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It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments. While back in the day you got soldiers heart from marching day in day out while eating ra

It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments. While back in the day you got soldiers heart from marching day in day out while eating rats and nothing else. Or being bombarded for more than 24 hours by artillery. Or living through the hell that war is with millions and millions dying around you. Opposed to firing a AR-15 and getting PTSD

Retric 7y ago
It’s not just about direct combat, being constantly alert for danger for long periods is inherently unhealthy. That might focus on IED’s, shelling, snipers, or just starting at the jungle looking for hidden soldiers but war is stressful. And such long term stress can cause seemingly mundane triggers. Even going back to Roman legions you can read accounts where the expectation of future combat causes problems for people in fortifications. PS: One change is explosives can cause brain injuries that are less obvious, but tend to get lumped into the same general category. That really started with WWI, but it’s still a real issue.
- lm28469 7y ago
  It is, but watching an isis video in your comfy air-conditioned London office while being payed the average african annual wage each month is a far cry from war. That's what I was talking about. I completely understand a soldier or a victim of a crime being traumatised.
  - Retric 7y ago
    It’s clearly not the same thing, but these jobs really are stressful. The article’s repeated mentions of taking a break is meaningful in that context because these people can be on edge for long periods. The flight or fight response did not evolve to deal with internet videos. People working in slaughter houses often learn to separate themselves from what’s going on, people that don’t learn that end up quitting. However, these researchers need to stay engaged and actually think through the details. Among law enforcement it is not the jobs that have the highest risk that always have the highest turnover. People dealing with extremely unpleasant images and video for most of their day apparently have on staff psychologists and high burnout.
mftrhu 7y ago
> It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments. Is it? It seems to me that PTSD is just more common than what people once thought, and that, nowadays, it's treated more seriously. It's not like military trauma was unknown "back in the day" - https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp > During World War I, treatment was varied. Soldiers often received only a few days' rest before returning to the war zone. For those with severe or chronic symptoms, treatments focused on daily activity to increase functioning, in hopes of returning them to productive civilian lives. In European hospitals, "hydrotherapy" (water) or "electrotherapy" (shock) were used along with hypnosis. Those soldiers who marched day in, day out, while eating rats, or who were bombarded more than 24 hours by artillery, or who saw millions die around them? They probably brought PTSD back home with them.
jcranmer 7y ago
Seeming to be more common doesn't necessarily mean it is more so. Furthermore, it could well be like a situation with helmets: the introduction of helmets caused head injuries to go up, not down... because people who would have died without with the helmet were now merely injured.
mattmanser 7y ago
I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2. Then after ww2 they figured out how to train soldiers to just react and kill, resulting in 6 in 10 soldiers killing. And those who kill but wouldn't normally are much more susceptible to PTSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology Wikipedia, so buyer beware. Seems like a controversial subject like that I can't help but think that a single edit like this changes the whole tone of the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killology&diff=786142624&oldid=782871604 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killology&diff=78...
- jaclaz 7y ago
  Somehow it must be considered the difference between draft and volunteers and professional soldiers, however. And also background (both cultural and previous civil occupation) when seeing the matter at the international level. The old assumption (right or wrong) was that populations of hunters and shepherds were more familiar with slaying than more agricultural ones. And of course is an entire different thing to kill an animal (let alone a human being) with a knife or a sword (or similar) and - say - pulling a trigger of a firearm from 300 yards away or dropping a bomb/firing a missile from 10,000.
- PorterDuff 7y ago
  "I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2." That's a good observation, and not one that I thought of, but it does bring up the question of organized combat in the other 95% of human history. It would surprise me if a Roman got much choice in the matter from his friendly local Centurion.
friendlybus 7y ago
People are raised in bubble wrap compared to the past. We used to live on less than a dollar a day, surviving plagues, wars & reasonably extreme religious/political doctrines. It was rough. We have the luxury of living in a time and place when getting fat is more likely than starving and the most challenging conflict you might have is being excessively lonely or fighting an ideological fight with a university professor or managing bills and relationships over a pay packet. I doubt you can get PTSD firing an AR-15 but if you take the above person with zero framework for how truly horrible life can be and dump them in a warzone, it gets a bit much. Maybe if we teach our kids how rough life can be, a trade of guaranteed survival of a cow's species and a reasonable quality of life for an individual cow is worth it's price in meat. Are we as humans promised anything better?
- Nasrudith 7y ago
  Have you noticed how frankly fucked up people "used" to those kinds of stress were and are? Many of the ancient barbaric practices are themselves institutionalized trauma modeled as norms. What is the difference between "can't stop your son from being molested by their socially superior tutor and pedestray" but normalization in institutions? To look to it as "strength" itself is a sheltered and deeply irrational delusions and frankly utterly messed up. To make matters worse the whole notion is deeply unoriginal and always wrong and yet it reoccurs. "We know how larger populations of agrarians with their stable but lesser nutrition were beaten by smaller populations of nomadic hunter gatherers and civilization never developed." Oh wait....
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    Yeah regression to the mean of the past would be a bad idea. But integrating knowledge or self-knowledge of the things we have exiled can be useful.

