Point made, but the phrasing is poorly done enough to detract from the message. There is a flippancy here that I personally do not find appropriate to the subject, especially coming from a...
An acquaintance of mine who got raped now seems to have a pretty rape-centric view of the world. Whenever she talks to me, it’s to tell me some new fact about rape that she recently learned or thought about. She seems to spend her time planning and debating interesting new governance structures that communities can use to prevent rape. While I think this is healthy (she is using her bad experience to potentially help others), it sometimes seems to go beyond that; I cannot imagine that most of her speculation ends in concrete changes to social norms. In any case, she certainly isn’t doing the “expected” victim behavior of meticulously avoiding all rape-related stimuli.
(She might have gotten off easy: a lot of victims develop rape fetishes. Again, not judging; again, doesn’t fit the usual victims-avoid-stimuli view.)
Point made, but the phrasing is poorly done enough to detract from the message. There is a flippancy here that I personally do not find appropriate to the subject, especially coming from a psychiatrist.
I certainly don't find the flippancy appropriate from a psychiatrist, but I unfortunately am not super surprised to see it -- I think this is unfortunately pretty common, especially among the type...
I certainly don't find the flippancy appropriate from a psychiatrist, but I unfortunately am not super surprised to see it -- I think this is unfortunately pretty common, especially among the type of therapist or psychiatrist who writes articles like this. The most charitable view I can take is that a psychiatrist is more likely to be flippant simply due to having more exposure to these concepts than most people.
Even ignoring the incredible shakiness of the claim that "ancient warriors" didn't get PTSD (which at least he kinda acknowledges), surely the history of shell shock in WW1 -- a war that was...
Ancient warriors apparently didn’t get PTSD. Everything about this claim is still controversial, but the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that they had a narrative in which war was heroic and inspiring, not traumatizing. I think this story is backed up by cross-cultural comparisons and research on depression: thinking you’re supposed to feel traumatized is a risk factor for problematic trauma symptoms.
Even ignoring the incredible shakiness of the claim that "ancient warriors" didn't get PTSD (which at least he kinda acknowledges), surely the history of shell shock in WW1 -- a war that was famously accompanied by an absolute shitton of the narrative that war is heroic and inspiring -- at least partially contradicts this theory. Perhaps one could make the argument that earlier warfare was substantially different in some other ways, but surely the narrative that war is heroic and inspiring did nothing for victims of shell shock in WW1.
I agree that the narrative surrounding war probably has little effect on shell shock, and I think examining differences in how modern vs. ancient wars were fought can strongly support that view....
Perhaps one could make the argument that earlier warfare was substantially different in some other ways, but surely the narrative that war is heroic and inspiring did nothing for victims of shell shock in WW1.
I agree that the narrative surrounding war probably has little effect on shell shock, and I think examining differences in how modern vs. ancient wars were fought can strongly support that view. To wit, WW1 saw a sea change in how war is fought due to the advancement of military technology. These days, we take the use of bombs in war for granted, but even a mere 50 or so years prior to WW1 during the Italian war of independence, targeted aerial bombing was limited to incendiary balloons, which were not at all accurate (nor was their use widespread).
If you look at the experience of a soldier in the 1800s or earlier, the vast majority of their time was spent without imminent threat of death. Sure, there were plenty of challenges - physically punishing marches, hunger, disease, boredom - but none that are acutely traumatizing like impending violence is. Of course, a soldier would be in physical danger during combat, but combat usually had a somewhat limited, predictable script - you encounter other soldiers, and the closer you approach the more danger you are in; you fight, often for as little as an hour, or sometimes as much as a day or two for larger pitched battles; then the battle is over, and this acute danger more or less vanishes. Occasionally, there would be ambushes or assassinations, but in many wars, relative to the average soldier's experience, these would be fairly infrequent.
It's true that even this type of combat could be traumatizing. Susceptibility to trauma is a spectrum, and there are plenty of early historical accounts of trauma in war (here's a good, brief article on the subject). But the warfare of WW1 was especially suited to cause trauma. A soldier on the front was essentially in constant danger from bombing. They could be sitting down to eat, sleeping, playing cards, taking a shit, and at literally any time a bomb could instantaneously kill them - or worse, wound them so grievously that death was inevitable after hours of immense physical suffering. The likelihood of this happening varied according to time and location, but was always high enough to weigh heavily on the soldiers' minds - pretty much every soldier knew of hundreds of others that had been recently killed in this exact way, many of whom were likely acquaintances from training, or from life prior to war.
And unlike the relatively short battles of previous wars, soldiers in WW1 would often be on the front for a week at a time - a week of uninterrupted, 24/7 imminent death. If they survived (and a truly massive number didn't survive), they would be cycled to second-line trenches (in which a similar death was still possible, though somewhat less likely), and then a week in reserve before returning to the front-line trenches. The human psyche is not equipped to handle this level of protracted danger, and despite the lack of detail on this subject in the historical record, it is almost certain that rate of war trauma was higher in WW1 than for almost any previous war due to this factor. Narrative likely has nearly nothing to do with it.
How ancient is this guy talking about here. This much shorter article talks about war PTSD in ancient literature, name dropping and quoting from many sources like Shakespeare's Henry IV, the...
