8 ms·

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 ar

by papeda 6y ago

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: (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. (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. 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. The whole thing raises interesting questions about our modern understanding of trauma. I think the most common modern statement on grief is that it's intensely personal and people should never feel that their grieving process is "wrong", at least not for a long time (years?) after the event. That at least seems different than past practice. [1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/642999?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/642999?seq=1

cletus 6y ago
You don't even need to go to the ancient world to see this. A rudimentary look at genealogy will show you that even in the 19th century. If a child under 2 dies, you'll often see reuse of that name for the next child. There were cultural standards, particularly in Europe, around naming children after paternal and maternal grandparents and so forth (such that often you can tell what number a child was by their name if you know the relative's names). Think about that for a second. Let's say you had a child who died at 6 months old. 1-2 years down the track you had another child and you'd use the same name. We have totally different expectations of mortality than a century ago. A child born today in the developed world is incredibly likely to make it to adulthood. It's simply not conceivable than in an era of greater infant mortality that there weren't different attitudes to the death of a child.
- DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
  that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories with something new. Less drastic / and practical examples: Say you went through a really bad breakup and your partner let you down by cheating on you with your best friend. You still love them and really want to those memories gone. You got 2 options: 1) stop listening to favorite songs, no longer visit specific restaurants or pubs, stop doing a sport you did together, 2) replace these memories by doing exactly those things with your new partner. soon you will have forgotten about them. Instead what remains is that activity/place now being your memory and not associated to another person (or the 2 of you).
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    I wouldn't recommend letting your new partner know that you're doing that though.
    - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
      yes would be a very bad idea :-/ there would probably be better examples (dealing with a breakup was in retrospect a terrible use-case to make my point).
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    > that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories Please avoid this oversimplification of human psyche. We are not fruit flies, we are thousands of times more complex than "replacing your bad memories"
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    That's... pretty dumb way of dealing with breakup, and I can't see it reliably working as you describe. Humans are way more complicated than that. What has at least a reasonable chance of working in similar situation - come to peace with whatever happened and simply move on. It doesn't matter anymore. Don't cover bad memories with new shiny ones and pretend those old ones aren't there - of course they are, till your last breath they will be. It really doesn't matter who did what and who hurt who once things are over, it's over. Process things, expose yourself to them (at least for me it works, weird as it may sounds smoking weed and mulling things over and over makes them closed quite effectively in relatively short time - but that's my own unique mindset, no clue why it works like that). They are your emotions after all, part of you. No point trying to act differently. How to know you really processed them? For example meeting your ex won't trigger any stupid emotional reaction. Imagine granny meeting grandpa when they are 80, would they still hold grudges? What would be the point?
king_panic 6y ago
Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.
- Udik 6y ago
  Hm. Think of how you normally try to comfort someone who is grieving about something that is not (in your opinion, at least) of paramount importance. For example, the loss of a sum of money. Would you rather say: "your loss is terrible and only you can understand fully how deep the pain is; savour it and integrate it in your person- it will take years to recover and will eventually become a part of you" or would you rather say "hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year". The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.
  - palimpsests 6y ago
    Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.: “That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.” Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly. When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
    - Udik 6y ago
      > Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune. If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).
agumonkey 6y ago
I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics. Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.
- mantap 6y ago
  At least where I live the only reason someone would be put on a psych ward is because they are a danger to themselves or others.
- rsynnott 6y ago
  Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases. This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.
  - agumonkey 6y ago
    Well at least in this case the patient were interned before.
magicalist 6y ago
