Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
On a related note, a while ago I read a little about how ancient families coped with the deaths of their children. My takeaway, pretty much cribbed from this article [1], was that such deaths produced less trauma than they would today because:<p>(1) More families lost children. This lessened the trauma because a family could talk to other nearby families who had experienced the same thing. Those families would also be able to give advice. In contrast, losing a child is extremely rare (in developed countries) today. This rarity breeds isolation, which makes everything worse.<p>(2) 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.<p>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.<p>The whole thing raises interesting questions about our modern understanding of trauma. I think the most common modern statement on grief is that it&#x27;s intensely personal and people should never feel that their grieving process is &quot;wrong&quot;, at least not for a long time (years?) after the event. That at least seems different than past practice.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;642999?seq=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jstor.org&#x2F;stable&#x2F;642999?seq=1</a>