Retric 7y ago

It’s not just about direct combat, being constantly alert for danger for long periods is inherently unhealthy. That might focus on IED’s, shelling, snipers, or just starting at the jungle looking for hidden soldiers but war is stressful. And such long term stress can cause seemingly mundane triggers. Even going back to Roman legions you can read accounts where the expectation of future combat causes problems for people in fortifications. PS: One change is explosives can cause brain injuries that are less obvious, but tend to get lumped into the same general category. That really started with WWI, but it’s still a real issue.

lm28469 7y ago
It is, but watching an isis video in your comfy air-conditioned London office while being payed the average african annual wage each month is a far cry from war. That's what I was talking about. I completely understand a soldier or a victim of a crime being traumatised.
- Retric 7y ago
  It’s clearly not the same thing, but these jobs really are stressful. The article’s repeated mentions of taking a break is meaningful in that context because these people can be on edge for long periods. The flight or fight response did not evolve to deal with internet videos. People working in slaughter houses often learn to separate themselves from what’s going on, people that don’t learn that end up quitting. However, these researchers need to stay engaged and actually think through the details. Among law enforcement it is not the jobs that have the highest risk that always have the highest turnover. People dealing with extremely unpleasant images and video for most of their day apparently have on staff psychologists and high burnout.

mftrhu 7y ago

> It seems that nowadays it is more common to get one of those ailments. Is it? It seems to me that PTSD is just more common than what people once thought, and that, nowadays, it's treated more seriously. It's not like military trauma was unknown "back in the day" - https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp https://www.ptsd.va.gov/understand/what/history_ptsd.asp > During World War I, treatment was varied. Soldiers often received only a few days' rest before returning to the war zone. For those with severe or chronic symptoms, treatments focused on daily activity to increase functioning, in hopes of returning them to productive civilian lives. In European hospitals, "hydrotherapy" (water) or "electrotherapy" (shock) were used along with hypnosis. Those soldiers who marched day in, day out, while eating rats, or who were bombarded more than 24 hours by artillery, or who saw millions die around them? They probably brought PTSD back home with them.

jcranmer 7y ago

Seeming to be more common doesn't necessarily mean it is more so. Furthermore, it could well be like a situation with helmets: the introduction of helmets caused head injuries to go up, not down... because people who would have died without with the helmet were now merely injured.

mattmanser 7y ago

I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2. Then after ww2 they figured out how to train soldiers to just react and kill, resulting in 6 in 10 soldiers killing. And those who kill but wouldn't normally are much more susceptible to PTSD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killology Wikipedia, so buyer beware. Seems like a controversial subject like that I can't help but think that a single edit like this changes the whole tone of the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killology&diff=786142624&oldid=782871604 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Killology&diff=78...

jaclaz 7y ago
Somehow it must be considered the difference between draft and volunteers and professional soldiers, however. And also background (both cultural and previous civil occupation) when seeing the matter at the international level. The old assumption (right or wrong) was that populations of hunters and shepherds were more familiar with slaying than more agricultural ones. And of course is an entire different thing to kill an animal (let alone a human being) with a knife or a sword (or similar) and - say - pulling a trigger of a firearm from 300 yards away or dropping a bomb/firing a missile from 10,000.
PorterDuff 7y ago
"I remember seeing a program that claimed this is because soldiers today are trained to kill against their natural instinct. So traditionally only 20% of soldiers could actually kill, which would explain the low casualty rates in older battles pre-ww2." That's a good observation, and not one that I thought of, but it does bring up the question of organized combat in the other 95% of human history. It would surprise me if a Roman got much choice in the matter from his friendly local Centurion.

friendlybus 7y ago

People are raised in bubble wrap compared to the past. We used to live on less than a dollar a day, surviving plagues, wars & reasonably extreme religious/political doctrines. It was rough. We have the luxury of living in a time and place when getting fat is more likely than starving and the most challenging conflict you might have is being excessively lonely or fighting an ideological fight with a university professor or managing bills and relationships over a pay packet. I doubt you can get PTSD firing an AR-15 but if you take the above person with zero framework for how truly horrible life can be and dump them in a warzone, it gets a bit much. Maybe if we teach our kids how rough life can be, a trade of guaranteed survival of a cow's species and a reasonable quality of life for an individual cow is worth it's price in meat. Are we as humans promised anything better?

Nasrudith 7y ago
Have you noticed how frankly fucked up people "used" to those kinds of stress were and are? Many of the ancient barbaric practices are themselves institutionalized trauma modeled as norms. What is the difference between "can't stop your son from being molested by their socially superior tutor and pedestray" but normalization in institutions? To look to it as "strength" itself is a sheltered and deeply irrational delusions and frankly utterly messed up. To make matters worse the whole notion is deeply unoriginal and always wrong and yet it reoccurs. "We know how larger populations of agrarians with their stable but lesser nutrition were beaten by smaller populations of nomadic hunter gatherers and civilization never developed." Oh wait....
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Yeah regression to the mean of the past would be a bad idea. But integrating knowledge or self-knowledge of the things we have exiled can be useful.