Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD? | Hacker News Reader

Did Civil War Soldiers Have PTSD?

smithsonianmag.com

29 pointsrfreytag20 comments

Odds are I'll get downvoted for this.

Did calculus Exist in 3 B.C.?

Did the Earth orbit around the Sun in 2800 B.C.?

Did dinosaurs exist way, way back in the day?

My point being, does discovering something suddenly mean it exists? Perhaps things do not suddenly exist, perhaps they are discovered. Math has always existed. It still exists to this day. Math is discovered. The rules don't change.

PTSD exists. It existed the first time Man A saw Friend B die in conflict. Did it have a name? Did it have a definition in a book? No. Did it exist? Yes. Was it 'discovered?' Recently.

Just like in 100 years, some formal definition of technology addiction will exist. It will be some extension of ADD or whatever. It was always there, it just didn't have a name.

> Math has always existed.

I would say that laws of the Universe that math describes always existed but not math. Math is more of a language to describe something, and you can't say that the word "apple" always existed and was only discovered later. Apples existed long before the word got invented to describe it, though.

> Did Calculus exist in 3 B.C.?

> Math has always existed. It still exists to this day.

> Math is discovered.

I really disagree with Platonism; I had trouble explaining why I had such a visceral reaction against it until I read "The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics"[1], which largely frames the Platonist/Non-Platonist debate as a difference in culture among engineers, mathematicians, and physicists. Of course you're right about the other examples - I think it's pretty uncontroversial to say that there's no crazy dualism / "Does a tree falling in the woods without anyone to hear it still make a sound?" thing going on.

[1] : http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?reload=tru...

This brings to mind the 19y/o with the 1000yd stare I met not long ago. Shell shock isn't just something that happened a long time ago to your uncle who was in 'Nam. It lives with us here and now every day, and it's sad as hell. That kid will never function normally again most likely.

Much of modern combat personnel management (rotations, leave etc) revolves around minimizing the inexorable insanity that comes from exposure to mechanized slaughter.

Food for thought: of late, the 'D' in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is being left off. The reasoning behind this is two fold: to feel nothing substantial after traumatic experiences is more of an indicator of problems and the term 'disorder' is unnecessarily negative

I support this fully and I would like you all to consider it. Ino way am I advocating Political Correctitude. I hate that shit.

Being emotionally affected by traumatic events is normal for humans. Being affected to the point where you're unable to live your life, when minor stressors make you feel as though you're under attack and respond accordingly, where you're abusing drugs and alcohol to get by - that's where it becomes a disorder.

> Ino way am I advocating Political Correctitude. I hate that shit.

There was zero need to include this, it's entirely irrelevant to your point.

No matter how brave you are, spending time killing other people and watching your friends blown to bits will affect you for the rest of your life.

This was covered somewhat in Peaky Blinders (series set in post-WWI Birmingham). One of the secondary characters suffers PTSD (or shell shock, to use the parlance of the time), up to and including psychotic breaks resulting in violence.

Some of them, probably. Did cavemen have insomnia from time to time? Probably.

No, I don't think they did. Nor did their kids have ADD nor their wives depression.

Instead the whole family had moral character flaws... (probably the thinking at the time).

tl;dr

Yes? No?

If you want to get any where in tech your going to have to learn to read much longer document's than a two page magazine article.

Let alone pass the airport test to get any where at work.

"too lazy; didn't click" is what he meant. The question was answered in the headline of the article.

Of course they did. It would be silly to assume differently - the value of this article is not the yes or no answer, but its exploration into how PTSD was perceived (poorly) and how it was treated (again, poorly).

I'd recommend reading the article, it's interesting.

As an aside, it would be interesting to know how pre-agricultural/nomadic hominids dealt with PTSD (and mental illness in general). I would guess that individuals who were no longer able to contribute to the survival of the tribe (or whatever you call a cooperative unit of prehistoric humans) would be culled in one manner or another, but I suspect there were exceptions.

It's really rather a shame that there is very little we can glean about the social customs of our prehistoric ancestors in this regard.

brb, i'm gonna go work on my time machine.

Given what happened in the civil war, it must have mentally broken many people.

But if you live in a society where it is fairly normal for mothers to die giving birth, or for children or friends to die or be maimed for life (and where it must have been fairly common to see corporal punishment of slaves) seeing healthy men die suddenly in horrible ways may have had a smaller effect than it does today.

But of course, outside the battle field, they had it way worse than present-day soldiers (at least those for rich countries such as the USA). No antibiotics, no rescue helicopters, no air-conditioned hospitals, etc. That may well have compensated for that.

What always fascinates me about the Civil War is the sheer number of deaths, and how quickly they mounted. Wikipedia estimates 215,000 deaths in a roughy 4 year period.

The Battle of Gettysburg saw over 4000 dead on each side in a 3 day period. That means, in 3 days, more US soldiers died than in 13 years of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.

People forget that about the American Civil War, quite often.

It's estimated that the Normandy landings on D-Day had 14,000-19,000 casualties total (all sides).

The Battle of Antietam had 22,000 casualties in a single day. Cold Harbor may have had up to 7,000 in a matter of minutes.

At Gettysburg, Pickett's division suffered around 60% casualties in their one charge, including a 100% casualty rate among regimental and brigade commanders, prompting his famous comment to Lee (on being told to prepare his division for a possible Union counterattack) "General Lee, I have no division".

It was a relentlessly and almost unbelievably bloody conflict, and yet both sides found the will to keep it going for four years. What sticks out to me is Grant's comment after the first day at Shiloh (which had been close to a massacre of the Union forces) in response to Sherman, who said to him "Well, Grant, we've had the Devil's own day, haven't we?" Grant simply said "Yes. Lick 'em tomorrow, though."

And he did. In the end it was that stubbornness and willingness to keep pressing on in spite of the horrific casualties that won the war.

Also fascinating: around the same time in China, there was a civil war involving a quasi-Christian cult/reform-movement (the Taiping Rebellion). Over 20 million people, mostly civilians, were killed from 1850-1864. That's an average of almost 4,000 per day, for the entire 15-year duration of the conflict.

Yes.

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