You don't even need to go to the ancient world to see this. A rudimentary look at genealogy will show you that even in the 19th century.

If a child under 2 dies, you'll often see reuse of that name for the next child. There were cultural standards, particularly in Europe, around naming children after paternal and maternal grandparents and so forth (such that often you can tell what number a child was by their name if you know the relative's names).

Think about that for a second. Let's say you had a child who died at 6 months old. 1-2 years down the track you had another child and you'd use the same name.

We have totally different expectations of mortality than a century ago. A child born today in the developed world is incredibly likely to make it to adulthood. It's simply not conceivable than in an era of greater infant mortality that there weren't different attitudes to the death of a child.

My grandmother has nine children. Seven of those survived and two did not. This was very common in the area she lived then. To this day, however only in private moments, she talks about the two that did not make it. The loss of the two children many decades ago still brings her a lot of pain. She gave the name of one of the children that did not survive to a later child, however that never erased the suffering.

I think we should be more kind to our ancestors. Just because they lived in fucked up times, compared to our current standards, does not mean they experienced a different quality of suffering.

> Just because they lived in fucked up times, compared to our current standards, does not mean they experienced a different quality of suffering.

Perhaps it's more about "you can get used to anything." Happiness set-point theory, etc.

If you're always experiencing some low level of pain, then the pain soon stops being distracting. It still has pain qualia, if you focus on it; but those qualia no longer impact your life. You learn to function around/through that pain. It stops having relevance to your brain's decision-making process. It stops being processed consciously.

And someone who has learned to do that, if they experience a set, larger amount of pain (a tooth being extracted, say), will experience less subjective pain relative to someone not already experiencing that low constant underlying pain, because the relative amount of pain they experienced—the pain they haven't learned to ignore, the pain that leaps to conscious attention—will be less for them, than it is for the person who normally experiences no pain at all.

Now take that concept and apply it to mental anguish or guilt/shame. I would expect that it would imply that people who lived in times where everyone had all sorts of reasons to be anguished, and thus were low-level constantly anguished—would end up less likely to get PTSD, simply because there are fewer things in their lives that can truly "pin the needle" of anguish enough to cause PTSD, when the tare on their "enough anguish to rise to conscious attention" scale has been reset higher.

I think you might be onto something. Today's folks, me including, take suffering, be it physical or psychical as something exceptional, the worst of the worst situation in life and will do just about anything to get rid of it. And in many cases we have some ways to help with it.

Compare it to times where you had to simply endure suffering (and everybody suffered somehow), be it headache, badly healed fracture, being gang raped during some war/raid by bandits, seeing your wife/child dying during childbirth and so on. And nowhere to escape to. Apart from alcohol/natural drugs which produced many addicts - drunks were part of many societies since ever and story was often the same as today

This struck me when I was reading up on SIDS and wondering how people could go so long without realizing that, if you put your babies down to sleep wrong, something like 1 in 1000 of them will die.

And then you look at the historical statistics and realize that, depending on your time and place, something like 250-400 in 1000 infants died. And aside from how viscerally terrifying that thought is, it's no wonder you couldn't notice that extra 1 in 1000 until you fixed childhood plagues and nutrition. It was the terrifying scourge of the 80's, but just a drop in the bucket historically.

that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories with something new. Less drastic / and practical examples:

Say you went through a really bad breakup and your partner let you down by cheating on you with your best friend. You still love them and really want to those memories gone. You got 2 options:

1) stop listening to favorite songs, no longer visit specific restaurants or pubs, stop doing a sport you did together,

2) replace these memories by doing exactly those things with your new partner. soon you will have forgotten about them. Instead what remains is that activity/place now being your memory and not associated to another person (or the 2 of you).

That's... pretty dumb way of dealing with breakup, and I can't see it reliably working as you describe. Humans are way more complicated than that.

What has at least a reasonable chance of working in similar situation - come to peace with whatever happened and simply move on. It doesn't matter anymore. Don't cover bad memories with new shiny ones and pretend those old ones aren't there - of course they are, till your last breath they will be.

It really doesn't matter who did what and who hurt who once things are over, it's over. Process things, expose yourself to them (at least for me it works, weird as it may sounds smoking weed and mulling things over and over makes them closed quite effectively in relatively short time - but that's my own unique mindset, no clue why it works like that). They are your emotions after all, part of you. No point trying to act differently.