Ancient Mesopotamian tablets from 1300 BC describe soldiers as being visited by “ghosts they faced in battle”. Iceland’s saga of Gisli Súrsson also details “that the hero dreams so frequently of battle scenes that he dreads obscurity and cannot stay alone at night”.
But you're absolutely right, WWI psychological traumas are extremely well recorded and we have a ton of poetry (such as Dolce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen) and writing that juxtaposes the supposed glory that men are expected to enjoy vs the realities of war. Would it not be more fair to say that all along, it is the strong stoic warrior that is the fabricated myth?
He links to this blog post by Bret Deveraux. He seems to focus very keenly on "the medical definition of PTSD" to an extent that I don't think makes sense when looking for something like this in...
He links to this blog post by Bret Deveraux. He seems to focus very keenly on "the medical definition of PTSD" to an extent that I don't think makes sense when looking for something like this in historical literature (and he seems to hold what I would consider to be misconceptions about PTSD as a psychological disorder, including some that this blog post itself argues against!)
Point made, but the phrasing is poorly done enough to detract from the message. There is a flippancy here that I personally do not find appropriate to the subject, especially coming from a psychiatrist.
I certainly don't find the flippancy appropriate from a psychiatrist, but I unfortunately am not super surprised to see it -- I think this is unfortunately pretty common, especially among the type of therapist or psychiatrist who writes articles like this. The most charitable view I can take is that a psychiatrist is more likely to be flippant simply due to having more exposure to these concepts than most people.
...still though. This portion hurts me to read.
Even ignoring the incredible shakiness of the claim that "ancient warriors" didn't get PTSD (which at least he kinda acknowledges), surely the history of shell shock in WW1 -- a war that was famously accompanied by an absolute shitton of the narrative that war is heroic and inspiring -- at least partially contradicts this theory. Perhaps one could make the argument that earlier warfare was substantially different in some other ways, but surely the narrative that war is heroic and inspiring did nothing for victims of shell shock in WW1.
I agree that the narrative surrounding war probably has little effect on shell shock, and I think examining differences in how modern vs. ancient wars were fought can strongly support that view. To wit, WW1 saw a sea change in how war is fought due to the advancement of military technology. These days, we take the use of bombs in war for granted, but even a mere 50 or so years prior to WW1 during the Italian war of independence, targeted aerial bombing was limited to incendiary balloons, which were not at all accurate (nor was their use widespread).
If you look at the experience of a soldier in the 1800s or earlier, the vast majority of their time was spent without imminent threat of death. Sure, there were plenty of challenges - physically punishing marches, hunger, disease, boredom - but none that are acutely traumatizing like impending violence is. Of course, a soldier would be in physical danger during combat, but combat usually had a somewhat limited, predictable script - you encounter other soldiers, and the closer you approach the more danger you are in; you fight, often for as little as an hour, or sometimes as much as a day or two for larger pitched battles; then the battle is over, and this acute danger more or less vanishes. Occasionally, there would be ambushes or assassinations, but in many wars, relative to the average soldier's experience, these would be fairly infrequent.
It's true that even this type of combat could be traumatizing. Susceptibility to trauma is a spectrum, and there are plenty of early historical accounts of trauma in war (here's a good, brief article on the subject). But the warfare of WW1 was especially suited to cause trauma. A soldier on the front was essentially in constant danger from bombing. They could be sitting down to eat, sleeping, playing cards, taking a shit, and at literally any time a bomb could instantaneously kill them - or worse, wound them so grievously that death was inevitable after hours of immense physical suffering. The likelihood of this happening varied according to time and location, but was always high enough to weigh heavily on the soldiers' minds - pretty much every soldier knew of hundreds of others that had been recently killed in this exact way, many of whom were likely acquaintances from training, or from life prior to war.
And unlike the relatively short battles of previous wars, soldiers in WW1 would often be on the front for a week at a time - a week of uninterrupted, 24/7 imminent death. If they survived (and a truly massive number didn't survive), they would be cycled to second-line trenches (in which a similar death was still possible, though somewhat less likely), and then a week in reserve before returning to the front-line trenches. The human psyche is not equipped to handle this level of protracted danger, and despite the lack of detail on this subject in the historical record, it is almost certain that rate of war trauma was higher in WW1 than for almost any previous war due to this factor. Narrative likely has nearly nothing to do with it.
How ancient is this guy talking about here.
This much shorter article talks about war PTSD in ancient literature, name dropping and quoting from many sources like Shakespeare's Henry IV, the Ramayana, Deuteronomy, and also from The Epic of Gilgamesh. (Truth hiding in plain sight: A history of wartime PTSD, Rachel Elkin 2022)
But you're absolutely right, WWI psychological traumas are extremely well recorded and we have a ton of poetry (such as Dolce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen) and writing that juxtaposes the supposed glory that men are expected to enjoy vs the realities of war. Would it not be more fair to say that all along, it is the strong stoic warrior that is the fabricated myth?
He links to this blog post by Bret Deveraux. He seems to focus very keenly on "the medical definition of PTSD" to an extent that I don't think makes sense when looking for something like this in historical literature (and he seems to hold what I would consider to be misconceptions about PTSD as a psychological disorder, including some that this blog post itself argues against!)