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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
I am a person who was physically and emotionally abused by peers as a child, who had a horrible, life changing experience on a psychedelic as a minor, and who has tinnitus and hyperacusis as a result of overexposure before 20.
I am now decades older and my life turned out horribly. I have many of the symptoms of PTSD, so it’s reasonable to self diagnose as such. I’m self destructive and suicidal, in constant mental torment, alone and bitter.
I’ve often thought that my life outcome was the result of bad luck, and sensitive genes. Then, at times, I figured this was the result of bad choices. It’s probably a combination of the above. Genetics, environment, luck, and poor decisions all factored into my experiences and how they’ve formed my resultant life.
To ‘tough it out’ is perhaps a great filter for those who are actually tough enough to do so, but some aren’t equipped for this. I’ve often seen my life outcome as indicative of a fundamental weakness in my genes, and there’s truth to this. Others went through similar circumstances and didn’t develop horrible tinnitus nor have a bad reaction to drugs, or childhood abuse. From an evolutionary standpoint, that I haven’t procreated is a success for the species. I will die off alone and the species will be stronger for it. Perhaps in old times this was done more silently.
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.)
Am I wrong to think this is a nonsensical question? I mean PTSD is just a term. I'm not saying there is not a real phenomenon underlying it but it's not something that can be objectively tested for in the sense of a blood test or something. It seems to essentially mean a subjective evaluation of "severe emotional trauma with lasting consequences"
So if you ask: "Was there severe emotional trauma with lasting consequences in the medieval world" and assuming that people 600 years ago were not biologically incapable of having emotional trauma, than yes of course, if we tested some of those people using the procedures and criteria we use today to diagnose PTSD, of course yes, we would conclude that they did have it.
Hearing psychology professionals take tautologically nonsensical questions like this seriously really makes me lose faith in modern psychology.
An underwhelming argument by the blogger. Introspection about motivation and emotion is also lacking in ancient texts; should we take that to imply that people didn't introspect, or have complex emotional lives? The role of literature has changed; if I look at a corpus of C++ and fail to see mentions of trauma, should I assume that no trauma occurred in the lives of the programmers who wrote and maintained the code? No, because one does not usually talk about such things in code. And, how easy would it be to miss evidence of psychological distress when it is described as visions and visitations of demons and angels? Read medieval hagiographic literature!
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.
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.
"We should expect to see signs of PTSD everywhere. It should be absolutely pervasive in a source-base produced almost entirely by, for and about combat veterans, in societies where military mortality exceeded modern rates by a robust margin. And it simply isn’t there."
Or perhaps it's so ubiquitous it's not mentioned. There are many about everyday life that don't appear in the historical record simply because they are so common.
Sometimes I think PTSD is the standard human experience. Industrialization, certain civil/human rights, and psychology insights have changed that some.
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.
>I tend to think the difference lies in part on the moral weight placed on warfare – it was viewed not generally a necessary evil in these societies, but a positive good – which may have meant there was less sense that what had taken place was trauma at all. If that is the case, the emergence of PTSD would speak to improvement in our society: we have become more averse to violence and do it less, and as a consequence, feel it more.
This seems to be the heart of his argument as to why this might be. When we look at the artwork that decorated public buildings in the ancient world (I'm specifically thinking of Egypt and Assyria) we see a lot of torture, warfare, abasement of enemies, etc. I'm trying to imagine going to my local public buildings and seeing scenes of, say, North Koreans being flayed alive carved in stone on the walls. It does seem like we view violence in a different way than they did in the ancient millennia.
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.
One thing I read today might contribute to this, I found it rather interesting.
I was reading about Black Death, and ended reading also about the Great Famine that happened a bit before it, and the two are attributed to be part of the reason why Chivalrious warfare ended, before these two events, professional soldiers (knights for example) usually died in training accidents than in actual battle...
But the deep changes caused by these two events, caused among other things, the start of a more destructive kind of warfare, where instead of winning by making the enemy retreat, you would win by completely destroying the enemy forces.
I suspect in some periods of history there was less PTSD because war was just less violent.
After Black Death, and increasing since, we got closer and closer to the idea of total war, that ended happening for real in the World Wars.
