How did people feel about killing hundreds of years ago compared to now...

Some were even court marshalled and executed.

Unless you've actually fought in a war you can't have any idea what it's like

examples of alexander's ptsd?

And unless you fought in both current and past wars, you better stop with this "muh iraq war was the worst war ever" bullshit

Pretty sure your average Roman in Germania or your average Napoleonic soldier in Spain knew very well what counter-insurgency and constant danger are

You are not under constant stress in melee warfare

But in siege warfare you are
And siege warfare always existed

No, it's a walk in a park. What with all the people showing spears or swords or arrows at your face, and that you are exerting all the strength you posses only to stay alive, usually over a prolonged period of time on a campaign and you watch how people you come to know and regard as friends perish and die one by one, certainly no stress in that,ever

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 cursed melancholy?
In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch'd,
And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars;
Speak terms of manage 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.

- Henry IV, Shakespeare

PTSD has existed as long as war has. It may not have been as apparent a problem to people in past eras where warfare and violence was common, but the trauma of combat is a universal constant.

They had PTSD, but to a lesser extent. War back then was honoured by the population, and conditions were far better.

Alexander was noted to experience changes in personality affecting his judgment and began killing the leaders of his army during his drinking bouts. He was also described as being pathologically suspicious.

Then again, Alexander also seemed to have been bipolar. He thought himself a descendant of the gods and yet went through bouts of depression where he hid himself in his tent for days.

Dude was all around psychologically fucked.

It's not made up, it's over diagnosed in soldiers and underdiagnosed in civilians.

I displayed symptoms of PTSD, except for one major component, which is a specific incident that I kept "reliving" or thinking about all the time. I was nervous, aggressive, paranoid, and had insomnia. After trying about a dozen types of antidepressants, sleeping pills, and hours of banging-my-head-against-a-wall therapy, one doctor finally asked if I got migraines, which I did. He did a CAT scan and, lo and behold, I had 2 TBI's that had never been diagnosed, and were the cause of my symptoms. After treatment (of which involved literally one pill for emergency migraines) I know have none of those symptoms, and know how to live with the short term memory loss. I read a study (don't remember the source unfortunately) recently that suggests that a fair number of PTSD cases in soldiers from OIF/OEF are misdiagnosed brain injuries.

On the flip side
>mother gets t-boned at an intersection
>totals car, she's in the hospital for 2 months, takes another 6 before she can walk without a walker/crutches
>won't leave the house, has problems sleeping and is moody
>Take her for a drive one day after she gets a gift card for a mani/pedi
>she's nervous but does alright until we get to an intersection, then starts crying and shaking
>tell her I think she has PTSD from the wreck
>"No son, your father has PTSD, he was in Vietnam. I'm just a little jumpy, I'll be okay."
People seem to think that only soldiers in combat can get PTSD, and it's simply not true. We need to do a better job of educating the public about it, and quit assuming every soldier who's ever seen combat is a traumatised wreck.

To clarify, I saw plenty of combat and do not suffer from PTSD, my brain is rattled from getting blown up too many times (6).

But nobody's claiming that?

In earlier times not being in war was actually more miserable than being in war. People underestimate how fucking awful the life of a peasant used to be. Starvation and disease keeping population growth in check was normal. A 30 year old peasant probably already lost one or two children, several siblings, his parents, his wife was raped several times by plundering robbers or invaders, he and his family are batteling starvation more or less everyday, etc. Pp. Going to war was actually really, really attractive compared to that, which is also the main reason why there used to be so many wars in the first place.

This is true only to an extent. Knights were probably afforded a modicum of protection by their status, lifelong training and faith, which was repeatedly enforced by the ubiquitous presence of clergy on the battlefield.

People in the ancient world were more accustomed to death and killing than we are, so it didn't have quite the same impact. But there are certainly many examples of soldiers who dealt with mental issues due to stress. Off the top of my head, Herodotus describes a Athenian warrior at the battle of Marathon who went blind with no apparent injuries after observing the death of a fellow combatant. Herodotus also recorded Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae, dismissing some of his troops after determining that because of previous combat stress they would be unable to perform at the level required. Gaius Marius seems to have suffered from flashbacks late in his life. According to Plutarch Marius, having gone into a fit of passion in which he announced a delusion that he was in command of the Mithridatic War, began to act as he would have on the field of battle.

