Most Humans Suffer PTSD

I'm guessing that in the 14th century one expected physical discomfort and civic unrest as a part of "normal" life.

Thomas Hobbes wrote
"and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

When you say it has "left it's mark on our gene pool" I'd probably agree. Perhaps it's why our brains are so adept at refusing to accept reality. We have developed many coping mechanisms such as denial, memory loss, schizophrenia, escapism and religion.

reading with interest.

yes, look at most other animals, many stressors to just survive. we're no different.

I disagree with Eorl:



Surely the majority of the members of the gene pool survive stress by directly coping with unpalatable reality?

Noddy, I think memory loss and denial are the most important and most common of these. If one was continually aware of every detail of every traumatic event in our lives we wouldn't be able to function. If we were constantly thinking about all the possible triggers of nuclear holocaust, why would we bother shopping for next week? When something like schizophrenia is used as a coping mechanism, it's usually in response to some pretty severe trauma (such as early abuse) that the majority of people don't need to deal with.

Eorl--

Everyone has a finite amount of room on the front burners. Eventually all human beings have senior moments.

As I remember, one component of PTS is Helplessness, an inability to do anything about the mess whether because of lack of power or lack of authority.

As for schizophenia being a coping mechanism. Mr. Noddy's family has a few schizophrenics and I've read a good bit of the literature. There may be a genetic predisposition towards schizophrenia, but environmental triggers of all sorts (not necessarily abuse) precipitate the disease.

Noddy,

I was not referring to "memory loss" in the sense of a loss of normal function, but rather that we are capable of putting things on the back burner and even lock them away where we can't see them. Not having instant awareness of every plane disaster doco I've ever seen makes it easier for me to get into a plane.

As for schizophrenia, I went looking for some evidence to demonstrate what I meant, and found that my view may have been a bit "old school". ( in my defense, when I studied psychology, Madonna was having her first hits! )

Source: www.absw.org.uk/Briefings/schizophrenia.htm

I think you are confusing two things, Coberst.


To have experienced events that MAY trigger PTSD is not the same as actually HAVING it.

Only a percentage of people exposed to such events will develop the symptoms....



That it has been the norm that humans have, throughout our history, frequently been exposed to very traumatic circumstances is certainly true.


Some argue that it has resulted in a tendency to anxiety and gloominess of expectation in our species, since pessimistic (therefore watchful) and anxious (therefore jumpy and reactive) individuals tended to survive better...who knows?

I think Laing's theory of schizophrenia is probably crap (as was the cold mother theory of autism), though I have great admiration of him in many ways...(I once heard a long interview with him, and have admired him a lot more since then), but adversity and trauma as triggers aiding in the manifestation and course of schizophrenia is once again beginning to take back some of the psychiatric field from the fundamentalist physical causes only folk, as we discover more and more about how poor parenting and trauma has profound effects on the human brain.



Well, that is physical again, isn't it! See how mind and body dualism infect our language!

I mean, that psychological trauma is more and more recognized as having profound effects...doubtless mediated through our physiology.

I doubt that it can CAUSE schizophrenia, though.

