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Have a look at world war 1 vets and shell shock.

There are arguments that fighting in the past was mostly movements with occasional violent battles but they did not last long enough to cause the type of mental trauma associated with long term stress.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269035855_Combat_Stress_Disorders_and_Their_Treatment_in_Ancient_Greece

Probably as long as we have had an amygdala we’ve experienced hijack

There have been terms and overlap. Abandoning post. Cowardice. Desertion. When talking about war.

It's been around for awhile.

Evolutionary. If one were experiencing constant threats. Hypervigalence, decreased sleep. Sort of adaptive right? Harmful. But short term kept people alive.

So not modern.

There was a lot more drinking back in the day too so. Self medication of sorts. But the occurance and harm is not new. Just new that we recognize the constellation of symptoms and harm.

Edit think of taste aversion. Weve only come up with common terminology relatively recently. But our innate biological response to becoming food poisoned and subsequent avoidance/consequences of it have been around forever.

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Trauma is a natural phenomenon with a purpose. If a person in our prehistoric past were to live in a particularly dangerous place and time, they would become “traumatized” and become hyper-vigilant to threats. They would constantly be on edge, scanning their environment for threats, and would go into a fight or flight response extremely easily. This would give them a competitive advantage and increase their chances of survival in a dangerous environment.

However, in the modern day and age, most people in developed countries live in relatively safe environments. So when a person is traumatized by some event or series of events they also become hyper vigilant to threats, they also become constantly on edge and go into a fight or flight response extremely easily. However, this way of being is not at all adaptive to the modern, relatively safe world that we live in (quite the contrary).

What about centuries ago? Wouldn’t this trait of lasting effects once the threat gone, be reduced through evolution?

Ancient tribal cultures with would often see schizophrenia induced hallucinations as neutral entities, whereas in modern cultures with people living in cities those hallucinations are hostile entities, so there might be reason to suggest modern life gives us a view of the world where the world is inherently scarier, because hallucinations are often an externalization of the fear we feel inside (to put it simply, the person suffering a hallucination is not afraid because of the hallucination, they're hallucinating because they're afraid, but it's also not that simple). I believe I read the part about hallucinations in tribal cultures vs cities in "The Body Keeps the Score" a very long time ago.

And certainly, modern society is a lot more complex, financial anxiety is really harmful in particular because if we're in that situation we often have no way out (i.e failure of flight or fight). I would be surprised if this didn't make us significantly more prone to PTSD, CPTSD, and disassociative disorders that result from overuse of freeze/submit (but probably not 'cry for help' in this context) states that follow the failure of flight or fight.

I think what we're seeing is it becoming more common as a symptom of modern society, but it's also difficult to say how much of it is additional and how much of it is awareness. This is a field that is rapidly expanding in how much we know as it has had a lot of focus in recent years.

For the specific question, yes there has always been long term effects, perhaps a better but far more difficult question is how frequent were the occurrence of those effects in the past. It is a natural symptom from our evolution, so it must have always been possible for us to experience PTSD at our current stage. We also wouldn't have evolved this response without it being so present - our mind does a good job of protecting us, but modern society seems to be less compatible with this.

I think earlier people just died quicker. A wound from a sword or arrow attack would be lethal centuries ago based on the lack of blood transfusion and medication. The lack of meds likely means you die from wound and blood infection. Added that fact that injured people would likely just left on the battlefields.

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Not necessarily. On the one hand many of them would have already had children by then and on the other those that hadn't probably would have only to compete against mostly other soldiers who probably weren't in much better shape.

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I think trauma affects everyone, no matter when in history. It seems more prevalent now because we have billions more people on the planet so the number of people affected by ptsd is higher and we have a global instantaneous communication system that can spread information - and disinformation - in seconds.

I would speculate that it has always been with us in centuries and millennia past. Here are some writing arguings that we see descriptions of what we now call PTSD in Ancient Greece and Mesopotamia through to the US Civil War and today:

https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-hidden-evidence-of-ptsd-in-the-ancient-world-eb83752b7d4e

https://militaryhistorynow.com/2012/09/17/walking-wounded-ptsd-from-ancient-greece-to-afghanistan/

Evolutionarily speaking, it makes sense. The world was more violent in the past and many men would have been exposed to horrific violence and death of close comrades. Our evolved psychology was the same then as now, so I would guess our response to war was the same too.