How to know you really processed them? For example meeting your ex won't trigger any stupid emotional reaction. Imagine granny meeting grandpa when they are 80, would they still hold grudges? What would be the point?

I think I have to at least somewhat agree with GP here. Obviously you need to come to terms with the relationship ending and move on in general, but I think there's some truth to making new memories in these places being beneficial. I would argue it isn't necessarily specific to a partner, however.

I don't frequently meet up with my ex's, but have caught up with them for lunch or other things from time to time. I don't really have any sort of emotional reaction to those - the relationship is over, I've got no desire to get back together with them, etc. And it's easy for me, because I know and accept that who we are now wouldn't work out, and that's why we broke up.

But memories don't always have that same perspective. They're a crystallized point in time, and maybe that point in time is before whatever happened or changed that resulted in the relationship not working out. To me those "ghosts" can be significantly tougher to deal with than interacting with the person in present day. Making more memories in those places doesn't make me forget, but it does help redefine it as just another memory in a long list of them. It gives me options of other things to remember.

I wouldn't recommend letting your new partner know that you're doing that though.

yes would be a very bad idea :-/ there would probably be better examples (dealing with a breakup was in retrospect a terrible use-case to make my point).

> that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories

Please avoid this oversimplification of human psyche.

We are not fruit flies, we are thousands of times more complex than "replacing your bad memories"

This happened to Salvador Dali. His older brother, Salvador died a few months before he was born. I once (a long time ago, sorry I don't have a link) saw a documentary that claimed his fascination with counterfeit art had to do with his feeling like a copy of his brother.

> If a child under 2 dies, you'll often see reuse of that name for the next child.

This is apparently the backstory as to why the musician Richard D James called himself "Aphex Twin"

Also, illness and mortality was far more definitive prior to modern medical breakthroughs.

Prior to world war 2, getting ill from a wide range of highly deadly or incapacitating diseases (polio for example) was quite common and far more fatal then it is today.

The culture around mortality has changed a lot in my opinion.

Also, “highly deadly” included any serious open wound (open leg fracture, for example), stepping into a rusty nail or even getting a serious cold.

I think pneumonia, the flu, tuberculosis and diphtheria killed more people than polio (https://www.ncdemography.org/2014/06/16/mortality-and-cause-... doesn’t even mention it)

Tuberculosis did not go away. World wide it still kills 1.5 million people / year and 25% of the population is infected.

I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous?

It's not fatal and rarely debilitating. It does affect people's happiness and behaviour throughout their lives. It does not leave traces in the bones or DNA. How would we find an un-traumatized person in a world where injury, sickness and death were far more prevalent at all ages?

Much traditional childrearing practice that's supposed to be "character building" (e.g. corporal punishment; Roald Dahl's description of the process is worth reading) looks instead like a form of trauma inoculation. Get the trauma over with early. Bully anyone who shows signs of being negatively affected by the trauma. People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence.

WW1 was in some ways unique in that the West had experienced a long period of peace. There were colonial occupations and thousands of troops dying overseas, mostly of disease, but not in Europe itself.

Edit: see also the comment upthread about "being haunted"; the pre-modern world was what Carl Sagan called the "demon haunted world". If you look at a some religious and spiritual practices as trauma-processing, a connection emerges. Parts of the 60s spiritual revival and Jungianism were trying to do this explicitly.

WW1 was also different for the troops experiencing it because of the technologies involved.

There was a whole discussion here a few months back about how the WW1 battlefield (blasted trees, churned mud, etc) has shaped our expectations of what battlefields should look like. Before that, the battlefield itself was mostly untouched. Shell shock was a new phenomenon for soldiers from WW1 because it was a new experience for soldiers - artillery barrages just hadn't been that intense before.

Ancient hand-to-hand combat would have been horrific. Never mind trying to survive, just actively trying to hack someone else's body up with a sharp tool, when they're right there, would mess you up pretty bad. If, as TFA says, every able-bodied man in your entire society has experienced this, then every able-bodied man is going to be messed up.

But then, if every woman has gone through multiple stillbirths, child deaths, and so on, then everyone is going to be messed up. What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma".

