Quote Originally Posted by Catullus64 View Post
Got a question that I don't think is exactly about weapons, armour, or tactics, but is definitely related to historical warfare.

I'm looking for insights and/or sources about 'modern' psychological phenomena related to warfare and their existence (or nonexistence) in pre-modern battle. To what extent do you think soldiers in pre-gunpowder periods experienced what we might now call post-traumatic stress? If it did occur in significant numbers, how might the people of those periods have thought about or treated it?

I have a loosely informed picture of how modern ideas of battlefield-related trauma and stress are tied into modern life and the conditions of modern war, but it's just that: loose. I know that formal scholarship into the phenomena is nearly all informed by experience of the World Wars and later. I would appreciate any good writing on this subject (either academic, popular, or amateur). Primary sources are the most welcome of all, even (or perhaps especially) if they don't use modern psychological jargon.
Lindy Beige has a video on it.
Short version is that it was rare in pre-modern times. Randomness seems to be a key element as being attacked by a bear or lion was seen as more stressful than being in battle.

Historically the first war that I am aware of that had large numbers of what we would now call PTSD was the American Civil War which featured long periods in trenches in the latte part of the war.
WWI had “shell shock” which we now consider to be PTSD. Armies learned that rotating troops in and out of the line, keeping comrades together and avoiding keeping troops in extended stays under fire were key elements to controlling the development of shell shock. By WW2 the British army was using tables to work out just how many combat hours a soldier could endure and withdrew soldiers with high number of battle hours from fighting units. With their systems of counting battle hours and keeping social and support structures for soldiers together they were able to get roughly double the number of combat hours out of each soldier than the US Army did with its repple depple system.

If you look back at Ancient warfare
1) There was a much lower degree of randomness.
2) Hours in combat situations were much lower
3) The social/support networks within the units were stronger than their industrial age counterparts.

PTSD obviously did occur, just to a significantly lower degree than it does in modern long distance extended timeframes warfare.