Considering violent death was a stronger possibility back then, becoming hyper-vigilance wasn't so much a drawback as it was in more peaceful times.

The symptoms of PTSD can be found in a lot of historical epics like The Odyssey and An Táin Bó Cúailnge

I read an interesting essay once where the author noted that in these historical stories, the hero is more likely to exhibit symptoms of PTSD if the rules of warfare are somehow violated. For example, when Odysseus recalls the destruction of his ship by Zeus and begins to weep, or when Cú Chulainn faces a series of dishonorable duellists and has what seems to be a mental breakdown

It fits in with the theory that PTSD is more common in modern soldiers because they exist under high threat circumstances constantly

>conditions were far better
The stuff that happens in Mossul today was standard back when siege warfare was standard warfare.

PTSD would have probably just been the norm for most people although folks seemed to get it real bad after the Black Death.

Along with all the reason named here, one should note that wars between countries used to consist of two or three major battles, and then the war was normally over. There was also several months between each battle, and battles often wete over quickly because the side that looked like losing would often quickly flee the field. So yeah, while still very brutal, war was not so constant and intense as it is nowadays, let alone the hellish trench warfare in WW1 and 2.

If killing becomes part of your daily existence you probably become desensitized to it. Also violence was not viewed as much of a taboo as it is today.

Do you actually think that wars in the past were fought like they are today, but just with arrows instead of rifles?
Any commander would avoid battle whenever possible, unless they were absolutely certain they would win or had no other choice. Committing to a battle was always a huge risk because there always existed the chance of your force losing. Which meant that the opponent could do pretty much whatever he wanted for months. Battles were extremely rare and lasted for approximately half a day max in general.

No, I think that risking your life over and over over time fucks up your nerves and causes PTSD. And nice of you to mention how battle lasting half a day tops like it's some sort of picnic. You could die during any second of those conflicts. Have you ever been in a fight at all? Even the one where worst that could happen is to have your nose bloodied seems to last an eternity even when it's over in minutes, tops.

This is a shit thread full of shit responses. This is like watching /k/ talk about melee combat and just spouting memes and disinformation.

I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles. Of course the fear of death is not present, but one thing you do realize is that most of the time you are not engaged in combat, but instead manouvre and try to gain an upper hand by positioning. You are fucking stupid if you think that any soldier has the stamina to stay locked in combat for any long period of time.

Also, as I mentioned, battles were rare, and your average soldier would see like 3 in his lifetime. See this list for some perspective of what wars were like. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hundred_Years'_War_battles

You are literally larping and consider that that experience is comparable to actual war? I hope it's all been a ruse and a bait, I really do.

As a civilian you probably had more reason to get PTSD than as a soldier. As a soldier you fought the battle, but as a civilian you then had to deal with the plundering, raping and murdering invaders. And since people used to have wars basically constantly, nobody had PTSD in the sense that anyone had it, so it was more a normal state of mind.

Only around 10% of combatants in ancient/medieval battles actually fought

>this entire post

And they were the ones that would have been experiencing PTSD. It's not like everyhone who came back from Vietnam or Iraq or WW1 or 2 had PTSD

>as a professional LARPer, let me tell you how battles were, cause I'm an expert
Holy fuck I'm dying

I highly doubt it is, reenactors are fucking cancer.

>that quote
Definitely sounds like PTSD.

But isn't PTSD caused by being shot at, not for killing anyone?

Didn't Thucydides also describe Peloponnesian war vets with PTSD-style symptoms?

>I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles.

They say another big part is we're not giving soldiers enough wind down time together after deployments. Pre-Vietnam US soldiers had months of downtime waiting to be mustered out. This gave them months of time to work through shit with people who they'd gone through it with. Now it's only a day or two before you're back at Dover or wherever.

