTSD and I have absolutely no experience remotely close to the ones this person has faced, in an environment where there was no escape (family). Afterwards noone seem to understand their reactions, fears (people, loud noises) and feelings, but apparently feel that they are qualified to give advice and to just do things because 'there is no way you are actually physically being limited by your body and I know exactly how you feel because I have the exact same because my dad used to yell at me when I refused to take out the trash now and then'.
This reaction is of course commonplace online, and online help groups have plenty of undiagnosed people who don't seem to be limited in any unusual way or have had any traumatic event, but who then cause stress for those who don't have coworkers or friends or can go do things in public and who really need the online space.
But it's also closer to the reaction and acting most people in real life have to it, and in some cases even mental health professionals, than it is to having had a similar experience.
There just seems to be a too large gap between people who have it average by todays standards and thise who've faced horrible traumas.
I notice a lot of stress in my daily life today with the covid-19 pandemic, where I'm in Sweden where life seems to be going along as normal, while I'm in three separate risk groups, two for serious illnesses and one for the immunosupressants used to treat them, and where I get questioned by my doctors, friends and family as to why I don't want to go to thr clinic or socialize. I can't walk further than a block away because noone keeps any distance and joggers come brushing by from behind. It feels like this is also caused by the different experience. "Why can't they keep their distance, aren't we supposed to do that? Why do they assume I'm not in a risk group and assume that none they see could possibly be?". And this is still an experience they know a lot of people are having and know a lot about through media.
I just think having others that you share your overall experience with helps a lot, and with much better lives in average the distance between those who have it OK and those who have it the worst has increased.
Reproducibility crisis says dunno?
In this context, the presumption that humans a few hundreds, or thousands, years ago didn't experience PTSD is... strange.
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.
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 intermittent stress exposure early in life induces the development of subsequent stress resistance in human and nonhuman primates."
"People with the capacity to maintain healthy emotional functioning in the aftermath of stressful experiences are said to be resilient, or stress resistant (1, 2).
"Researchers have sought to identify attributes associated with stress resistant individuals, with the expectation that understanding the etiology of stress resistance may lead to the prevention of stress-related psychiatric disorders.
"One intriguing finding to emerge from this retrospective research has been that stress resistance is associated with childhood exposure to mildly stressful events (1, 3)."
https://www.pnas.org/content/103/8/3000
Don't worry about one particular study. Search for The Concept. Deduce for yourself its validity.
I do not have the classic "first page" symptoms from the DSM-V, as I like to call them. These are the flashbacks, intrusive memories, noise sensitivity - the common image of classic PTSD. I believe I do not have them because I never personally compromised my own value system and caused harm to innocent people. I did, however, witness milder events to an extent frequent and prolonged enough to cause a deep unmovable certainty that the world is tragically fucked up. That lead me to have all kinds of angsty aggressions in the direction of "the system" or "the world" at large. This anxious, overdriven fearful discontent lead me to be fully certain that life was tragic, and all around convinced that there was a conspiracy to make it so. It has taken over a decade for those certainties to subside. Some of it was immaturity, most of it was evidence.
My Marine battalion made front page NYT news for its suicide rate. Many Marines have not had the experience I had. I believe this is because they were younger than I was (25) and many went on one or even two combat deployments to Iraq prior to ours. They have done a sadly effective job at killing themselves. I believe the reason for this (with no evidence) is because these men were prone to enjoying and seeking opportunities to kill.
Apart from that guessing game, I also believe that the symptoms of PTSD are all-around easy to suppress and make look like other things. Most of the behavior associated with "toxic masculinity" as it is currently being called can be instead directed towards a PTSD diagnosis or some kind of traumatic reaction. I am sure of this. So the fact that the ancient world had all these orders and so forth with vows and tight-knit little clans are all a sign to me that they were just like the soldiers returning from WWII who became bikers; they were rattled badly. They had to put on that cold, tightly-wound demeanor by force of the nervousness that lay underneath. All those sovereign military orders and all that? They were all PTSD clubs.
In opposition to this ideal, there is a book titled "On Killing" which describes why not all killers are susceptible to PTSD. I believe the book is fairly accurate in its claim, however it does exactly what those old military orders did: it creates a warrior ethos which allows for an in-group admission of the experiences while keeping the out-group afraid of the warriors. According to the book, there is a subsection of humanity that are naturally capable of killing without it being contrary to their values. They do not revel in it as some do. They are not triggered by it as many are. This is the chivalrous vision of being a trigger-puller.
My experience of events which ought to be traumatic is mostly that they only return to bother us if there is some behavior that was contrary to the individuals values. Those vary. To move the slider as far to the (?) as is necessary to justify killing on moral, religious, personal, political/tribal/cultural grounds, and showering killers in rewards after the fact, including great tales of valour, etc that make all those sacrifices worthy: that is the means of shielding the society from the reality of there being a fraction of the people who are extremely fucked up from having hacked/shot/blown people to pieces.
One final note: it was far more common to die from wounds and disease. Many people just plain didn't survive the wars due to wounds and plagues. Or they were assimilated somewhat into their enemies worlds and never returned to exactly the same place where people could say: "holy shit, you're different."
Or perhaps, a bit more generally, if the event causes a significant degree of cognitive dissonance. This would include behavior by one who later suffers PTSD, as you say, but it might also include events that were simply totally outside what a victim expected could possibly happen to them.
WTF dude!?
- - - -
> I’d say there is vanishingly little evidence that people in the ancient Mediterranean or medieval Europe experienced PTSD from combat experience in the way that modern soldiers do.
Yeah, no shit Sherlock! The entirety of civilization back the was a horror show. People have been psychotic since the Younger Dryas. The reason there's "vanishingly little evidence" of PTSD is because everybody had it, all the time.