I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards.

Also concussive blast damage was far, far more common from WW1 than in any previous war. The Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) caused by blast damage isn't externally visible, but is responsible for some of the common symptoms of PTSD[1]. We know there are forms of PTSD unrelated to blast-based TBI, but it's quite possible that pre-WWI soliders didn't experience PTSD as much because there weren't as many explosions. Combined with different social views & more traumatic lifestyles the (non-physical injury) trauma of war wouldn't be as great.

Also, surviving a battle injury was far less common before the discovery of antibiotics and the germ theory of disease. Infection from relatively minor wounds caused a much higher death rate. So the surviving soldiers were less likely to have experienced physical trauma and lived long enough to make it into accounts of their behavior afterwards.

[1] https://blastinjuryresearch.amedd.army.mil/assets/docs/newsH...

I'm always dubious about this. "Decimation" was a horrific thing, inflicted on Roman Legions as punishment for cowardice. It meant killing one out of every ten soldiers. So it seems to me that that's the extreme upper bound of casualties - 10%. Anything more and running away to face decimation would improve your odds.

But the survivors might well have trauma from their actions not their injuries. Hacking another human to death is traumatic for normal people. The survivors would also have survivor guilt.

I think you also have to consider the fact that throughout history, the individual outcome of battles for most soldiers has been survival - either you win, flee, or become a prisoner. People did die, for sure, but maybe not as many as we imagine.

I wonder how much video games have do to with this perception? In a video game, you have a Kill-Death ratio, not a Kill-Death-Prisoner-Flee-Serious Injury-Light Injury ratio (I know some games have a more sophisticated model, but still).

Or disease or desertion. The majority of Napoleon's troops in the famous Tufte diagram were not lost in battle. The Boer war similarly lost more to disease than combat.

Yup. I think of the Battle of the Bulge this way as well. It's much easier for Americans to identify with the Battle of the Bulge because we have access to many more dramatizations of it, but it was only a hint of what was going on on the Eastern front!

> What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma". I think you're right - everyone would be traumatized by modern standards.

I suspect that some of the harmful behaviors (we associate with PTSD) weren't socially abhorrent, in past eras.

eg: Societies generally condone some amount of mistreating other people. That particular outlet could have been fully acceptable, when done to marginal and lesser classes.

totally agree. Beating your wife as a method of controlling your PTSD was socially acceptable then. Now, not so much.

It seems to me that death in WW1 and later might be experienced as much more arbitrary. Instead of engaging in hand to hand combat with an enemy they can see, a shell just falls out of the sky and someone happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I suppose there could also be a sense in which, depending on the culture, a death in hand to hand combat might be viewed as glorious in a way that getting shot by a sniper or blown up by artillery wouldn't be.

Yeah I was thinking about the technology as well

WWI had the technology to be profoundly violent. Ok, there were cannons in ships and in the Civil War for example, but I suspect that WWI (and later wars) had a bigger technological dependency.

Technologies that are loud, flashy and destructive: tanks, bombs, machine guns, grenades, etc.

>But then, if every woman has gone through multiple stillbirths, child deaths, and so on, then everyone is going to be messed up. What they'd consider "normal" is what we'd consider as "struggling with deep trauma".

>I think you're right - everyone would be traumatised by modern standards.

But if everybody is traumatized then nobody is, it's the local normal. Sure we can say they were "wrong" but that's just a reflection of our current cultural norms. What is right and wrong or traumatic or not is a matter of cultural norms and social consensus. The reason we give a crap over whether or not people are traumatized is because it makes them "messed up" and affects their ability to function normally in society. If people are able to function normally in society, are not "messed up" according to the people around them and don't consider themselves traumatized are they really traumatized?

It's really easy to sit in an air conditioned office and say the past was horrible but it's only horrible because we have a different frame of reference. For the people who lived it it was just how things are. I think it's kind of paternalistic to say the people of the past were all/mostly traumatized because it's not like they had any other options, the things they had to experience were unavoidable facts of life.

Yes. I think that's the point. No-one commented on it, because no-one considered themselves traumatised. It was normal.

> I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous?

I agree. I think that a society with high infant mortality would (will?) look traumatised (to the extent of seeming alien) to those of us raised with very safe childhoods.

