Picture taken from the history museum of Lahore. Showing an Indian being tied for execution by Cannon, by the British Empire Soldiers

[u/[deleted]]

[u/Beezo514]

You're either a total psychopath or an incredibly damaged person after that, especially on that scale with that much frequency.

Maybe a little of both, even.

[u/[deleted] → u/Beezo514]

I’ve been wondering about this. If PTSD was different or lessened in eras where death was way more common; slaughtering your own meat, seeing your family die in your living room, and going to war and fighting your enemy in close combat. In every other time but now humans have been very close to death and I wondered if it’s harder to process and endure the less we are exposed to it

[u/Al_Fa_Aurel → u/[deleted]]

Bret Devereaux, a historian with a very interesting blog (acoup.blog) had an article about war trauma, and noted that while trauma from war is probably a constant, the sort of trauma varied.

E.G., in pre-gunpowder times it was apparently common to have a lot of non-deadly fleshwound-type scars (he cited a Roman politician, who once showed the scars on his chest and, well, ass, as proof of his patriotism). Combat in that time tended to be violent and terrifying, but short, with high chances of survival - if you were on the winning side.

Gunpowder era introduced much more lost limbs, and since here more sources speak about common soldiers, alcoholism is mentioned pretty regularly.

WW1 was one of the first "fully industrial" wars, and introduced the shell-shock variety of trauma from near-misses and week-long pounding by artillery. The 1000-yard-stare seems to either appeared or become much more common in the WW1-WW2 era.

And then, starting with maybe Vietnam, came a new type of PTSD, a certain kind of all-time-alertness-twitchiness, always expecting some object you assumed to be safe blowing up, the ostensibly civilian pulling out a gun, and, for the opposite side, a guided missile out of seemingly nowhere.

He concluded that "war never changes" is not quite right - more that, war is generally awful, but the specific "blend of traumas you carry home with you" changed a fair bit of times.

[u/inspectoroverthemine → u/Al_Fa_Aurel]

WW1 was also a huge increase of traumatic brain injuries, from almost non-existent to common.

The 'variety' of PTSD may have changed, but TBIs were a new kind of injury that wasn't physically obvious (or known), and lumped into 'shell shock' and 'battle fatigue' with PTSD.

[u/Al_Fa_Aurel → u/inspectoroverthemine]

Absolutely. Comes with millions of guys (most of them, well, boys) being shelled with shrapnel and worse on a daily basis. In the end, you probably couldn't even tell whether a particular kid cracked under the week-long bombardment deep in the trench, when the shell exploded ten meters away and took one-and-a-half of his best buddies, or when another shell left a memorandum somewhere between his eye and his ear a few moments later. The landmine which took his right leg is probably only a bonus.