FWIW I believe this has become a somewhat outdated view of how people historically dealt with the death of children. It appeals to a sort of historical logic without really being supported by the record. Lazy citation: here are some askhistorians threads on evidence and how scholarship ended up going in this direction https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_did_parents_deal_with_the_high_mortality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_d... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_are_some_good_histories_of_childhood_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_...
seibelj 6y ago
In Ancient Greece a baby wasn’t named for 5 days after birth, so it wasn’t really considered a person until it survived 5 days. I’m sure this helped lessen trauma as many babies would die before this milestone.
quezzle 6y ago
Do you have kids? It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past. I wonder if your opinion is from someone with kids or not.
- hef19898 6y ago
  I think mothers, and fathers, loved children as much or little back then as they do now. That being said, I do belivethat if something like loosing a child is bsaically a daily occurance, shared with family and friends, makes it easier to cope with it. Even if it is just by maybe getting a little numb. As far as PTSD is concerned, I remember a commentary / documentation (I suck at keeping my sources, so...) that went a long these lines: - War was more common, when everybody is kind of traumatized, society copes with it better - soldiers were traumatized, but it seems less so when compared to modern war, which brings me to the last point: - the most horrible war experience back then was battles (sieges, field battles,...), off battle, life for the soldier was as dangerous as a civilian's one. In modern war, the soldiers stress was constant, everywhere and the enemy (artillery, snipers, air craft,...) often invisible, increasing the stress levels a lot I am no expert in psychology, but it does sound logical.
- naravara 6y ago
  >It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past. It doesn't mean they loved their children less. It means they had a different bar before they considered them full-fledged "children." In lots of cultures they don't name kids for a few days or weeks. In pre-modern China, infanticide within the first few days of birth was considered a normal, though regrettable, form of birth control. There's even the story about how Spartans used to leave children who were too sickly to the wolves. You can see this sliding standard in modern times too with the abortion debate. Some evangelicals get VERY intense about the life of the fetus in utero. For some of the more hardcore ones, even very early stage miscarriages get funerals and the zygote gets regarded with all the honors that a child would have been. In their minds, an abortion is infanticide without a doubt. Meanwhile, other people think of it as a routine medical procedure and think the evangelical position is parodic on the level of "Every Sperm is Sacred." But overall, the point isn't that they didn't feel the feelings. It's that they had better ways of processing and working through them.
pjc50 6y ago
I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous? 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.
- ThrowawayR2 6y ago
  > "People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence." 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?
  - pjc50 6y ago
    Homelessness is an effective way of hiding the symptoms at the cost of hiding the whole human from society. How many homeless lives are in the historical record? To the extent that they are referenced at all, they will appear as beggars in the background of some wider historical event. 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.
    - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
      But that goes back to the author's point: some mention of many beaten-to-death veterans would've received mention in ancient works but doesn't. And that's setting aside the idea that beating up a veteran who's primary combat skill was close combat, unlike modern veterans, was something easily done.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> This rarity breeds isolation highly related: the opposite of addiction isnt sobriety, its connectedness. https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y... a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economics, drug addiction, social media, you name it.
- ReactiveJelly 6y ago
  And because we get more done by specializing, everyone has to be as disconnected as we can afford. And although there was always a hidden price on it, now the price is obvious: Friendship is expensive, and your friends also have to pay, for it to work. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender. Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know. Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun. I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.
  - icebraining 6y ago
    That's interesting; I never felt that programming was an isolated job. The offices I worked at always had plenty of socialization, both in interaction for work purposes (with not just other programmers, but also other people on the company and even quite a few clients) and during breaks, lunches, post-work outings, etc. I guess this might be different in a large org with impermeable "silos", where you just talk to your direct teammates and work comes in the form of tickets. I mostly worked in small companies (under 50 people), with little bureaucracy, and specialization is a little less strict.
- valuearb 6y ago
  Pop psychology.
take_a_breath 6y ago
==more families lost children== Today, 15-20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriage. Not so rare. I wonder how many of those parents would have even known they were pregnant prior to modern medicine.
C1sc0cat 6y ago
War was also much less intense and drawn out even up to say the Napoleonic war. If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week
AlexandrB 6y ago