As evidence I would offer "Death without Weeping" by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who spent years working in shanty towns in the 1960s and wrote a book. http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~dperry/Class%20Readings%20Scanne...

> WW1 was in some ways unique in that the West had experienced a long period of peace. There were colonial occupations and thousands of troops dying overseas, mostly of disease, but not in Europe itself.

Yes, also some of the comments to the blog post point out that the experience in WW I was new with prolonged periods of exposure to sudden dangers that emphasized the helplessness of the soldiers (descriptions of artillery bombardments often mention this helplessness). Others have mentioned the effects of concussive injuries and the huge scale of the war thanks to modern logistics. The US civil war (50 years previously) had some of the technological elements and scale of WWI but I don't think anyone in Europe was prepared for what was to come.

> "People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence."

Doesn't the plight of homeless veterans today demonstrate that PTSD and mental illness is not something that can be easily hidden, even under threat of violence?

Homelessness is an effective way of hiding the symptoms at the cost of hiding the whole human from society. How many homeless lives are in the historical record? To the extent that they are referenced at all, they will appear as beggars in the background of some wider historical event.

You can beat symptoms out of someone if you don't care whether they survive the process. Then you have no people with visible symptoms around cluttering up the place.

But that goes back to the author's point: some mention of many beaten-to-death veterans would've received mention in ancient works but doesn't. And that's setting aside the idea that beating up a veteran who's primary combat skill was close combat, unlike modern veterans, was something easily done.

FWIW I believe this has become a somewhat outdated view of how people historically dealt with the death of children. It appeals to a sort of historical logic without really being supported by the record.

Lazy citation: here are some askhistorians threads on evidence and how scholarship ended up going in this direction

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_d...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_...

> This rarity breeds isolation

highly related: the opposite of addiction isnt sobriety, its connectedness.

https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...

a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economics, drug addiction, social media, you name it.

And because we get more done by specializing, everyone has to be as disconnected as we can afford. And although there was always a hidden price on it, now the price is obvious: Friendship is expensive, and your friends also have to pay, for it to work.

Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender.

Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know.

Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun.

I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.

That's interesting; I never felt that programming was an isolated job. The offices I worked at always had plenty of socialization, both in interaction for work purposes (with not just other programmers, but also other people on the company and even quite a few clients) and during breaks, lunches, post-work outings, etc.

I guess this might be different in a large org with impermeable "silos", where you just talk to your direct teammates and work comes in the form of tickets. I mostly worked in small companies (under 50 people), with little bureaucracy, and specialization is a little less strict.

Pop psychology.

> To me, this is very similar to the suggested explanation in the featured article for why war used to cause less PTSD: there was less stigma around war, a much larger chunk of society fought in wars, and there were universal and well-defined rituals for processing the experience.

I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly.

In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.

Don't forget that WW1 was one of the first wide scale wars where it was common to be "blown up", and for some people, several times. Today we know that the actual act of being in a shockwave has long term real physical effects on the brain based on studies on soldiers blown up by IEDs. I wonder how much different that type of trauma is from trauma incurred by witnessing something.

My theory is that modern "combat PTSD" didn't happen widely until barrel rifling enabled artillery and snipers to hit targets from incredible distances.

Before barrel rifling, if you weren't actively fighting, you weren't at too much risk of dying from an unseen enemy attack. You could let your guard down and take a rest when you needed to. But if artillery and snipers are on the board, death can come anywhere, any time. Soldiers are in "fight or flight" mode basically all of the time and they never get a break until their deployment is over. But by that point it's hard to turn off, so you end up with a bunch of traumatized soldiers poorly adapted to living in a peacetime society.

From what we know about trauma, the more time you spend in "fight or flight" the greater your chances of developing PTSD. This is why guerilla tactics are so effective against a standing army: if you make sure the enemy never feels safe, they will eventually become so traumatized that they leave.

People certainly got PTSD -- I'd be surprised if most women of certain eras weren't traumatized given the ever-present threat of rape -- but it was probably limited to the victims of war rather than the combatants.

Completely unscientific - but anecdotally, the Civil War was the first to have the "modern" template for PTSD.