It's caused by stress. Bad accidents can cause it, having close calls with bullets or bombs can cause it, witnessing the death of someone close can cause it, along with plenty of other things. Soldiers get PTSD from killing others when they kill, or believe their actions caused the death of women or children. Particularly if they were the same age or otherwise reminded them of women and children they know. Few soldiers get PTSD from killing enemies or people they just plain don't care about.

>I practice historical reenactment. I've done battles.
Do you larp as a german or a russian during ww2 battles?

Life itself is a PTSD. Why do you think babies cry? Of course, having the guts of your friend sprayed all over you isn't funny, but come on, without modern sensibility there wouldn't be such "victims" of PTSD. Public torture was common during Middle Age, Ludi were open to children in Rome, and no one was PTSD'd.

desu its been a few centuries since melee combat was the norm. LARPers have taken the scene to that regard.

Nigger you're under constant stress if you have overbearing parents. Different people have different abilities to cope with stress. The mechanism by which people get PTSD isn't fully understood.

Imagine being forced to leave the place where you spent your entire life, given a spear and told that you'll be able to come home when the war ends. You're marched all over, your friends die of sickness and disease, you have no idea when and if you'll fight a battle. Is that not stressful?

What the fuck. Reason brainlets think PTSD is something new is that it used to be called nostalgia, and nostalgia could kill you.

You Un-American commie bastard. You're asking such a nonchalant question about PTSD? You are to be gutted you Osama Bin Laden lover. Outrageous that you ask such a stupid question about our army about our soldiers my soldiers my America my country. Typical lib trash.

I was pretty sure that nostalgia was depression

I choose to believe this post is unironic.

Morale used to be much, much more important in medieval and ancient times. In modern warfare there is this concept of "cannon fodder", where it really doesn't matter if the soldiers on the front line are highly motivated or not, because they are going to die anyway.

Medieval battles were completely different. In medieval battles soldiers were actually able to flee from the battle. If a couple of soldiers just start running away, there is not much you could do about it as the general. You could try to catch them with your cavalry, but that might just endanger your whole position even worse if you pull cavalry out of formation. But now other soldiers see this group that just ran to safety and they might do the same. In modern times fleeing from a battlefield is not really possible because the battle is everywhere. Often battles were decided simply by who starts fleeing first.

So keeping morale up - having soldiers that actually want to fight - was very important. This is also the reason why european armies, despite sometimes already have populations of >10 million, rarely had armies larger than a couple of tenthousands or 100k max. You wouldn't just turn everyone you can into a soldier ("cannon fodder") but only those that can and want to fight. Normal peasants would just drag the moral of the army down and that was a huge disadvantage. This is also why there are so many battles where a heavily outnumbered army still was able to succeed: they had better morals, and the enemy army started fleeing en masse.

This is also why epic generals giving epic speeches before the battle was actually a thing. You wanted your men to be as highly motivated as possible, so you tried firing them up shortly before battle by giving an epic speech and fighting side by side with them.

Ancient battles was more like professional sports teams playing against each other, and not so much like the cannon fodder wars we have today.

Wounds from edged weapons are much worse than small arms fire, can you imagine how much blood there'd be an an ancient battlefield? Sounds like a traumatic experience to me. What's interesting to me is to think about how PTSD would have affected certain societies. Most Greek city States had militias so a pretty huge percentage of people in these societies would have seen combat, so there'd obviously be more PTSD.

Tbh he wasn't a very capable ruler. But alpha dog no doubt.

PTSD is an american thing

What's your experience, by the way? You can dispute my knowledge of the matter any way you like, but do provide some counterarguments that do not attack me as a person.

Neither, not particularly interested in the era. I mostly do stuff like this.

Not him, but I would be curious to hear how you imagine to have someone from 1500s relate his experiences to you here, now?

>my manchild roleplay is just like real life

user please

>Nah, it's bullshit made by Americans to feel like special snowflakes

Are you retarded? Not only soldiers experience PTSD. My close friend is an Iraqi and he had to see and experience all sorts of fucked up shit during the war.

He suffers from PTSD and depression and can hardly do anything most days

Probably completely differently, because I am a history student playing make believe for fun instead of a soldier risking his life out of necessity.