> 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. I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly. In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.
- yonaguska 6y ago
  Don't forget that WW1 was one of the first wide scale wars where it was common to be "blown up", and for some people, several times. Today we know that the actual act of being in a shockwave has long term real physical effects on the brain based on studies on soldiers blown up by IEDs. I wonder how much different that type of trauma is from trauma incurred by witnessing something.
Gupie 6y ago
The 14th century poem "The Pearl" is about the death of the poet's daughter. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-power-of-a-medieval-poem-about-the-death-of-a-child https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-powe...
sharadov 6y ago
You don't have to go back far in time, 1918 my grandfathers on both sides lost entire families to the Spanish flu. And then some more in the wars. My granddad was a survivor, but he was scarred enough, that he exhibited some of the symptoms of PTSD. But, there was a collective loss and people thought in terms of a society. Do we have a social support structure left in this country?
gadders 6y ago
I've been to Egypt a couple of times, and did a trip to the Valley of the Kings. One of the tombs (I forget which) was for a child of a pharoah that had died. The pictures on the wall were of his father the pharoah going round introducing his child to the gods he would meet in the afterlife. I found that pretty moving. Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.
SkyBelow 6y ago
A few other factors at play concerning losing children: (3) More experience. The rate young child died was much higher, so not only were you likely to have other families to lean on, you had a much higher chance of having experienced this growing up or even having lost another child before. (4) Less attachment. Children weren't valued the way they are today. The biggest example I can think of is the social expectations around proper treatment of children, such as the laws protecting children. There was far less social protections around children even just a couple of centuries ago. Laws basically allowed the parents to do as they wish to the child, short of murdering them. Abuse of a child did not spark the same emotional outrage that it does today (see the fate of orphans of the lowest class of society). We did value them more than compared to mammals who have more than one offspring at a time, but nothing near the modern day extent where 'for the children' has becoming a rallying cry strong enough to be worthy of political abuse. (5) Greater expectation. People were faced with it being a far more real possibility. While in today's world I factually know that one of my children may die young from cancer, I don't emotionally consider it a possibility at all. But back then, with infant mortality rates being what they were, one was less likely to view it as an impossibility.
wayoutthere 6y ago
My theory is that modern "combat PTSD" didn't happen widely until barrel rifling enabled artillery and snipers to hit targets from incredible distances. Before barrel rifling, if you weren't actively fighting, you weren't at too much risk of dying from an unseen enemy attack. You could let your guard down and take a rest when you needed to. But if artillery and snipers are on the board, death can come anywhere, any time. Soldiers are in "fight or flight" mode basically all of the time and they never get a break until their deployment is over. But by that point it's hard to turn off, so you end up with a bunch of traumatized soldiers poorly adapted to living in a peacetime society. From what we know about trauma, the more time you spend in "fight or flight" the greater your chances of developing PTSD. This is why guerilla tactics are so effective against a standing army: if you make sure the enemy never feels safe, they will eventually become so traumatized that they leave. People certainly got PTSD -- I'd be surprised if most women of certain eras weren't traumatized given the ever-present threat of rape -- but it was probably limited to the victims of war rather than the combatants.
- RichardCA 6y ago
  Completely unscientific - but anecdotally, the Civil War was the first to have the "modern" template for PTSD. And it was the first with rifles. If you look around for similar info about the War of 1812 and earlier it becomes harder to find. https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY
  - wayoutthere 6y ago
    Yeah, it's just a hypothesis; but based on my own experience with non-combat PTSD it makes sense to me that being unable to shut off the constant hypervigilance in the absence of a threat could easily be a common thread. The American Civil War was the first "modern" war as it made use of a lot of new technology that had been developed in the early industrial revolution, but barrel rifling is probably the most relevant to the experience of an individual soldier (as opposed to railroads, steam ships or the telegraph, each of which revolutionized the strategic dynamics of war).
tathougies 6y ago
Well yes you're mostly right about losing a child. But, > 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. Still exists today. For one thing, the religions that were around then -- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc -- still exist today. For my wife and I, we had comfort with our Catholic grieving traditions, which are mostly the same as a thousand years ago.
coffeeling 6y ago
One interesting thing that pops up on reddit every now and then is that pregnancy going wrong is surprisingly common, yet it's not talked about that way at all - most people talking about it seem surprised that it's actually somewhat common. It's like pregnancy going wrong is reserved for specifically infertile/something people, rather than the dice roll not being 9 wins to 1 loss in the first place.

