Would PTSD be quite common in Imperial Guard regiments?

>Post-Traumatic
There's never a "post" to reach.

Dark Heresy (IIRC might have been a novel) mentions a world where IG vets who had earned enough respect to get a medical discharge, but had gone crazy, retired to planet with a giant medical facility for their care.

That planet was also known for creating a large number of combat servators.

shellshock is just slang for ptsd

Wow thats dark.

That was in one of the Ciaphas Cain novels.

My favourite bit of Black Library was one of the Eisenhorn short stories, about him investigating a spree of Ritual Killings, assuming it's a Chaos Cult. Turns out it's a group of PTSD'd Guard Veterans who got mustered out after a nasty campaign, killing "Chaos Worshippers", and believing they're doing the God-Emperor's work.

He tries to talk them down rather than just wade in and Inquisition at them. It fails and it takes a shitload of Arbites and his Inquisitorial Retinue to put down the resulting firefight.

they don't call it grim dark without reason

>Die for the emperor
>Or just die

had a talk with a friend what happens to guard vets who retire or are discharged and we concluded that it's super rare.

With augmatics most wound that would result in medical discharges instead result in a replaced limb and back to the fight. Mental health discharges exist (I brought up the example), but are likely extremely rare, especially as comissars are allowed to shoot soldiers who won't go back to the fight.

The way we figured it, most guardmen realize that they'll die during their tour, and have become okay with it. The few who live long enough either rise to high ranking positions and serve for a life of potentially centuries, or become instructors at training camps. There are so few that there is more than enough positions.

Big IG recruiting world might have some vets returned to the world to take on local posts after their time, but must wind up wherever it's convenient to drop them off.

This is with the standard caviate that the Imperium is huge and variations exist.

No. Recent medical evidence suggests that blast trauma in and of itself has a number of clear symptoms independently of standard PTSD symptoms. This effect was difficult to identify until recently, as any event capable of inflicting blast trauma damage is inherently able to cause PTSD and PTSD has such a vast range of symptoms, but the sheer prevalence of blast trauma and the specificity of Iraq and Afghanistan combat experiences likely to cause PTSD and the patterns specific to these wars, combined with a vastly improved understanding of psychological and physiological trauma, has enabled research to effectively identify that there are two separate syndromes.

Although they overlap considerably, there is a difference between the impacts of blast and the impacts of PTSD. Blast is more identifiably neurological with some physical traits, whereas most physical or neurological damage from PTSD has a psychological causation.

You guys need to keep up to date with the medical journals.

In a universe as grimdark as 40k, PTSD would be common in everyone.

Common? It's mandatory!

Keep in mind, shell shock was a term coined during the first world war, when psychology was not well understood. They believed that any symptoms of what we would now call PTSD were caused by blast shockwaves affecting the nerves, or cowardice. Given that the official response for cowardice was death by firing squad, whereas the official response for injury was time away from the front in a hospital, many people claimed that injury was causing their symptoms.

I think Sly Marbo has PTSD which caused him to be the psycho he is today

Do you recall which one? I don't remember anything like that, but it has been some time since I read them.

>and have become okay with it.
This is very rarely seen in real life, if ever. A casual acceptance of dying on the battlefield as a matter of course, even in a death obsessed cultures like Imperial Japan, was only ever real in propaganda. Even in Islamic cults that practice suicide bombings its common to use strong opiates and even physical restraints to condition their members for suicide.

When there's no hope of victory or just possibly surviving, the majority of soldiers stop fighting.

you're misunderstanding what I'm saying there.

I'm not saying they expect every battle they fight to be hopeless. In each battle they think they have a real chance of victory and survival.

But even in victory some of them will die. And there will be another battle, and then another battle. They'll be break in between. Time for recreation, months spent in transport and mustering. But then there will be another battle.

Each battle might have only 5-10% fatalities, with the occasional bad one with higher loses, but there will be another battle. Tours are decades long.
So the chances that you survive THIS battle might be high, but the chances of you surviving all of them are low.

Wrong, there were plenty of cultures where the soldiers wanted to die in battle, Viking, Spartan, they actively sought out death by war

Natural selection took its course, now those nations are filled with pussies and cucks.

It's "Missing in Action".

Nice meme history there lad.

Vikings were pirates and raiders. They weren't the horned, bloodmad beserkers hollywood memelords paint them as. There's a reason they almost always targeted largely defenceless targets like monasteries or villages, and the only time they fought was when they couldn't escape fast enough.

The Spartans were warriors, true, but they weren't openly suicidal and aiming to die. The Spartan army was tiny because of how long and gruelling their training was, so they had a VERY strong incentive to not be wasteful with their manpower.

I'll have to check it out again, thanks.

I guess it makes sense for Shell Shock to have more identifiable, physical traits when those suffering it have probably experienced one or more concussions due to explosive shock waves. Not everybody who has PTSD has literally had their head knocked around like that.

>Post Traumatic Euphoria

Depends on how many Imperial Guard regiments are issued AR-15s.

Except the fluff is littered with references to guardsmen being discharged to settle worlds they had conquered. Sorry to you and your friend

I thought of Missing in Action as soon as I saw this thread. Glad to see it already mentioned.

>It remains a sad truth of the Imperium that virtually no veteran ever comes back from fighting its wars intact. Combat alone shreds nerves and shatters bodies. But the horrors of the warp, and of foul xenos forms like the tyranid, steal sanity forever, and leave veterans fearing the shadows, and the night and, sometimes, the nature of their friends and neighbours, for the rest of their lives.

>The guards of the Ninth Sameter Infantry had come home thirteen years before, broke by a savage war against mankind’s arch-enemy and, through their scars and their fear, brought their war back with them.