And it was the first with rifles. If you look around for similar info about the War of 1812 and earlier it becomes harder to find.

https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY

Yeah, it's just a hypothesis; but based on my own experience with non-combat PTSD it makes sense to me that being unable to shut off the constant hypervigilance in the absence of a threat could easily be a common thread.

The American Civil War was the first "modern" war as it made use of a lot of new technology that had been developed in the early industrial revolution, but barrel rifling is probably the most relevant to the experience of an individual soldier (as opposed to railroads, steam ships or the telegraph, each of which revolutionized the strategic dynamics of war).

War was also much less intense and drawn out even up to say the Napoleonic war.

If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week

Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.

Hm. Think of how you normally try to comfort someone who is grieving about something that is not (in your opinion, at least) of paramount importance. For example, the loss of a sum of money. Would you rather say:

"your loss is terrible and only you can understand fully how deep the pain is; savour it and integrate it in your person- it will take years to recover and will eventually become a part of you"

or would you rather say

"hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year".

The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.

Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.:

“That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.”

Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly.

When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.

> Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms.

There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune.

If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).

Everybody is different - for some alcoholics it will be incredibly healing in going to see a therapist or psychologist who validates their experience, lets them know that their pain from, for example, a life of abuse, is completely legitimate, and that the drive to seek something that soothed the pain is also legitimate - we are hard wired to avoid discomfort. We live in a society where addiction is demonized and people are ostracized for it. This does not help people to heal. Part of this healing is letting people know they are not "bad" or "wrong" for having these urges.

This in no way implies that the clinician has to dramatize life.

In my professional opinion, that clinician would then be negligent if they did not also (at the right time) advocate for their client to explore healthier forms of self-soothing and self-care, and to deeply and honestly reflect on how alcoholism has affected their life.

While seeing this clinician, this same client might also benefit greatly from regular attendance of a 12-step program (which, unless an explicitly closed group, are populated by people in all stages of recovery: from actively using all the way to decades of sobriety).

The exact opposite of your conclusion is true.

Acknowledging someone's emotion gives them permission to feel it, and eventually let it go. Dismissing someone's emotion is denying them the permission to feel it, and let it go. Feelings we don't allow to be felt are never released.

This is true of PTSD at one bound, and the anxiety someone can feel day-to-day, over what seems like absolutely nothing to the casual observer, at the other.

It's interesting that both you and the other commenter took the second option for a dismissal of the grieving person's emotions. Which is not, and there is no indication in the text that it is one. It does acknowledge the pain (also by explicitly sharing a personal experience) and then proceeds to reframe it into some common occurrence that can be overcome in due time.

I think the keyword here is "common". Negative experiences become especially bad when they're perceived as unique, extraordinary. Framing them as normal facts of life helps dealing with them (think of support groups: they reframe personal experiences that might feel uniquely terrible into normal experiences inside the group).

Yes it's very interesting that two people came to the same conclusion of dismissal when there is no indication of dismissal.. it's almost like there is indication..

Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible. A support group doesn't make a condition more or less common. A support group makes you less alone, which is another way of saying you feel your emotions are validated and youre relationship to your emotion changes in that group. Some people need a support group to change their relationship to an emotion.

Or maybe you have come to identify validation of grief with its sacralization, and you don't accept someone saying at the same time "I understand you, it has happened to me as well" and "it will pass, there is a bigger picture in which this becomes less relevant".

> Commonality does not make negative emotions less terrible.

There is a saying in Italy: "a shared misfortune is half a joy".

There's a recognized therapeutic value in literature. Reading novels doesn't validate your emotions- reading is unidirectional, there is nobody telling you "I understand you" from the pages of a novel. But you get in contact with characters who suffer, confront problems, overcome them or succumb to them. You can see their inner life, and recognize a commonality of human experience.

Conversely, social media are notorious for making people depressed: it can be as unidirectional as reading, but since people tend to show only the positive aspects of their life, it can make you feel your own life is especially bad.

A few other factors at play concerning losing children:

(3) More experience. The rate young child died was much higher, so not only were you likely to have other families to lean on, you had a much higher chance of having experienced this growing up or even having lost another child before.