by papeda 6y ago

cletus 6y ago

You don't even need to go to the ancient world to see this. A rudimentary look at genealogy will show you that even in the 19th century. If a child under 2 dies, you'll often see reuse of that name for the next child. There were cultural standards, particularly in Europe, around naming children after paternal and maternal grandparents and so forth (such that often you can tell what number a child was by their name if you know the relative's names). Think about that for a second. Let's say you had a child who died at 6 months old. 1-2 years down the track you had another child and you'd use the same name. We have totally different expectations of mortality than a century ago. A child born today in the developed world is incredibly likely to make it to adulthood. It's simply not conceivable than in an era of greater infant mortality that there weren't different attitudes to the death of a child.

DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories with something new. Less drastic / and practical examples: Say you went through a really bad breakup and your partner let you down by cheating on you with your best friend. You still love them and really want to those memories gone. You got 2 options: 1) stop listening to favorite songs, no longer visit specific restaurants or pubs, stop doing a sport you did together, 2) replace these memories by doing exactly those things with your new partner. soon you will have forgotten about them. Instead what remains is that activity/place now being your memory and not associated to another person (or the 2 of you).
- SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
  I wouldn't recommend letting your new partner know that you're doing that though.
  - DyslexicAtheist 6y ago
    yes would be a very bad idea :-/ there would probably be better examples (dealing with a breakup was in retrospect a terrible use-case to make my point).
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  > that's actually a pretty effective way for overwriting/replacing your bad memories Please avoid this oversimplification of human psyche. We are not fruit flies, we are thousands of times more complex than "replacing your bad memories"
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  That's... pretty dumb way of dealing with breakup, and I can't see it reliably working as you describe. Humans are way more complicated than that. What has at least a reasonable chance of working in similar situation - come to peace with whatever happened and simply move on. It doesn't matter anymore. Don't cover bad memories with new shiny ones and pretend those old ones aren't there - of course they are, till your last breath they will be. It really doesn't matter who did what and who hurt who once things are over, it's over. Process things, expose yourself to them (at least for me it works, weird as it may sounds smoking weed and mulling things over and over makes them closed quite effectively in relatively short time - but that's my own unique mindset, no clue why it works like that). They are your emotions after all, part of you. No point trying to act differently. How to know you really processed them? For example meeting your ex won't trigger any stupid emotional reaction. Imagine granny meeting grandpa when they are 80, would they still hold grudges? What would be the point?

king_panic 6y ago

Grief is never wrong, only our relationships to grief. This is true of all emotions.

Udik 6y ago
Hm. Think of how you normally try to comfort someone who is grieving about something that is not (in your opinion, at least) of paramount importance. For example, the loss of a sum of money. Would you rather say: "your loss is terrible and only you can understand fully how deep the pain is; savour it and integrate it in your person- it will take years to recover and will eventually become a part of you" or would you rather say "hey, I understand, but it's not such a big deal after all- happened to me as well, you won't care in a year". The first seems to me the way to encourage everlasting trauma. And it seems the common approach today, as a way to show respect for other people's suffering.
- palimpsests 6y ago
  Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. I.e.: “That sounds really hard! I’m sorry to hear that.” Then, just wait! don’t say anything else (yet...). Just BE with the person in however they respond. You don’t need to solve their experience by offering any of the rest — those statements can work later, and it’s important to follow the organicity of their process and not go too quickly. When we are given space, permission, and a safe witness to our feelings, this is one way to facilitate the resolution of trauma — our bodies know how to do this, naturally.
  - Udik 6y ago
    > Clinical experience and research indicates that validation of the person’s felt experience is usually going to lead to more efficacious resolution of their symptoms. There is a difference between validating someone's grief (and there is no better validation than sharing a similar personal experience) and actually encouraging the expression of grief by framing the experience as an exceptionally bad one. The best way to deal with a negative experience is to frame is as a normal occurrence of life, and not as some extraordinary misfortune. If you're an alcoholic at the end of your rope, you don't go to a psychologist who will tell you that he understands your pain because your life is extraordinarily bad; you'll go to the AA where you'll hang out with a lot of people for whom your experience is normal, and yet managed to leave it entirely behind. (As much as it's allowed by the dynamics of addiction, of course).