What I intended to convey, is that my experiences in simulating past battles pretty much the only feasible way we have today, and study of the subject in university (as well as my own actual military service) has taught me that 1) battles were rare 2) battles did not take that long on average 3) most of the time a unit in battle is maneuvering and looking for an opportunity to force the enemy into a shitty spot before committing to actual combat. Ergo, a soldier would spend very little time under immediate threat of life, whereas today modern weaponry and they way wars are fought is so different that constant threat is actually a thing in many operations.

I have not claimed to know what war and doing battle is like from the soldier's perspective because reenactment doesn't accurately represent that due to many psychological factors, but just from an observers perspective.

Are you saying that those moments of sheer terror once you do end up in a fight are mitigated that you would have weeks of marching and evading or chasing someone just for the privilege of experiencing another round of pant-shitting fear?

Marching is mainly boring, and fear is most intense when you're waiting for the battle to start. When the action starts, the fear goes away. This is something we studied in the army. The anticipation is what stresses you out, not the fight itself.

Dude, no just no. Studying something is nowhere near as actually living it. And besides, why are you so adamant that waiting to die in 1500s is a walk in a park compared to waiting to die today?

>Dude, no just no. Studying something is nowhere near as actually living it.
For these studies veterans were obviously interviewed, and lots of data has been collected from the Iraq and Afganistan wars. You think war and psychology are not subjects that can be studied?

>waiting to die in 1500s is a walk in a park compared to waiting to die today?
Never did I say that it is a walk in the park. But anyways, these days an artillery strike may come down at any moment, or an airstrike, or a missile. These are things that you cannot foresee, nor do anything about. And these situations may last for years with little to no respite (not counting leaves etc).
In the 1500's the danger was much more observable, and you only participated in a battle maybe a couple of times a year, in extremely turbulent times, if you were a professional soldier. Most of the time was spent in a camp or on the march, as battles were rarely sought out. An existing army is a deterrent. A beaten army is an invitation to fuck up everything it was protecting.

>These are things that you cannot foresee, nor do anything about.

Warfare has always been about luck

>le dude impaling you with his sword from behind while you're fighting another enemy
>le arrow ending up in your head
>le cannonball going straight through your torso

As previously said, insurgencies and asymetrical warfare have always existed
When you werent fighting a pitched battle, you could always be attacked by bandits or butthurt civilians

I seriously doubt that soldiers who fought in the 30 Years War for exemple had easier time than US soldiers in Iraq

>In modern times fleeing from a battlefield is not really possible because the battle is everywhere. Often battles were decided simply by who starts fleeing first.

You're forgetting the part where the majority of losses inflicted upon an army were once the route started. Strength in numbers is everything and these people couldn't run for long enough to escape the winning army just like that. It was a massive gamble taken only once the alternative was real 100% chance of death.

>>le dude impaling you with his sword from behind while you're fighting another enemy
Why would you have your back to the enemy? Sounds like a really inefficient tactic.

Bandits attacking a military force? Sure.

Official stats in France.
It doesn't seem that high, and I don't know why there's a sudden increase...
(there's about 30.000 soldiers in operation around the world)

>soldiers can never be detached in smaller forces when occupying a nation

Of course bandits wouldnt attack a stacked army heading to a battle
But soldiers had also other duties when in enemy lands, like occupying or foraging
And these smaller parties could often be attacked

...

Nope. Check out Christopher Browning. Wehrmacht units committed to shooting unarmed civilians were ravaged by PTSD so badly it became a threat to unit cohesion.

The 30 year war was one of the most fucked up conflicts of all time, notable hundreds of years later for it. It's an outlier, not the norm.

Well,in ww1 it was called shell shock,in the American civil war it was called Soldier's Heart and in the napoleonic era it was called Bullet's wind.
And back then,keep in mind that they whised to die for their country,god or king.

Don't forget the meme that Vietnam soldiers fought 400 days a month thanks to helicopter mobility while WW2 soldiers only fought two days a year

People actually being willing to die for something as nebulous as all that is highly debatable.

Clearly no anti-American bias in this post. Stop spreading blatantly incorrect information, PTSD has always been a thing.

