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, 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...
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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?
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.
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.