I just read an article about Iraq veterans with PTSD and it got me wondering just how new a phenomenon PTSD is. I’ve heard accounts of it from as far back as the Civil War, but was it something that soldiers suffered from in the era before mechanized warfare. Are there in accounts of soldiers in medieval times, or even in ancient Rome, suffering from PTSD.
PTSD is not limited to warfare; any severe enough trauma can cause it. Natural disasters, famines, plagues, fires, etc. So it has been with us forever.
Even in modern times, PTSD isn’t limited to combat veterans, but is experienced by lots of people who’ve suffered a traumatic event. (E.g., victims of assault or rape). So I feel quite sure that some soldiers in ancient times would have experienced it as well. Of course, the term didn’t exist back then, so they might have just said “Man, Gaius seems really jumpy since he got back from the war.”
I don’t personally know of a specific account of soldiers in ancient times suffering PTSD symptoms, but I’d be surprised if no such accounts exist.
The story of the Fisher King comes to mind.
The problem is that it used to be that people just didn’t think in terms of “psychology”. They didn’t go around classifying all the various ways in which people were odd or look for patterns. People who had some odd quirks just had some odd quirks–which you didn’t speak about in public. That would be impolite. Literature which presented characters as realistic, psychological beings probably didn’t begin until the beginning of the 19th century with books like The Red and the Black, Pride and Prejudice, the works of the Marquis de Sade, and so on.
Previous to the late 18th, early 19th century, there just wasn’t a lot of critical analysis of the world of any sort, let alone of psychology.*
- Actually it looks like there may have been in the Islamic world. In which case it would be writings from this area that would be most likely to present a historic presentation of PTSD.
As old as humanity. There were always stories about people who experienced something horrific and “never been the same”.
Now, IIRC it was first officially recognized in ICD-9, so it wasn’t diagnosed as PTSD before 1977. I might be wrong on that point - going from memory.
So, bottom line is that there are thousands upon thousands historical and literary cases that we would nowadays probably classify as PTSD, but at the time they weren’t. So, unless we invent time machine, we can’t say for sure if any distinct case was PTSD, result of head trauma, substance abuse, chroniclers badmouthing somebody, episode of latent phobia or merely schizophrenia… among other possibilities.