Did PTSD exist in ancient times? Kere there Aztec and Spartan and Persian warriors who witnessed the horrors of war...

Did PTSD exist in ancient times? Kere there Aztec and Spartan and Persian warriors who witnessed the horrors of war, and just sort of became depressed and reclusive, or otherwise mentally messed up?

Woulda, for example, a warrior who was horrified at the sight of his comrades being chopped in half get a panic attack at the sight of a butcher slaughtering an animal? Just to make a sort of correlation to the picture here.

Or were warriors known for any kind of reclusion or depression after experiencing combat?

I would have to assume yes, since people werent much different back then. Is there any documentation, either from ancient times or later, that speaks about this sort of thing?

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youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg
bbc.com/news/health-30957719
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg

Not ancient, but here's some relevant Shakespeare:

Hotspur’s wife, Kate, was complaining about her husband’s regular involvement in mortal combats and his consequent odd behaviour:

O, my good lord, why are you thus alone?

For what offence have I this fortnight been

A banish’d woman from my Harry’s bed?

Tell me, sweet lord, what is’t that takes from thee

Thy stomach, pleasure and thy golden sleep?

Why dost thou bend thine eyes upon the earth,

And start so often when thou sit’st alone?

Why hast thou lost the fresh blood in thy cheeks;

And given my treasures and my rights of thee

To thick-eyed musing and curst melancholy?

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d,

And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars;

Speak terms of manage [horsemanship] to thy bounding steed;

Cry ‘Courage! to the field!’ And thou hast talk’d

Of sallies and retires, of trenches, tents,

Of palisadoes, frontiers, parapets,

Of basilisks, of cannon, culverin,

Of prisoners’ ransom and of soldiers slain,

And all the currents of a heady fight.

Thy spirit within thee hath been so at war,

And thus hath so bestirr’d thee in thy sleep,

That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow

Like bubbles in a late-disturbed stream;

And in thy face strange motions have appear’d,

Such as we see when men restrain their breath

On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these?

Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,

And I must know it, else he loves me not.

I'm sure they did. It would have probably been less of a shock to them though as:
A. There were no explosives, gunpowder etc. War was on a more perceptible/manageable scale for the human mind, usually 1on1 combat.
B. The average person probably grew up a lot more exposed to combat and danger in general, compared to your average Westerner.

I still reckon they had something of the sort though.

I've only read part of it myself, but there's a book called Achilles in Vietnam about just this, the history of battle related PTSD throughout history.

Most definitely.

> "The sorts of symptoms after battle were very clearly what we would call now post-traumatic stress symptoms.
"They described hearing and seeing ghosts talking to them, who would be the ghosts of people they'd killed in battle".

bbc.com/news/health-30957719

I'm 100% certain there were reports of 'friendly stabbing' incidents.

It's not from ancient times but "shell shock" from WW1 is massively well documented and that is before the term PTSD was even invented.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shell_shock

I think people largely perceive those two as the same thing nowadays.

Thanks

I really wish he did more videos citing sources like that.

Sure, I entirely agree with you. It is well recognised, now, that people suffering from "shell shock" after WW1 were in the main suffering from PTSD.

OP asked whether there was evidence and documentation from the past that PTSD was not merely a modern phenomenon and I provided an example.

I doubt ancient people could contrive symptoms without exposure to holly wood movies on vietnam or the invention of mental illness

Hard to say; unlike normal medical illnesses, mental illness is in large part a product of social/environmental conditions (brain chemistry might have some impact, but it's not clear if that exists prior to the traumatic event, is caused by it, or is instead caused by social factors and stigmas related to the trauma). Look up the various culture-bound mental illnesses like Koro, amok, or dhat, which are as real in their effects upon people as PTSD. You can definitely draw analogies to past times, but attempting to understand the past in the context of the present when it comes to psychological phenomena like mental illness is ultimately just speculation; the environment is too different.

It's difficult, as a lot of PTSD in ancient times was written off as cowardice/possession/haunted souls of the slain, etc.

Even in WW1 people were executed as cowards for exhibiting PTSD like symptoms.

The neurological limitations of the human mind were not well understood, and stoicism bordering on sociopathy was regularly admired and romanticized.

Pic related. It's a man who romanticized war until his dying days and would have certainly regarded PTSD as cowardice.

Mental illnesses are a Jew meme to sell pharmaceutical drugs. There is no such thing, both in the present and past.

