PTSD in ancient times

Did gladiators suffer from PTSD? Or do you think the environment being for entertainment, made it less traumatic on the human psyche. As opposed to marching out into a field with 20,000 other men and hacking away at each other until one side wins.

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I doubt it was that entertaining environment for the gladiator's involved. Killing another human being is pretty hard on the psyche no matter the situation.

PTSD is watered down rhetoric to further disconnect people from humanizing such an awful condition. Technically PTSD can be caused by someone holding you down and farting in your face. It's vague dehumanized jargon.

Shell Shock, on the other hand, isn't something that can be adopted by anybody who has an unpleasant experience. It's too grounded in truth to be molded by abstract definitions. Shell Shock is universally known to be an extreme combat related ailment that destroyed men who endured a neurological snap.

Stop posting this shitty thread.

Some probably did. There are various reactions to killing, from feeling nothing at all to absolutely losing your shit over it. The gladiators that felt nothing probably did quite well, the gladiators that lost it were too distracted to survive for long, but the gladiators that reveled in it were the ones that rose up the ranks.

the slaves would have been messed up mentally, the trained gladiators would have most likley been alright since they had been preparing for it for months

They most likely did it was just called differently.
The current definition of PTSD started somewhere around WWI (shell shock) because the battles lasted much longer than before and soldiers had to endure stress for weeks at a time.
It's one thing to be in a stressful situation for a few hours and another to fight for days/weeks at a time.

Lindybeige has a video on this

youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg

Shell-shock came from the constant artillery barrages that would cause men to lose their fucking minds. Days of nonstop explosions drove them mad. Add some death and carnage, a gloomy environment devoid of all life and WALLAH! You have fucked up mind.

>Lindy "Cavalry is stupid" Beige
>Lindy "Operation Market Garden was a success" Beige
>Lindy "The Bren Gun Won WW2" Beige

I'm sure sieges and the like took a toll on people too, and they could go on for months.

yeah the lad has let himself go. Guess being BTFO by Matt Easton so many times does that to you

today it might be but back in the day when kicking the shit out of things was a daily event you'd probably be used to it.

Yeah modern PTSD is probably milder in most cases but it's probably still worse than what the ancients had to deal with.
The thing you have to think about is that before WWI no one really took PTSD seriously and just accused the soldiers of being cowards without documenting anything.

shell shock and ptsd is the same thing

Their anxiety levels were off the charts. They were constantly paranoid, alert, etc. knowing their climb to the top could end within a second. Because of this, they were itching for more to get it over with. It's like how silence during a war is most-agitating, because you're anticipating the shitstorm.

I thought all gladiators were slaves or do you just mean the trained ones faired better compared the to the raw recruits?

>Did gladiators suffer from PTSD?
They were actually man, so no. Women neither told them: hey honey you are a little bit aggressive today.

Gladiators are a meme.

Very expensive to train, and there were like many type.

Most wouldn't have fought to the death at all. Far too expensive to train. Those who DID fight to the death would likely be prisoners though.

As for the PTSD question, not sure if its been posted already but Lindybeige did an excellent video about this:

there are only TWO mentions in ancient writings of what historians have deemed to be "PTSD," obviously its not written as a medical problem.

youtube.com/watch?v=FDNyU1TQUXg

honestly i would disagree. unlike a private killing or a killing in war, in a gladiatorial ring you get instant gratification for your actions. A crowd cheering you on and a emperor/king honoring you will give you a big shot of dopamine no matter who you are. this could honestly condition people to enjoy killing in the ring, in a very simple, kill them get dopamine type action.

Also people pre-civilization were designed to kill each other in tribal groups, clearly we are evolved to do that

You were just not safe. In the times before WW1 you would camp at a hill with your army while being able to the the fires on that other hill over there where your enemy sits. Tomorrow the numbers will clash and most likely none party will be compleatly exterminated.
In trenches you could die at any secound all the time by various means

I think they used the term "Warrior's Heart" back then, but don't quote me on that.

actually,gladiators rarely killed eachother
they were entertainers,not murderers
kind of like today s wrestlers

>wallah

I'm aware. So is the term "combat fatigue". It's just been watered down to encompass a broader spectrum of ailments. An ever contorting shit-river that multiplies with it's self to allow for unification through generalization and obscurity. A quantum rave of acceptance through ever-changing levels of all inclusive perceived disparity.

>Shell shock
>Combat fatigue
>Post traumatic stress disorder

>Negro
>African American
>Melanin rich kangs

You can be Arabic and be accepted as a melanoid but you're still not a negro.
You can have PTSD from fat jokes but your neurons aren't misfiring due to input overload.