[...]

>‘Why are they killing?’ Bequin asked me. ‘All these years, in secret ritual?’

>‘I don’t know.’

>‘You do, Eisenhorn. You so do!’

>‘Very well. I can guess. The fellow worker who jokes at the Emperor’s expense and makes your fragile sanity imagine he is tainted with the warp. The rug-maker whose patterns suggest to you the secret encoding of Chaos symbols. The midwife you decide is spawning the offspring of the arch-enemy in the mid-rise maternity hall. The travelling evangelist who seems just too damn fired up to be safe.’

>She looked down at the floor of the land speeder. ‘They see daemons everywhere.’

>‘In everything. In every one. And, so help them, they believe they are doing the Emperor’s work by killing. They trust no one, so they daren’t alert the authorities. They take the eyes, the hands and the tongue… all the organs of communication, any way the arch-enemy might transmit his foul lies. And then they destroy the brain and heart, the organs which common soldier myth declares must harbour daemons.’

Spicy

>Spartan, they actively sought out death by war

>one king being a bitch and running off with a small part of the armed forces = all of Spartha at all times

Mental IIlness is largely defined by the society.
Pathologies and syndromes that aren't par for the course wouldn't be considered mental illness.

warp sickness probably replaced PTSD in the DSM-40k

Goddamn that gave me feels

I recall a black library short story about an administratum agent sent to a pleasure world for maimed/retired imperial servants that had an asylum for guardsmen who are broken but not tainted.

>Vikings were pirates and raiders. They weren't the horned, bloodmad beserkers hollywood memelords paint them as. There's a reason they almost always targeted largely defenceless targets like monasteries or villages, and the only time they fought was when they couldn't escape fast enough.

Yup, in battles where the vikings haven't tipped the scales with tricks/ignored enemy rules of war, they generally get btfo.

> Part of me will always stay, over the hills and far away.

You had to fucking Sharpe me in the feels, user. I'm sorry.

Not to mention Sparta got hilariously BTFO by Rome, but the Romans saw a business chance in letting the poor natives live and keep their culture so that they could essentially use them as living tourist attractions

>and have become okay with it.

youtu.be/O5YpUsDsHmk?t=1m20s

You know, PTSD or not, the average Imperial citizen transplanted to our time and society would come off as an utter lunatic.
>It is better to die for the Emperor than live for yourself
>Blessed are the gunmakers
>Trust not the xenos, the mutant, the heretic
>Faith, Hate, Ignorance
>A logical argument must be dismissed with absolute conviction
Imagine how bad an Imperial with PTSD would become.

The Spartans spent a very long time figuring out how to cultivate this point of view amongst other cultures. They came off as bloodthirsty warriors, sure, and they seemed invested more in omens and the will of the gods to see their victory than anything else, which gave other Greek city-states cause to fear them, but omens were notoriously nebulous and open to interpretation. On more than one occasion, the Spartans refused to make battle because the signs weren't right, or because it was on so-and-so's festival, or whatever, which a lot of people might put down to superstition, but might well have been the Spartans exercising their right to choose their fights when the odds weren't against them.

Being a proud warrior race doesn't mean being stupid. They were still incredibly picky about their fights, and they only picked the fights they were certain they were going to win.

The Imperial Guard does not have this luxury.

Sorry, were against them. You guys knew what I meant.

Source: did my undergrad thesis on Spartan 'warrior culture' and realpolitik.

>which gave other Greek city-states cause to fear them,
I will always love them successfully staring down Phillip II and by extension Alexander The Great with one fucking word.
>"If I invade Laconia you will be utterly destroyed, never to rise again."
>"If."

Gimme the source for this, sounds like a good read.

The real reason Alexander didn't invade them was just that it wasn't worth it. Sparta had nothing to contribute by that point, that was long after their whole warrior culture had decayed into shit. Once they actually tried to fight Alexander shoved his cock down their collective throats, penalized them, and forced them to join the league of corinth

No, they will die before they have the chance to have ptsd, there is no post only death. Even if their tanks and mass numbers win the battle, the commanders will probably kill them anyway or they might stub their toe and die in agony

>I think

That should have been a red flag right there, friendo. Marbo = Rambo. Google is your friend.

>why is this man smiling

The seven mates to his left and right are all undercooked Spam, but he got thrown into a trench with barely a scratch by the concussion. He's smiling because two red-faced sergeants are both about to have aneurysms from repeatedly shouting orders at him - not realising that he is now stone deaf. He thinks his arm might be broken, but these blokes are fit to pop, and that's some pretty funny shit right there. As soon as his legs start working again, he's going to find a nice, comfy cot attended by a pretty nurse who will fall in love with him after hearing his heroic war story.

Grimdark PTS is Pre-Traumatic Stress, and it's not a disorder - it is the manner of things. When there is Only War, soldiers aren't fazed as easily as the poor former greengrocer in OP's pic.

Don't forget how he trolled them later: Well into his campaign (after the battle of Granicus, the biggest battle he was to fight against the Persians), among the other loot he sent back to his country and the Greek city-states that supported him, he also sent the Spartans 300 sets of persian armor with the inscription "Alexander son of Philip and Greeks from the Barbarians who dwell in Asia, minus the Lacedaimonians."

>minus the Lacedaimonians

if you didn't have PTSD you would certainly be the oddball of the group.

>confirmed for never watching Rambo.

>Lacedaimonians
Who?

Im with you too man, phantom menace really was that terrible

That was the demonym for people from Laconia. Sparta was the most powerful polis there

Just made the connection looking at earlier posts, but thank for the reply