The problem with history is that it gives a certain historians inerpretation of old historic documents and other sources, along with arguments against other interpretations of said documents, in order to firmly inbed a historians POV on a certain cluster of events, or social/economical trents of a certain place and time.
Then again, there are global history books, in which the 'history of the world' or the 'history of a country/region/belief system/ duchy/ timeperiod/ anything else interesting enough to write about' These are often more specific, since they focus on a certain delineated frame, rather then at the whole picture.
Nevertheless, both suffer in that they are obliged to capture something as widly complicated as human life, interests and interactions with one another and the reasons behind those in a book of 500 pages or so... tops.
In that case, one is bound to skip over the more... uneventful or otherwise less interesting periods or specific events that happened.
Which makes, especially the Middle ages, seem like a period of almost universal despair in Europe, with wars, plagues, famine, draught, and what not more happening seemingly all the time.
That, of course, simply isn't true. Many people and regions, even then, in an admittedly less organized and structured, and thusly more unruly and violent time period then the modern day and age (in Europe that is... Other continents (notably Africa) may feel different about this).
Next, and I'm no expert by any means, so please, correct me if I'm wrong, such events that cause PTSD must be perceived to be extremely dramatic and life threatening events. That hinges of course on the victims mindframe during the event. An traumatic event becomes just that because it stands out as such from the victim's normal events in life. It also has to do with the way a person 'works through'such an event. Let me elaborate.
Life, as such, was more harsh in those times and people were not nearly as vocal as today. (there is no such thing as democracy then). Salvation comes in the afterlife through the suffering of our earthbound existence. This may very well have rung true for many peasants and civilians, since life was unquestionably harder in those days then they are now. But in the acceptance of the 'suffering', they laid the foundation of a better existence in heaven. With that in mind, less events will probably be construed as being 'traumatic', due to the harsher standards of life in those days, and, such events that will qualify as traumatic, could very well strengthen the victim's faith in a new and better afterlife.

Now, a last few words. It seems easy to place ourselves in the shoes of those that lived in for example the Middle ages, or the Roman Empire. We see the movies, read the books, and think we et a fair picture of what life must have been like in those days. That is a dangerous pitfall. While it is undoubtedly true that the medieval, or the ancient, man was by no means less intelligent then their modern day counterparts, there is a vast distance between us nevertheless, not only created by time but also by vast, cultural differences.
How many of us can even conceive what it was like to live in a society where the vast majority of men was a devout christian and the church was one of the most powerful institutions, apart from the monarchs, existing in Europe?

dlowan says--"To have experienced events that MAY trigger PTSD is not the same as actually HAVING it."

You are correct, I left an erronious impression.

I came across a cheerful concept in the morning newspaper. In addition to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder there is a phenomenon called "Post Traumatic Growth". As the cliche has it, that which doesn't kill us, makes us stronger.

I find this a very cheerful idea.

If you're interested in this, id suggest reading "Why Zebras Dont Get Ulcers"

http://www.amazon.com/Why-Zebras-Dont-Get/dp/0805073698/sr=8-1/qid=1156881902/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-7035173-7446208?ie=UTF8

It's a fascinating look at the biology of stress, and how its evolved to become something of a hindrance to modern man.

Monolith--

Thank you and welcome to A2K.

I should check out this vague memory, but wasn't it the psychoanalyst, Melanie Klien, who contended that most of us suffer from some kind of "birth trauma"?

Looks like Freud mentioned it, Rank made it an important theoretical construct, and Klein was influenced by it:

Ferenczi was not alone in his theoretical efforts to abandon the Freudian overemphasis on the role of the father for the sake of a primary and decisive relation to the mother. In 1924, Otto Rank (1884-1939), another brilliant theoretician and innovator of psychoanalytical technique, published his famous treatise Das Trauma der Geburt und seine Bedeutung für die Psychoanalyse (The Trauma of Birth and its Meaning for Psychoanalysis), in which he asserted that the individual attempts to overcome his birth trauma by unconsciously trying to regain the motherly womb. Drawing attention to the role of femininity and motherhood, Rank pleaded for downplaying the import of the Oedipal and castration complexes. By so doing, he anticipated one of the major contentions of British psychoanalysis.


And...(from a different source)

Otto Rank expanded on Freud’s work on birth anxiety in his book The Trauma of Birth. Rank proposed the controversial idea that birth is the prototype of all later anxieties. (11) This was a major influence on Melanie Klein, who believed that all anxiety has its origin in the fear of death, and Ernst Becker, who attributed the ills of human society to the quest for immortality, arising from a fear of death. (12) This is more easily demonstrated than Freud’s attribution of human neuroses to repressed sexuality: even societies without cultural sexual taboos develop theories of an afterlife, usually of a paradise in which all one’s needs are fulfilled.

http://www.cpcs.umb.edu/~Peter/misc/fem_psych.html



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Thanks, Dlowan.