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PTSD and other psychological disorders have been around for millennia. As long as humans have! Our classification of it is more modern - the first glossary of descriptions of disorders was published in the 1950s.

And as for long-term effects, humans used to live to an average age of 35. By 1900 this was up to 46. Now it’s 70-75. So I guess it depends on your definition of long term in the ‘has there always been’ question.

Hooray for medical science, and why mental health requires so much more research and investment! Psychologically, we can evolve quick enough!

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This is exactly my thought. PTSD was essential for survival. It's the mechanism for quickly adapting to a hostile environment.

This would explain the evolutionary usefulness of the hypervigilance part, but not the intrusive thinking (nightmares, flashbacks, etc) that are signs of ptsd. Also, there is a tendency to show an overgeneralization of dangerous situations that leads to a lot of avoidance behaviour - that in the long run could have been a negative evolutionary factor

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PTSD has always been a thing but people were less inclined to talk about it in the past as it was seen as weakness. In WW2 it was called ‘Shell Shock’, and contrary to popular belief, was not exclusively a result of being shelled

Source: I’m an ex commando with PTSD who has done a lot of research on the subject

as long as you were more fit to reproduce and your offspring were themselves fit enough to reproduce, evolution will select for it. 25 years of mental anguish versus 14 of relative peace because you were an easy-going type in an extremely dangerous environment.

There's research on resilience and post traumatic growth (I can never remember authors to reference) that finds that people experience an average of 8 traumatic events in their life. Only about 8% of people go on to develop PTSD. Most people are able to process, learn and grow from trauma - so there are long term effects but not necessarily negative. And those with PTSD can recover from their trauma with a bit more specific focused help and resources. I'd imagine that before therapists, that shamans, priests, and the community were pivotal in healing trauma. Trauma has always been around. It's a fact of life.

Do you have a source for the tribal hallucinations being neutral and urban schizophrenia producing hostile ones? Not arguing, just curious i’d be interested in reading that

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I'm sure I read it in The Body Keeps the Score - I have a copy but it's really hard to search so I tried to Google hoping it would be referenced. The closest I got was "Culture shapes the expression of traumatic stress" (from that book) and a few other references that suggests he did focus on culture at some point. I recall distinctly he also mentioned that those suffering hallucinations often became Shamans or similar.

I wish I could say with absolute certainty it was that book, but I'm about 95% there. Whatever I was reading at the time also delved into how hallucinations affect people with sensory issues - auditory hallucinations manifesting as phantom hands speaking sign language, or how people blind from birth never have auditory hallucinations.

While googling to validate what I said, I did come across an interesting article here that might interest someone with a genuine curiosity for this topic. I skimmed over it, work has me overloaded and burned out so even trying to locate stuff like this feels a bit overwhelming right now. I did notice how I can't search that page for the keywords 'fear', 'panic', 'terror', 'scare/y' so I suppose it doesn't focus on those aspects of it.

The Body Keeps the Score is an indispensable resource, so I'd recommend reading it regardless, but unless someone challenges what I'm writing here I probably wont go looking for it specifically (my apologies).

>And as for long-term effects, humans used to live to an average age of 35. By 1900 this was up to 46. Now it’s 70-75.

I totally think most of what you wrote is true, but those numbers are mostly due to high infant mortality

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In terms of warfare, it is documented in some sources from the medieval period but quite rarely and mostly to do with protracted sieges.

There was a huge amount of study done on combat fatigue/ptsd/shellshock during and after both world wars. Medieval and ancient warfare were far less intense, as in you'd probably spend +90% of your time marching, waiting, building and only a tiny fraction actually fighting, you could go on an entire campaign and never actually be in mortal danger more than a few times. Where as in industrialised and modern warfare the level of intensity increased dramatically. Take ww1 as an example, instead of marching for months and having the occasional skirmish or settling in to besiege a town you are now put in a trench and constantly bombarded with machine guns, mortars, long range artillery and raiding at night. You can literally be killed at any time and are in constant mortal danger.

I think the research done around the wars came to the conclusion that after 2 months of this pretty much everyone breaks hence why regular r&r is essential to maintaining an effective fighting force.