He didn't say it wasn't stressful, he said you aren't under constant stress, which is true. The chances of you dying randomly outside of battle were low. You spent most of your time marching. Soldiers in the trenches were literally never safe, a shell could always land nearby and kill you.

>in the napoleonic era it was called Bullet's wind
The phrase "vent du boulet" as a depiction of the trauma is not that old. During the napoleonic period and even before, it only referred to an artillery problem.
Besides, no one cared about such silly things before WW1. I've read an interesting book about the topic (Les soldats de la honte, Jean Yves Le Naour), and if the phenomenon was known to the soldiers and their families, the medical corp only took it in account around the end of WW1. Remember psychiatry was almost inexistant at that time, let alone in the centuries before.

>what's your experience by the way?
I've done 1 tour in Iraq and 2 in Afghanistan as a Combat Engineer, operating in a Route Clearance capacity, which is a nice way to say drive (or walk in some places) around and look for bombs hidden on the road and ambushes.

I've been in contact plenty of times, and LARPing with blanks is nowhere near the real thing. I know, I've done both. Don't get me wrong, re-enacting is fun, and I always liked doing larger battles, but it's literally just a bunch of history nerds getting together, grilling and throwing back a few, then dressing up and showing normies stuff you think is cool, then at the end of the day you march around a field, make some loud smoke and maybe fall down. I in no way shape or form think I understand what a Union infantryman went through during a battle because I put on my Blues and walk around for a day or two, that would be asinine. It'd be like an airsoft player comparing his experience on the field to mine in the sandbox.

Good point

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_S._Patton_slapping_incidents

desu, I dont know if I feel rage, sorrow or simply empathy, poor guys

This is also immediately after he rants about one of his supporters not backing him and advising him against rebellion. He could be worrying about the coming battles, not reliving past ones.

PTSD doesn't come from killing people, it comes from being shot at or bombed, or more likely the disease and generally shitty conditions of warfare in the case of earlier warfare. If PTSD is more common now it's probably just because war is louder.

would people be forced to kill civilians in early wars? I know they killed/raped etc out of their own volition as long as warfare has been around, but i can't imagine a higher up telling a soilder "you HAVE to kill these non combatants" until relatively recent warfare, maybe around the large scale adoption of guns.

>What's your experience, by the way? You can dispute my knowledge of the matter any way you like, but do provide some counterarguments that do not attack me as a person.
look dude, not even the guy you responded to, but you need some truth

I reespect and like re-enactements, for their historical and recreational value, but you are vastly closer to the experiences of somebody who has never heard of the concept of war than to the experiences of somebody that fought in a war

fucking rome intentionally wiped out entire cities if it needed to be done

Just in a documentarie I watched recently

Some celts stood in a fortress, sorrounded by romans and caesar, and they expelled the woman and the children, so the romans would feed them for humanitarian reasons and lose provisions for that

The roman army left the women and children to slowly starve, right in front of them, between the fortress and the army

Romans were pretty brutal by themselves

That's called Alesia and that's the most famous Roman battle

Its not from killing people but the Greeks had a word for it...don't remember.

It seems that old battles were generally (>muh cannae) more about posturing than today's. Who would run first etc. The ability to kill was something to be proud of, because most men would fail.

"Author of the Civil War Collector's encyclopedia F. A. Lord tells us that after the Batde of Gettysburg, 27,574 muskets were recovered from the battlefield. Of these, nearly 90 percent (twenty-four thousand) were loaded. Twelve thousand of these loaded muskets were found to be loaded more than once, and six thousand of the multiply loaded weapons had from three to ten rounds loaded in the barrel." Why? (Grossman, 1995)

I like the theory that exposure to the idea of killing other people is the most PTSD inducing experience of all. The level of dissociation required fucks the human psyche. Thing is, even with technology, people still kill others up close.

You could explain the multiple loads as retards (or maybe it works i dunno) trying to shoot multiple balls at once.

you are the retard

>people actively trying to kill you doesn't cause stress
are you actually retarded?

Hey, could link some more related reading, if you have any. That's fascinating