PTSD in Ancient Times/Middle Ages ?

I read recently something about descriptions of PTSD among medieval knights: recurring nightmares, and becoming terrified of the sound of metal banging and scraping. (A shame I can't find the source now)


I saw that on the BBC, too. One of the most famous ancient account of PTSD is Herodotus describing a young hoplite developing psychosomatic blindness.

While death and war were more common in ancient times, I don't think people back then would have grew to consider it normal.
 
I read a book years ago (sorry, I don't remember its name) that dealt with this specific issue in medieval Europe. Judging by existing records of specific human behavior at the time, their conclusion was that almost everybody must have suffered from some degree of PTSD, some people more than others. It was so ubiquitous that PTSD-related behaviour was considered unremarkable, even normal.
 
FWIW there's a strain of thought in psychiatry which holds that the best way to overcome trauma is to confront triggers rather than shying away from them, in which case it would seem that someone in a world with high mortality rates would generally recover more quickly from losing a friend or relative than someone in the modern West would. Which I suppose makes sense: humans evolved in quite punishing circumstances, and would need to be able to cope with stressors with minimal impairment to their overall functioning.
 
Look at the Theater of War project, at

http://www.outsidethewirellc.com/projects/theater-of-war/overview

Ajax and Philocetes, I'm told, look like textbook cases of PTSD. Ajax flies into a rage at a minor thing, ultimately committing suicide out of shame. Philocetes must recover from an injury and is ashamed that he cannot join his comrades in battle.

Bear in mind, too, that Sophocles was a general and Athens had a draft. He, and his audience, and even the actors, would have known bloody hand-to-hand combat firsthand and the effect it has on the mind.

Sorry, but PTSD has not much to do with being sensitive. And many people diagnosed with PTSD come from rich western countries, but that doesn't mean, that it doesn't exist elsewhere.

I've read reports of research into an african country torn by civil war. Noone was somehow desensitized, they simply were traumatized. (Nearly) all of them.

This. When you look at the level of casual brutality in the ancient world, you assume that a ton of people had it, lashed out when they were feeling dreadful and thus created more it, etc. Plus, when you consider the huge amount of marital rape across so many cultures and places, that's another huge swath of the population who are going to be handed a whole mass of scars - at the ceremony they've raised to regard as the start of the apex of their lives, no less! Merely because it was considered a fact of life that wasn't talked about doesn't mean that the ancient world were all tough virile manly men from manly town. Look at the levels of violence that disappointment or disobedience would bring during that period, and tell me that these were calm or balanced people.

Barbara Tuchman's "Distant Mirror" kind of addressed this when she focused on how young so many medieval decision makers were. I think her point was that its not surprising we see the Middle Ages littered with terrible, impulsive decisions, when you realize that many of the people making them were PTSD cases in their late teens and early twenties.
 
Does anyone have some info on PTSD among Muhjahadeen groups such as ISIS or Taliban?

Either ways I wonder how a deep seated belief in the afterlife and its inherent goodness or reward for martyrdom can effect PTSD. I do not know what to make of historical PTSD, I personally have not read extensively on it, but still horrendous things where done in ancient times such as the Neo-Assyrian empire. I however doubt there is mentions of PTSD in that ancient a setting.
 
FWIW there's a strain of thought in psychiatry which holds that the best way to overcome trauma is to confront triggers rather than shying away from them, in which case it would seem that someone in a world with high mortality rates would generally recover more quickly from losing a friend or relative than someone in the modern West would. Which I suppose makes sense: humans evolved in quite punishing circumstances, and would need to be able to cope with stressors with minimal impairment to their overall functioning.

I take it nobody else on this forum believes in that theory.
 
I would have thought that since PTSD is partly caused by being under constant combat stress, there would be less of it in the Middle Ages where battles generally ended within a couple of days (if not hours), and the intervening 'down time' was in the period of months. It would be interesting to see medieval PTSD rates in areas where combat pressure was 'constant' (for example in a siege or a frontier zone e.g. the Arab-Byzantine zone in the 800s).

I suppose you could argue PTSD diagnoses in a few cases in China, e.g. at Gaixia where Xiang Yu (3rd Century BC), surrounded by the Han army, basically snapped after the Han started singing songs of his native land (the origin of the proverb 'Surrounded by Chu songs', which indicates a hopeless situation). Gongsun Zan's killing of his family and burning of his fortress prior to its fall to Yuan Shao in the 190s is another example.

Even further back, it has been theorized that the wanton behaviour of King Zhou of Shang (1000s BC), such as burning people alive in bronze pillars, was not so much propaganda from the dynasty that replaced him, but the symptoms of PTSD from his constant campaigns against the Dongyi peoples.
 
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It's important to remember that people experience psychological conditions differently depending on their cultural context. We might see less PTSD in history simply because we don't know what to look for. Ancient Greek PTSD may not present with the same symptoms as modern western PTSD. A colleague of mine did his Master's Thesis on Ancient PTSD, specifically in Ancient Rome and that was his conclusion. While the disorder is pretty universal, the symptoms associated with it differ slightly based on cultural factors. For example, he attributed a lot of the "ghost stories" from the ancient world to PTSD sufferers freaking out and hallucinating about the people they killed. These culturally-derived symptom differences can make it difficult for scholars to identify PTSD in historical records, but he argued that it was similar enough to make the connection. Some of his points made sense, but in some cases I'm pretty sure he was just scouring the records and slapping the PTSD label on any strange psychological phenomena. Still, it's something to keep in mind.
 

PsihoKekec

Banned
Does anyone have some info on PTSD among Muhjahadeen groups such as ISIS or Taliban?

Either ways I wonder how a deep seated belief in the afterlife and its inherent goodness or reward for martyrdom can effect PTSD. I do not know what to make of historical PTSD, I personally have not read extensively on it, but still horrendous things where done in ancient times such as the Neo-Assyrian empire. I however doubt there is mentions of PTSD in that ancient a setting.
These groups are very hostile to such research and societies from which they recruit the most frown at showing ''unmanly'' behaviour, so data is scarce, but I read an article years ago about PTSD amongst Talibans. With ISIL, I wouldn't be surprised if they straight out executed anyone who exhibited signs of severe PTSD.

http://www.newsweek.com/do-taliban-get-ptsd-68973
 
Yet you still had public gore-ings of POWs and mass torture sessions too boot.

Braveheart anyone?

This happens even in modern times, though the most high-profile case of this is recent history by a "civilized" power would be Imperial Japan. I recall reading that the brutality of their training made Japanese soldiers dissociate to some extent, because really, how else can one do such horrible things?
 
This happens even in modern times, though the most high-profile case of this is recent history by a "civilized" power would be Imperial Japan. I recall reading that the brutality of their training made Japanese soldiers dissociate to some extent, because really, how else can one do such horrible things?

So ancient civs possibly training recruits to be dissociative somehow made it not psychologically damaging see and hear people cooked in brazen bulls?

Or crucify people upside down? What about draw and quartering people?

It seems to me either ancient people were either batshit crazy, or less evolved brain-wise as to successfully dull the subconscious from reeking havoc on the mind through witnessing and participating in these and other similar atrocities.
 
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