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Comment by sogen | Hacker News Reader

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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