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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general).

Surely the average person back then were confronted to a much more difficult life than the modern average first world country inhabitant, did nobody talk about it ? Did they just plow through it all ? Were they less prone to complain ? It seems like today you can't go more than a week without a "x" gave me ptsd article[0]. I used to be on chans back in the days, and I saw my fair share of isis videos, they're awful there is no doubt about that but I never felt any of what these people are describing, anyone with the same experience ?

[0] https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-york-daily-news-journ...

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We keep inventing new names for old problems. Shell shock (WWI), battle fatigue/combat stress reaction (WWII), Gross Stress Reaction (Korea and Vietnam), and soldier's heart (Civil War) continue a long trend. You can even read descriptions of such problems in the Iliad.

PS: Nostalgia was apparently the term used in the 1700’s.

The other point worth making is one from the article -- people have varying levels of tolerance and recovery ability.

A comment which bounces off one person may well cause serious damage to another.

There's some research indicating that being around people who have shared similar experience matters a lot. Basically, it's not trauma if it happens to a big enough % of people. It's just a normal (if unlucky) life experience.

When the British went and whacked Argentina they found that the soldiers who hopped on a plane and 12hr later were surrounded by people who will never have to make a life and death decision and are complaining about how they "literally got ptsd" from firing a rifle had PTSD type problems at a much higher rate than soldiers who got a 2wk boat ride surrounded by people who had been through the same stuff.

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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

> 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.

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.

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

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=78...

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.

"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.

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?

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....

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.

Playing around on a chan is not the same thing as researching these things for a living.

It's probably a sign of good mental health if someone is disturbed by violent imagery. I am worried about people who aren't disturbed by violent imagery.

Personally, when I was younger I perused a ton of violent and disturbing imagery online. I was curious and I thought I was "tough-minded"!

It turns out that I just had difficulty accessing my emotions. Now I literally begin to tear up watching Netflix shows. I much prefer myself now since I can be emotionally available for the people I care about. I shudder to think what I would be like if I never outgrew my puerile obsession with being a "tough guy".

As for "tough guys" I have noticed how quickly they leave the room when difficult situations arise. I also notice how easy it is for them to alienate people in their lives. I am beginning to wonder if "toughness" is really just an excuse not to grow up.

Toughness is not the same as courage, courage requires you to be emotionally invested in the suffering of others, which often means you will be affected by images of suffering.

> It's probably a sign of good mental health if someone is disturbed by violent imagery. I am worried about people who aren't disturbed by violent imagery.

idk, some people lose their shit at the slightest sight of blood or violence, you can't count on them to save the day when things go south. And I'm not talking about getting robbed at gun point or the like, simply cutting a finger while cooking or breaking a leg while hiking. I saw people get in worst conditions than the victims just at the sight of blood, emergency services had to treat them before the victims.

I wasn't really thinking about toughness in the "tough guy" sense. You can be tough and emotional, I don't see how these are mutually exclusive. ISIS victims' stories hit me way harder than the images.

"I always wonder if people were tougher before, when death, blood, violence were much more common (< 100years ago: famines, wars, diseases, life conditions, crimes in general)."

I actually think this is a fairly unique circumstance in modern days. In this case, these are people who are exposed to daily violence that they cannot do anything about and are asked to mentally analyze the degree of violence and circumstances of this violence. People are being forced to engage with and analyze horrific stuff they have to see for hours a day.

Before this, we saw similar trauma with police investigators tasked with analyzing horrific crimes. The Farming Of Bones covers the long, generational trauma of the Parsely Massacre in Dominican Republic/Haiti before that.

I highly doubt that your exposure to 4chan gore was equivalent to the scale of consistent, hours-a-day exposure of these folks.

Longer ago, if you didn't adapt well to combat, you probably died. A fair percentage of green troops won't shoot to kill, and they suffer fairly high casualty rates.

Anecdotally, it seems to me that my acquaintances who were actual combat veterans in WW II, Korea and Vietnam were much less enthusiastic about the military than those who served in peacetime or were in non-combat roles.

> people were tougher before

Sort of, in exactly the same way that people were "tougher" before the invention of antibiotics and would suffer through, live with, and routinely die from diseases instead of seeking treatment.

What actually happened, of course, is that we started looking at issues like PTSD as real mental health conditions that can be treated and discussed, instead of irrelevant mental issues we were supposed to "get over" or ignore. Basically, your attitude sounds like someone claiming that PTSD doesn't really exist, and people shouldn't claim to have it. And that doesn't seem very informed, honestly.

Now, I know you'll reply that lots of people who claim to have PTSD or other mental health conditions probably don't. Which is true. But the same is true of all sorts of other conditions, and we don't tend to see posts like yours talking about people not being "tough" because they whine senselessly to their doctor for an hydrocodone or Ambien prescription.

It's tough to tease out the causation in mental health epidemiology. Are there more PTSD cases because people are "less tough" as you say? Or are there more PTSD cases because it's more broadly understood by clinicians and patients? Or maybe there are events occurring which are likely to produce more PTSD?

I think it's safe to say there is a mixture of causes, and we should always shy away from a single causal explanation like "tougher before".

Tough in this case equates to traumatized. If you traumatize a child with everyday violence, typically they become violent and inured to seeing violence. Plenty of militaristic societies in the past courted this deliberately, or quasi deliberately (the trauma was referred to as "toughening them up" etc).

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