agumonkey 6y ago

I do believe that modern society regressed on these topics. Another instance is "insanity". Today the standard answer is psychiatry/psychiatric ward.. But there was a documentary about mildly handicapped people being hosted by a group of elders in a big house. And these potential patient, looked happy as a puppy in this environment. Gut feeling level of improvement IMO. Now I think I've read that people accepted handicap that way before .. it was just how life was sometimes, and it seems it was a better answer than stuck in a hospital.

mantap 6y ago
At least where I live the only reason someone would be put on a psych ward is because they are a danger to themselves or others.
rsynnott 6y ago
Mildly mentally handicapped people normally aren't institutionalised today. Long-term/residential psychiatric hospitals are for very severe cases. This feels like a pretty rosy-tinted view of pre-modern institutionalisation, too. A lot of these people would have ended up in workhouses and similar.
- agumonkey 6y ago
  Well at least in this case the patient were interned before.

magicalist 6y ago

FWIW I believe this has become a somewhat outdated view of how people historically dealt with the death of children. It appeals to a sort of historical logic without really being supported by the record. Lazy citation: here are some askhistorians threads on evidence and how scholarship ended up going in this direction https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_did_parents_deal_with_the_high_mortality/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7vbohl/how_d... https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_are_some_good_histories_of_childhood_and/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/41953k/what_...

seibelj 6y ago

In Ancient Greece a baby wasn’t named for 5 days after birth, so it wasn’t really considered a person until it survived 5 days. I’m sure this helped lessen trauma as many babies would die before this milestone.

quezzle 6y ago

Do you have kids? It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past. I wonder if your opinion is from someone with kids or not.

hef19898 6y ago
I think mothers, and fathers, loved children as much or little back then as they do now. That being said, I do belivethat if something like loosing a child is bsaically a daily occurance, shared with family and friends, makes it easier to cope with it. Even if it is just by maybe getting a little numb. As far as PTSD is concerned, I remember a commentary / documentation (I suck at keeping my sources, so...) that went a long these lines: - War was more common, when everybody is kind of traumatized, society copes with it better - soldiers were traumatized, but it seems less so when compared to modern war, which brings me to the last point: - the most horrible war experience back then was battles (sieges, field battles,...), off battle, life for the soldier was as dangerous as a civilian's one. In modern war, the soldiers stress was constant, everywhere and the enemy (artillery, snipers, air craft,...) often invisible, increasing the stress levels a lot I am no expert in psychology, but it does sound logical.
naravara 6y ago
>It’s a very strange idea that somehow mothers loved their children any less in times past. It doesn't mean they loved their children less. It means they had a different bar before they considered them full-fledged "children." In lots of cultures they don't name kids for a few days or weeks. In pre-modern China, infanticide within the first few days of birth was considered a normal, though regrettable, form of birth control. There's even the story about how Spartans used to leave children who were too sickly to the wolves. You can see this sliding standard in modern times too with the abortion debate. Some evangelicals get VERY intense about the life of the fetus in utero. For some of the more hardcore ones, even very early stage miscarriages get funerals and the zygote gets regarded with all the honors that a child would have been. In their minds, an abortion is infanticide without a doubt. Meanwhile, other people think of it as a routine medical procedure and think the evangelical position is parodic on the level of "Every Sperm is Sacred." But overall, the point isn't that they didn't feel the feelings. It's that they had better ways of processing and working through them.