There's also the conditioned response training modern armies use which makes a huge problem. In ww2 only half of us army troops actually fired their weapons. No normal person wants to kill, most people are capable of killing in a hand to hand scenario as it's literally him or me and this is a thing our brains can handle. But if you hand somebody a gun and tell them to shoot somebody over there that doesn't know you're there and isn't actively endangering your life, they won't want to do it, even if they do pull that trigger they will often consciously or subconsciously miss. That has been going on since the times of linear warfare.

Now in modern military training you take your soldier, a regular joe, and you run him over and over again through drills and combat simulations where targets pop up and they aim and shoot. You keep doing this until it becomes reactionary and part of their muscle memory. Now you stick joe here in a combat zone and of course all his training takes over, now when an enemy soldier pops around the corner at the end of the street Joe's mental conditioning comes into play and he'll raise that rifle aim and shoot on instinct pretty much skipping the thought process. Now Joe has just killed someone on reflex who may not have even been a direct threat to him when he pulled that trigger. That is something our brains cannot handle well

I believe there is more to selection than surviving. If you want to reproduce, you have to be able to function in a community which is very hard while suffering a mental illness (in a pre-modern community that would be). Also, one would probably not be a preferred mating partner.

I would tend to see it as a disfunctional process that may in some cases be useful but in other cases as a evolutionary disadvantage.

I'd look at it like a mental scar or wound, that sometimes can have a good and healthy outcome and sometimes fester and become infected.

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I note shakespear, who has been dead a bit, describing night terrors and flashbacks.

“O my good lord, why are you thus alone? For what offense have I this fortnight been A banished woman from my Harry’s bed?

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 curst melancholy?

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched, 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 bestirred thee in thy sleep, That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream;

And in thy face strange motions have appeared, Such as we see when men restrain their breath On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these? Some heavy business hath my lord in hand, And I must know it, else he loves me not.” —Henry IV, Part 1 (2.3.39-67)

Shakespear - a woman describing night terrors and PTSD.

“O my good lord, why are you thus alone? For what offense have I this fortnight been A banished woman from my Harry’s bed?

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 curst melancholy?

In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watched, 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 bestirred thee in thy sleep, That beads of sweat have stood upon thy brow Like bubbles in a late-disturbèd stream;

And in thy face strange motions have appeared, Such as we see when men restrain their breath On some great sudden hest. O, what portents are these? Some heavy business hath my lord in hand, And I must know it, else he loves me not.” —Henry IV, Part 1 (2.3.39-67)

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It’s actually kind of logical when you think of it.

In the past, interpersonal violence was direct, “in your face,” close quarters violence that involved sticking a sharp pointed object into the body of a resisting person. It’s not that easy to swing a melee weapon around, particularly for long periods. Also, military bows could be quite taxing to wield as well, with draw weights above 100lb.

In an environment where it’s always opt in, you’re probably right, but historically speaking, sex wasn’t always a choice for everyone.

It’s a misinterpretation of life expectancy stats that absolutely refuses to die.

And being more irritable and showing a faster fight flight reaction helps with forceful intercourse how?

The difference is that most members of the tribe would have similar experiences instead of a ptsd sufferer being mostly unique in the tribe. So ptsd symptoms would be the norm. The nightmares and other symptoms of ptsd would most likely to be attributed to "bad spirits" or whatever the group's religious traditions said it was.

Did you know the word Gay was coined before the word straight? Its true! The western world had a word for an atypical behavior before the typical one. Complex PTSD was coined after "regular" PTSD for the same reason. Complex PTSD is the PTSD you get from long term early life trauma and it has always been ubiquitous- like heterosexuality- so much so that we didn't even think it was it's own medical condition until 1980. We now know that trauma changes the human body on a molecular level. Anyways here's a good read I found that might answer your question better it has documentation of PTSD all the way back to ancient times. It's not too dense https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3181586/

PTSD has always been around but it got much worse starting in WWI. The reason being that you could no longer see who was trying to kill you. Before then you usually saw the enemy. Once long range artillery started you no longer saw where the attack was coming from. Aerial bombing made this worse. So those types of warfare amped up PTSD.