So what do the drugs contain? What are they making us do?

Why is it the people who most believe this sort of thing clearly need psychiatric help the most? I don't know of anyone who believes in these grand conspiracies who doesn't seem to suffer from at least one metal illness.

PTSD often develops after a long period of constant stress, like months of constant bombardements and shootings. Since war in the old days was noting like that, PTSD was not as common for soldiers like it is today. In the past it would have been rare to be in a non stop, 4 year long neverending battle.
This does not mean PTSD didn't exist back then, it just means modern soldiers are more likely to develop PTSD.

>invention of mental illness

Well memed, friend.

Not exactly a historical source, but the Japanese Tale of the Heike mentions a few seasoned warriors who became unable to fight when confronted with certain events. I remember one who I think had seen his young son killed in the battlefield, and froze up when he saw that an enemy he later defeated was a kid the same age as his deceased son. He went on to retire from the military by entering monasticism, and apparently managed to find peace later on.
Again not 100% historical, but certain figures in Romance of the Three Kingdoms developed progressively worse habits of violence as they went on. I don't remember who it was, but for example there was a general of Wu who basically made it a habit to personally kill random civilians each time.
I also remember some Crusade anecdotes about returning knights who had been in the thick of battle, and who would flip their shit if when they heard metal clangs or other similar loud sounds. Also one Crusader saying or writing something like (as another user put it) "You weren't there, man! You can't understand it!" when questioned rather smugly by some other guy about some aspect of combat.

It's also pretty much guaranteed that many who had seen or perpetrated violent acts more than once would develop some kind of disorder afterwards, slight or heavy, whether this counts as PTSD or not. Anecdotes about the guilt and the symptoms of guilt of some rulers, murderers and executioners exist, it would also be the case for many soldiers.

Top laff

Ptsd is not an illness, just a haphazard compilation of symptoms and spurious explanations that was invented so American veterans could be used as guinea pigs for a new class of drugs, designed to alter the definition of 'healthy' and increase the number of people in need of medication. Psychiatric medicine is a million miles from the scientific rigor of legitimate medicine.

>amok

I once put myself into an Amok state.
Scary as fuck.

Yeah. Okay man whatever you say. And I assume paranoid schizophrenics, which you most likely are, are a jewish lie too?

Schizophrenia is a neurological disorder with psychological manifestations. PTSD is a random assortment of psychological phenomena with no material basis. Learn to segregate things properly.

People weren't in the field for any longer than 2-3 days with ancient warfare, the human mind can take fucked up shit just not for long

>implying the Macedonians didn't go on a 12 year campaign with Alexander

modern humans are just massive pussies

Yeah but they didn't actually fight for more than a couple hours to about 3 days, 3 days being the longest
You see PTSD a lot today because you're essentially in a high stress environment for weeks at a time

>not believing in mental illness makes you mentally illed

This is what mentally illed faggots believe

A few days or a few bad battles is enough to cause PTSD, especially when you consider how directly confronting ancient combat was.

Then you have sieges which could be literal hell for both sides.

Yes. Believing in far reaching global conspiracies to create medicine to control people starting 100 years ago makes you mentally ill. Believing the ebul jews are out to get you makes you mentally ill. Creating paranoid delusions based on zero evidence makes you mentally ill. Believing the rest of world is insane but you are perfectly sane makes you mentally ill. Sorry you had to learn this way.

While I agree that PTSD is due to prolonged periods in a high stress environment, a Roman legion could face similar high stress environments. Imagine being a Roman soldier marching across Germania. Dark Forests, occasional skirmishes, especially at night, and at times dismembered Roman corpses. Couple that with battles that, if large enough, could last all day, terrible food, pillaging, and the up close and personal nature of battle, a soldier could easily suffer from PTSD.

Mental illness exists, of course. Because it is defined behaviourally. The problem is that people are not encouraged to be true to themselves.

If you have a cold, of course you want to get rid of it.

But if you are a depressive person, is that the same thing?

There is a sort of sickening underlying problem with the mental health industry, which is the idea that it is minds that go wrong, and not the world that IS wrong.

I mean, you PTSD from seeing war. Okay, but war really exists, whether you see it or not! We are being told that if we really saw reality, we would become mentally ill.

In the end, only a pseudo-Christian message makes any sense: We are in enemy territory. Who knows how we might react?