pjc50 6y ago

I would like to raise a frame challenge: what if instead trauma was ubiquitous? 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.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "People would refuse to show PTSD symptoms under the threat of violence." 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?
- pjc50 6y ago
  Homelessness is an effective way of hiding the symptoms at the cost of hiding the whole human from society. How many homeless lives are in the historical record? To the extent that they are referenced at all, they will appear as beggars in the background of some wider historical event. 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.
  - ThrowawayR2 6y ago
    But that goes back to the author's point: some mention of many beaten-to-death veterans would've received mention in ancient works but doesn't. And that's setting aside the idea that beating up a veteran who's primary combat skill was close combat, unlike modern veterans, was something easily done.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> This rarity breeds isolation highly related: the opposite of addiction isnt sobriety, its connectedness. https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_you_know_about_addiction_is_wrong https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y... a large amount of resources are spent reimprinting the fact that people and emotional, irrational animals. ignoring this fact leads to its rediscovery and reexplanation in so many facets of our life: disaster planning and recovery, politics, economics, drug addiction, social media, you name it.

ReactiveJelly 6y ago
And because we get more done by specializing, everyone has to be as disconnected as we can afford. And although there was always a hidden price on it, now the price is obvious: Friendship is expensive, and your friends also have to pay, for it to work. Sometimes I wonder what life would be like in a village where everyone did the same agriculture tasks and I was working together with everyone of the same gender. Even though that's only half of all the people I know, it would be far more programmers than I currently know. Programming isn't traumatic, it's not like war and miscarriage, but it seems like _everyone_ in the working class is isolated, and it sure isn't fun. I imagine farming is more lonely too, now that one person and a tractor can manage so many acres.
- icebraining 6y ago
  That's interesting; I never felt that programming was an isolated job. The offices I worked at always had plenty of socialization, both in interaction for work purposes (with not just other programmers, but also other people on the company and even quite a few clients) and during breaks, lunches, post-work outings, etc. I guess this might be different in a large org with impermeable "silos", where you just talk to your direct teammates and work comes in the form of tickets. I mostly worked in small companies (under 50 people), with little bureaucracy, and specialization is a little less strict.
valuearb 6y ago
Pop psychology.

take_a_breath 6y ago

==more families lost children== Today, 15-20% of all pregnancies are lost to miscarriage. Not so rare. I wonder how many of those parents would have even known they were pregnant prior to modern medicine.

C1sc0cat 6y ago

War was also much less intense and drawn out even up to say the Napoleonic war. If some one had started in the dunes in Flanders and gone through to Waterloo the amount of time in actual combat would be measured in hours - as opposed to D Day when a soldier might have exceed that time well inside the first week

AlexandrB 6y ago

> 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. I don't find the explanations in the article convincing and I think they omit just how much more horrific WWI was than anything that came before. Indeed, WWI started with the kind of positive perception you'd see in previous wars but its intensity, brutality, and scope put those perceptions to rest. New weapons systems like coordinated mass artillery and gas attacks are unprecedented in history and, from all accounts, are a horrific experience even if you survive. And if you do survive, you're likely to be sent back out to face another artillery barrage shortly. In short, I think the analysis in the article has cause and effect backwards. We didn't suddenly realize that warfare was evil thus making PTSD more prevalent. Instead, the experience of a war that left so many of its participants mentally scarred changed the perception of war in society. PTSD led to changing attitudes towards war, not the other way around.

yonaguska 6y ago
Don't forget that WW1 was one of the first wide scale wars where it was common to be "blown up", and for some people, several times. Today we know that the actual act of being in a shockwave has long term real physical effects on the brain based on studies on soldiers blown up by IEDs. I wonder how much different that type of trauma is from trauma incurred by witnessing something.