(4) Less attachment. Children weren't valued the way they are today. The biggest example I can think of is the social expectations around proper treatment of children, such as the laws protecting children. There was far less social protections around children even just a couple of centuries ago. Laws basically allowed the parents to do as they wish to the child, short of murdering them. Abuse of a child did not spark the same emotional outrage that it does today (see the fate of orphans of the lowest class of society). We did value them more than compared to mammals who have more than one offspring at a time, but nothing near the modern day extent where 'for the children' has becoming a rallying cry strong enough to be worthy of political abuse.

(5) Greater expectation. People were faced with it being a far more real possibility. While in today's world I factually know that one of my children may die young from cancer, I don't emotionally consider it a possibility at all. But back then, with infant mortality rates being what they were, one was less likely to view it as an impossibility.

You don't have to go back far in time, 1918 my grandfathers on both sides lost entire families to the Spanish flu. And then some more in the wars. My granddad was a survivor, but he was scarred enough, that he exhibited some of the symptoms of PTSD. But, there was a collective loss and people thought in terms of a society. Do we have a social support structure left in this country?

In Ancient Greece a baby wasn’t named for 5 days after birth, so it wasn’t really considered a person until it survived 5 days. I’m sure this helped lessen trauma as many babies would die before this milestone.

Well yes you're mostly right about losing a child.

But,

> There were established societal and religious ways to deal specifically with the death of a child. Think prescribed ceremonies that grant a form of closure and which pretty much all of your friends and neighbors subscribe to. Nothing like this exists today.

Still exists today. For one thing, the religions that were around then -- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc -- still exist today. For my wife and I, we had comfort with our Catholic grieving traditions, which are mostly the same as a thousand years ago.

One interesting thing that pops up on reddit every now and then is that pregnancy going wrong is surprisingly common, yet it's not talked about that way at all - most people talking about it seem surprised that it's actually somewhat common. It's like pregnancy going wrong is reserved for specifically infertile/something people, rather than the dice roll not being 9 wins to 1 loss in the first place.

I've been to Egypt a couple of times, and did a trip to the Valley of the Kings. One of the tombs (I forget which) was for a child of a pharoah that had died. The pictures on the wall were of his father the pharoah going round introducing his child to the gods he would meet in the afterlife. I found that pretty moving.

Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.

The 14th century poem "The Pearl" is about the death of the poet's daughter.

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-powe...

==more families lost children==

Today, 15-20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriage. Not so rare. I wonder how many of those parents would have even known they were pregnant prior to modern medicine.

I think mothers, and fathers, loved children as much or little back then as they do now. That being said, I do belivethat if something like loosing a child is bsaically a daily occurance, shared with family and friends, makes it easier to cope with it. Even if it is just by maybe getting a little numb.

As far as PTSD is concerned, I remember a commentary / documentation (I suck at keeping my sources, so...) that went a long these lines:

- War was more common, when everybody is kind of traumatized, society copes with it better - soldiers were traumatized, but it seems less so when compared to modern war, which brings me to the last point: - the most horrible war experience back then was battles (sieges, field battles,...), off battle, life for the soldier was as dangerous as a civilian's one. In modern war, the soldiers stress was constant, everywhere and the enemy (artillery, snipers, air craft,...) often invisible, increasing the stress levels a lot

I am no expert in psychology, but it does sound logical.

>It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past.

It doesn't mean they loved their children less. It means they had a different bar before they considered them full-fledged "children." In lots of cultures they don't name kids for a few days or weeks. In pre-modern China, infanticide within the first few days of birth was considered a normal, though regrettable, form of birth control. There's even the story about how Spartans used to leave children who were too sickly to the wolves.

You can see this sliding standard in modern times too with the abortion debate. Some evangelicals get VERY intense about the life of the fetus in utero. For some of the more hardcore ones, even very early stage miscarriages get funerals and the zygote gets regarded with all the honors that a child would have been. In their minds, an abortion is infanticide without a doubt. Meanwhile, other people think of it as a routine medical procedure and think the evangelical position is parodic on the level of "Every Sperm is Sacred."

But overall, the point isn't that they didn't feel the feelings. It's that they had better ways of processing and working through them.

I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics.

Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.

Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases.

This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.

Well at least in this case the patient were interned before.

At least where I live the only reason someone would be put on a psych ward is because they are a danger to themselves or others.