A lot of soldiers shouldnt even be in the army. The fact that they are promised larger and quicker retirement fees brings a lot of undesirables who really dont want to or arent mentally capable to be in the fight. Many soldiers dont really see real combat nowadays. What these people do to get away from the army with their retirement and a bonus? Suffer from ptsd. It always seemed to me that ptsd became a thing when people were mass-drafted into armies. Drafting is barbarism. Thankfully modern tech will soon allow to greatly reduce number of soldiers in favor of skilled and willing professional engineers, machine operators and commandos who love and know they are doing.

>Did gladiators suffer from PTSD?

Probably not, because gladiator fights in the arena weren't exactly the horrible, gruesome bloodfest most people nowadays believe they were.

Gladiators were being trained for months on end, fed luxurious meals, hell, they even got hot baths and massages and shit. Archeologists found brothels solely for gladiators in Pompeii. Gladiators were basically human race horses. Training them cost a shitton of money for their owners, so they weren't just dumped into the arena to die.

In fact, only like 10 percent of fights in the arena actually resulted in death, and even then only afterwards because of wound infestation or something. Your stereotypical 'pollice verso' like execution of beaten gladiators was very rare.

In fact, slaves who were assigned to become gladiators had a HIGHER life expectancy than an average Roman legionnare. And if they fought well for, say, 20 fights or so, they were granted their freedom most of the time.

You could say gladiator fights were a very risky version of boxing, just with blades instead of gloves. So I don't think gladiators suffered from PTSD much.

Now, this didn't apply to convicts who were sentenced to the arena, however. These people really were meant to die in there and weren't given any training at all and usually had to fight with dull blades or chained together against fully-armed and trained gladiators.

As far as PTSD in general is concerned, of course soldiers, raped saxon slaves etc suffered from PTSD occasionally. The thing is, nobody knew about that condition back in the day, so 'shell shocked' soldiers were usually just called cowards, pussies or whatever.

Also, keep in mind that war, pestilence, slavery and death in general was a pretty everyday occurence back in those days. Every human being probably witnessed a couple of public executions during his life etc. So you could probably say while PTSD existed, it was far less common than today. People were just more used to it.

Many people had a very different idea of morality and killing, than people of today. Even in WWI, the mentality of soldiers and their ideas about what combat was, morally and practically, is wholly and completely different from the ideas of today.

Now, this isn't to say that trauma, among the victors, the ones who committed the terror, the rape, the killing, did not exist, but that their reaction to what they had done, would likely be very different from how someone would react today. Their idea of what they did, morally and socially, was not comparable to today.

Bear in mind, this is a society that laughs and cheers to the spectacle of men and women being tied up and burned alive, or eaten alive by wild animals, as they cry out to God to forgive their executioners. This is a society where a man who just killed several terrified, untrained, helpless slaves, and is still dripping with their blood, is considered to be the ultimate sex symbol. That doesn't mean that we today are any more insulated against being so politically and socially malleable that we would not become the same as this society, but that the idea currently exists that this sort of thing is abhorrent and wrong, and most people, if suddenly forced to commit similarly cruel and violent acts, would be very upset, after the adrenaline had worn off, as they were taught from birth that this is not normal or good.

Do you know how frickin expensive and valuable a slave was to a private owner? They wouldnt just send in untrained slaves to die for entertainment. Gladiators would rarely kill each other and they were and investment, too. Roman slave was, relatively, treated better than modern humans under their socialist governments.

Well, people back then really did believe in mythology

Forget shell shocked
He got shell cucked

PTSD is largely a modern phenomena. It arose from the combination of modern draft armies with large number of people who never killed as much as a chicked in their lives often being packed together in a platoon with strangers; and the uniquely horrible conditions of warfare that occured with the profileration of modern artillery and other beyond-line-of-sight means of killing. In wars before, with some exceptions, actual moments of mortal danger were brief. In the trenches a soldier could be blasted to pieces by a random shell at any moment, his own skill and effort could only mitigate the chance of that to a limited extent, and intense shelling could last for days. Unprepared men + escalation of horror = lots of people verifiably losing their mind. Thus "shell shock" and "combat fatigue" were recognized as psychological conditions, rather than someone just being a pussy.

And then their meanings were constantly expanded by psychiatrists interested in securing their jobs, until the PTSD term, so vague and all-encoplassing as to be useless for anything except securing psychiatrists' jobs and excusing actual cowardice, was coined.

PTSD wasn't invented at that time

haHAA

I'm sure it was fucking terrifying.

No. Ptsd started with explosive weapons. Fighting with swords is not so different from fighting with claws, easy for mammalian brains to comprehend.

Guns and bombs are more than the human mind is built to handle though. You become helpless in that situation, just more matter to be distroyed

That was well thought out.

Tell that to Epizelus.

I've killed with a rifle and it wasn't too pleasant an experience. I can't imagine what it must be like to stare your opponent in the face, hear him draw his last breath, or breath in his blood and excrement. I doubt many men would be able to come away that experience with a clear conscience.

Those who couldn't handle the training or that horrible way of life probably just died

Also there was no such thing as massive artillery barrages that literally churned all the earth around you to the horizon