Gupie 6y ago

The 14th century poem "The Pearl" is about the death of the poet's daughter. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-power-of-a-medieval-poem-about-the-death-of-a-child https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-strange-powe...

sharadov 6y ago

You don't have to go back far in time, 1918 my grandfathers on both sides lost entire families to the Spanish flu. And then some more in the wars. My granddad was a survivor, but he was scarred enough, that he exhibited some of the symptoms of PTSD. But, there was a collective loss and people thought in terms of a society. Do we have a social support structure left in this country?

gadders 6y ago

I've been to Egypt a couple of times, and did a trip to the Valley of the Kings. One of the tombs (I forget which) was for a child of a pharoah that had died. The pictures on the wall were of his father the pharoah going round introducing his child to the gods he would meet in the afterlife. I found that pretty moving. Also, depending on your definition of Ancient, Seneca wrote some essays he felt on the pain of losing his daughter.

SkyBelow 6y ago

A few other factors at play concerning losing children: (3) More experience. The rate young child died was much higher, so not only were you likely to have other families to lean on, you had a much higher chance of having experienced this growing up or even having lost another child before. (4) Less attachment. Children weren't valued the way they are today. The biggest example I can think of is the social expectations around proper treatment of children, such as the laws protecting children. There was far less social protections around children even just a couple of centuries ago. Laws basically allowed the parents to do as they wish to the child, short of murdering them. Abuse of a child did not spark the same emotional outrage that it does today (see the fate of orphans of the lowest class of society). We did value them more than compared to mammals who have more than one offspring at a time, but nothing near the modern day extent where 'for the children' has becoming a rallying cry strong enough to be worthy of political abuse. (5) Greater expectation. People were faced with it being a far more real possibility. While in today's world I factually know that one of my children may die young from cancer, I don't emotionally consider it a possibility at all. But back then, with infant mortality rates being what they were, one was less likely to view it as an impossibility.

wayoutthere 6y ago

My theory is that modern "combat PTSD" didn't happen widely until barrel rifling enabled artillery and snipers to hit targets from incredible distances. Before barrel rifling, if you weren't actively fighting, you weren't at too much risk of dying from an unseen enemy attack. You could let your guard down and take a rest when you needed to. But if artillery and snipers are on the board, death can come anywhere, any time. Soldiers are in "fight or flight" mode basically all of the time and they never get a break until their deployment is over. But by that point it's hard to turn off, so you end up with a bunch of traumatized soldiers poorly adapted to living in a peacetime society. From what we know about trauma, the more time you spend in "fight or flight" the greater your chances of developing PTSD. This is why guerilla tactics are so effective against a standing army: if you make sure the enemy never feels safe, they will eventually become so traumatized that they leave. People certainly got PTSD -- I'd be surprised if most women of certain eras weren't traumatized given the ever-present threat of rape -- but it was probably limited to the victims of war rather than the combatants.

RichardCA 6y ago
Completely unscientific - but anecdotally, the Civil War was the first to have the "modern" template for PTSD. And it was the first with rifles. If you look around for similar info about the War of 1812 and earlier it becomes harder to find. https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY https://youtu.be/6LdG1YQDTSY
- wayoutthere 6y ago
  Yeah, it's just a hypothesis; but based on my own experience with non-combat PTSD it makes sense to me that being unable to shut off the constant hypervigilance in the absence of a threat could easily be a common thread. The American Civil War was the first "modern" war as it made use of a lot of new technology that had been developed in the early industrial revolution, but barrel rifling is probably the most relevant to the experience of an individual soldier (as opposed to railroads, steam ships or the telegraph, each of which revolutionized the strategic dynamics of war).

tathougies 6y ago

Well yes you're mostly right about losing a child. But, > 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. Still exists today. For one thing, the religions that were around then -- Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc -- still exist today. For my wife and I, we had comfort with our Catholic grieving traditions, which are mostly the same as a thousand years ago.

coffeeling 6y ago

One interesting thing that pops up on reddit every now and then is that pregnancy going wrong is surprisingly common, yet it's not talked about that way at all - most people talking about it seem surprised that it's actually somewhat common. It's like pregnancy going wrong is reserved for specifically infertile/something people, rather than the dice roll not being 9 wins to 1 loss in the first place.