Posted on 01/23/2015 7:44:38 PM PST by Steelfish
23 January 2015
Post-Traumatic Stress 'Evident In 1300BC' By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website
Evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder can be traced back to 1300BC - much earlier than previously thought - say researchers. The team at Anglia Ruskin University analysed translations from ancient Iraq or Mesopotamia. Accounts of soldiers being visited by "ghosts they faced in battle" fitted with a modern diagnosis of PTSD.
The condition was likely to be as old as human civilisation, the researchers concluded. Prof Jamie Hacker Hughes, a former consultant clinical psychologist for the Ministry of Defence, said the first description of PTSD was often accredited to the Greek historian Herodotus.
Referring to the warrior Epizelus during the battle of Marathon in 490BC he wrote: "He suddenly lost sight of both eyes, though nothing had touched him."
But Prof Hughes' report - titled Nothing New Under the Sun - argues there are references in the Assyrian Dynasty in Mesopotamia between 1300BC and 609BC.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The Illiad is the story of the anger of Achilles — an unstable Greek warrior, filled with rage, who refuses to fight any more. Ostensibly, this is because his commander Agammemnon has taken Achilles’ slave girl. But one might also guess that Achilles has become totally burnt out on the fighting and just wants to stay in his tent and try to get a handle on his emotions.
Isn’t it interesting how academics will create an acronym to label something that has existed all along and they somehow believe that they have something new?
I can’t imagine anything as stressful as fighting in a war
The cause of the condition is the person has to feel they have NO CONTROL over events AND be in abject fear for their lives.
Just about anyone will get it if the fear is sufficiently intense, especially if combined with shame.
It's actually emerging as a PHYSICAL condition. The injection of that much cortisol into the brain steam causes a permanent rewire.
Let me testify, it sucks.
See _Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character_, and _Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming_, by Jonathan Shay, M.D.
Scholars.
Big time.
Been there, done that, earned the T-shirt the hard way.
The Romans would make their warriors wait outside the city for 3 days or more, before allowing them to go to their families after battle.
Kind of a re-acclimation. Our soldiers did something similar in WWII. It often took weeks or months to be sent home from theater. Time to decompress and contemplate.
I’m not saying our WWII vets didn’t suffer, my dad is one of them.
Some who didn't became outlaws (Jesse James) or Bikers (Hells Angels).
“I can’t imagine anything as stressful as fighting in a war”
Divorce will run it a close second.
That’s interesting. There’s probably something to be said for having a period of decompression, especially in the company of the soldiers you shared in combat with. Might not even need to be very long. Just a time to be together and hash out all the stuff you’ve all been through, before regular life floods back in.
Or...maybe they were really visited by ghosts they faced in battle.
Who ya gonna call?
If you check your Old Testament describing how the Israelites conquored Canaan, you will discover that soldiers were required to spend a several day “purification” period after a battle before they could join the tribe.
I first became aware of PTSD when my late husband (Korean combat vet) started exhibiting symptoms after being mugged a couple of times and having his jaw broken. Eventually his behavior led to my having mild PTSD. I went into treatment, he did not. I got better, he got worse. I studied a lot about his symptoms and behavior and eventually lured him into treatment. I also received training and began to see civilians with PTSD type symptoms as a counselor. Most had been physically, and/or sexually abused by one or both parents, and were not helped by conventional talk therapy. Here are some of the things that seemed to work.
First of all, the combat experience or other adult stress can trigger early experiences which have been suppressed or repressed. In my husband’s case receiving a leg wound while fighting and killing a young Chinese soldier was lying in wait. As our son entered his teen years, and looked somewhat Asian (some American Indian ancestry) the guilt became very strong. One night he came home drunk and was whining and complaining about something. I said “poor baby”, which enraged him. I suggested we go into the sound proofed room where I saw clients and explore the issue. I started saying poor baby again and soon he was writhing and wailing on the mat. Turns out that at birth nurses had put a hot water bottle on his leg which left a faint scar he showed me. I rubbed the scar and said poor baby and he was off screaming again. After he had come up for air again, I asked him about the scar that looked like a cut that he would never tell me about. He burst into tears and started screaming “I killed somebody’s son,” over and over again (his mother was very religious) for more than an hour. This is just one sample of a number of issues we explored in this way.
For me a critical point was when I had a potentially fatal adult experience which I survived by exercising great self control. The most intense experience I ever had in therapy was when I relived an experience I had at age 7. My father and I saw a crowd down the highway and when we walked there a truck had jackknifed, a car crashed into it, and 4 people were hanging out the broken windows bleeding to death (this was before safety glass). The truck driver was banging his head against the side of the truck screaming something. I had perfect visual memory of all this but no emotional memory nor could I remember what the driver was screaming. What I remembered while reliving was the feeling of absolute horror that this was something my capable father could not fix, that the truck driver was screaming “I lost control,” and for me the message was that loss of control means death. I have become much less controlling thanks to all this.
So for anyone suffering from PTSD, I would suggest the following. Start taking good care of yourself, eating nourishing food and taking supplements. If you can, find someone who will partner with you or a good therapist who will see you more than an hour at a time. Reliving often takes 1 1/2 to 2 hours. And one who is not afraid to let you cry and scream and rage safely (if you can express your anger by hitting a punching bag or beating on cushions or a mattress). When I was in a training group, a rape victim asked our doctor how many times she needed to relive the rape. He said, “until it becomes boring”. If something in the present is triggering, try to remember the earliest time you felt or experienced the same kind of thing and work on that first. If you wake up from a nightmare, try to sink into the feeling of the nightmare and let out the emotion. This kind of process seems to work because traumatic feelings are mostly stored in the mid brain, but as you relive them the electro-chemical charge is burned off, and the experience shifts into the cerebral cortex memory storage area where it has no emotional charge. Feel free to private message me if you need to ask any sensitive questions.
There's no free monies in studying "old" stuff.
Your explanation makes sense.
Prayers up.
Thank you for your service.
Thank you for your service.
Prayers for you.
Very, very stressful, but “a close second”? That comparison trivializes the horrors of war, IMO.
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