Also in centuries past the idea of going to war and killing people was seen almost as a right of passage, especially for the nobility. Now it is seen as necessary but still wrong to kill someone. That makes it hard for the brain to process the experience

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I’m riffing here - intrusive thoughts could be the work of a second, long term focused system that works to “refresh” the trauma.

With respect to over generalization - that’s simply a natural outcome of a discrimination model working with asymmetric costs. False negatives have higher cost here than false positives.

Interesting thoughts.

Yes I'd agree that overgeneralization sustains avoidance behaviour which short term can be with your cost/benefit reults. On the other hand it hinders more diverse behaviour long term and that would be (or at least could) a negative evolutionary fit. Which would not make it (ptsd) a positive evolutionary trait but just something where it stayed in spite evolutionary pressure.

The intrusive thoughts are often seen as refreshing the actuality of the trauma, but not as purpose but more as a unconscious attempt of integrating the emotional "short-curcuit" of a experience

It's more like: fight/flight/freeze/fawn/faint. Most people can't feel sexually aroused in F mode, but plenty can. And trauma can absolutely be the thing to cross those wires. F mode isn't gonna produce an intimate social connection, but all that adrenaline is going to make it pretty easy to overpower someone and succeed in passing on the genes anyway. It's a pretty effective two-pronged approach. If the safe/social branch of the nervous system fails in a given environment, lizard brain is still there to save the species.

So, that's the male side. On the female side, cPTSD made me hypersexual. Before meds and therapy, I was always ready to go. And I was much more attracted to intimidating strangers than people I felt community with. Add in the fawn response which doesn't just make it hard to say 'no', it also makes it hard to not say 'yes'...

So not only did my body have a high drive for behaviors that would historically have lead to becoming impregnated, it was also driving me towards acquiring novel genes from strange, aggressive men. Thus passing along the PTSD response while combining it with genes more likely to prosper in an environment where the safe/social approach isn't working.

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That’s awesome thanks! Don’t have time to read the full article atm but the abstract supports what you were saying should be really neat, looking forward to it. Cheers!

I don’t think we can forget that community had a tempering effect on the more negative aspects. Everyone around you knew your pain and/or experienced it with you.

I read once that PTSD was less likely to develop in people who were raised in stable homes with two good parents. I can't remember where I read it, so I can't site it for you. But I do believe that 100 years ago, people spent more time outside, working together, and they didn't shut out their spouses and children by looking at their phones. They ate meals at a table and talked to each other. No, not every home was stable, but I think the percentage was higher back when society sort of forced people to figure a way to work things out.

Post-war PTSD seems like the most talked about in today’s environment (and for good reason). The after effects of experiences in war must be tremendous. But I am also interested in PTSD suffered by children living in abusive homes, victims of neglect or rape or assault. These experiences must have also occurred for thousands of years. It’s crazy that our subconscious can hold onto these experiences and affect us in such a profound way, with no evolutionary advantage.

This reply is incredibly insightful. I appreciate it. It’s funny - I am currently reading “The Body Keeps the Score” which prompted me ponder these questions

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Excellent points. Do you think and individual who isn’t afraid of killing, could suffer from PTSD? I know not all Nazis were aggressive but so many were - they didn’t mind killing / assaulting. I’m curious about the PTSD of conforming Nazis or willing Japanese or Vietnamese soldiers.

Great point. While the percentage of PTSD suffers might be the same/similar, our increased population and readily available information has really brought it to a bigger light in the last 100 years.

While I agree with having a stable upbringing creates stable adults, past centuries have also been “it’s nobody’s business what happens behind another’s closed door”. Neighbors, extended family, friends, teachers, etc rarely intervened even if they knew child abuse, spousal abuse, etc was happening. Surely child growing up in abusive homes 1000 years ago would suffer some form of PTSD?

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I agree that modern weapons are probably much more fear inducing than previous weapons like bows and spears. I would feel terrified if there were a group of people with melee instruments on the other side of a stone wall clamoring over to get me. But I know I can take cover from direct fire weapons and will be perfectly safe. I have felt the extreme fear of accurate incoming artillery. After the first experience all the fear responses to all incoming fire were similar. It’s like the feeling of thinking you’re about to win the lottery in reverse. Wondering where the next one falls did the gunner adjust 30 to the left or right or is the effect coming since the last round blew dust and rocks all over you. Terrifying.