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.
[+] [-] crazygringo|5 years ago|reply
> 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...
[+] [-] _wovb|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] RookyNumbas|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Mvandenbergh|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mattigames|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valuearb|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] papeda|5 years ago|reply
(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
[+] [-] cletus|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] pjc50|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] magicalist|5 years ago|reply
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_...
[+] [-] kryogen1c|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wayoutthere|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] C1sc0cat|5 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] king_panic|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SkyBelow|5 years ago|reply
(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.
[+] [-] sharadov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seibelj|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tathougies|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coffeeling|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gadders|5 years ago|reply
Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.
[+] [-] Gupie|5 years ago|reply
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-powe...
[+] [-] take_a_breath|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] quezzle|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] agumonkey|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sorokod|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] ThrowawayR2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lidHanteyk|5 years ago|reply
> 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
[+] [-] mattigames|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] distances|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/militaryhist...
[+] [-] goodcanadian|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] rsynnott|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] yboris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyJones|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Killing
[+] [-] bbsanon|5 years ago|reply
I am now decades older and my life turned out horribly. I have many of the symptoms of PTSD, so it’s reasonable to self diagnose as such. I’m self destructive and suicidal, in constant mental torment, alone and bitter.
I’ve often thought that my life outcome was the result of bad luck, and sensitive genes. Then, at times, I figured this was the result of bad choices. It’s probably a combination of the above. Genetics, environment, luck, and poor decisions all factored into my experiences and how they’ve formed my resultant life.
To ‘tough it out’ is perhaps a great filter for those who are actually tough enough to do so, but some aren’t equipped for this. I’ve often seen my life outcome as indicative of a fundamental weakness in my genes, and there’s truth to this. Others went through similar circumstances and didn’t develop horrible tinnitus nor have a bad reaction to drugs, or childhood abuse. From an evolutionary standpoint, that I haven’t procreated is a success for the species. I will die off alone and the species will be stronger for it. Perhaps in old times this was done more silently.
[+] [-] john-radio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jka|5 years ago|reply
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.
[1] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30957719
[+] [-] papeda|5 years ago|reply
(It's also funny that the BBC article mentions the strong Herodotus PTSD example that the featured article treats as a repeatedly-rehashed outlier.)
[+] [-] anm89|5 years ago|reply
So if you ask: "Was there severe emotional trauma with lasting consequences in the medieval world" and assuming that people 600 years ago were not biologically incapable of having emotional trauma, than yes of course, if we tested some of those people using the procedures and criteria we use today to diagnose PTSD, of course yes, we would conclude that they did have it.
Hearing psychology professionals take tautologically nonsensical questions like this seriously really makes me lose faith in modern psychology.
[+] [-] jonnycomputer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gdubs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mcguire|5 years ago|reply
Or perhaps it's so ubiquitous it's not mentioned. There are many about everyday life that don't appear in the historical record simply because they are so common.
[+] [-] aklemm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] manishsharan|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] irrational|5 years ago|reply
This seems to be the heart of his argument as to why this might be. When we look at the artwork that decorated public buildings in the ancient world (I'm specifically thinking of Egypt and Assyria) we see a lot of torture, warfare, abasement of enemies, etc. I'm trying to imagine going to my local public buildings and seeing scenes of, say, North Koreans being flayed alive carved in stone on the walls. It does seem like we view violence in a different way than they did in the ancient millennia.
[+] [-] drewbeck|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] speeder|5 years ago|reply
I was reading about Black Death, and ended reading also about the Great Famine that happened a bit before it, and the two are attributed to be part of the reason why Chivalrious warfare ended, before these two events, professional soldiers (knights for example) usually died in training accidents than in actual battle...
But the deep changes caused by these two events, caused among other things, the start of a more destructive kind of warfare, where instead of winning by making the enemy retreat, you would win by completely destroying the enemy forces.
I suspect in some periods of history there was less PTSD because war was just less violent.
After Black Death, and increasing since, we got closer and closer to the idea of total war, that ended happening for real in the World Wars.
[+] [-] stared|5 years ago|reply
In this context, the presumption that humans a few hundreds, or thousands, years ago didn't experience PTSD is... strange.