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Counterpoint being that the entire life of a subsistence farmer was high stress, fear of death and helplessness. Crop failures, disease, crime, and wars were pretty common. And if the crops are failing in your village, you know you’ll be at minimum very hungry over the winter, and people die around you and probably members of your own family could meet the same fate. Nothing you can do.
A huge difference for modern WEIRDs is that we approach the world from the perspective that life is supposed to be good with the troubles I mentioned (death, disease, starvation, warfare, etc.) seen as outliers and black swan events. And at the same time, the more ancient approach to life was that bad stuff happening is normal, and it’s best to just get on with it. Your fate was your fate. And feelings, while they existed and were acknowledged, weren’t the same focal points that they are today.
I’m personally fairly confident that our modern WEIRD approach to the negative parts of life are creating and driving a lot of mental illnesses, especially in teenagers. We teach, in my view, the exact wrong approach to trauma, and a very inflated view of what can cause trauma. Part of it is just how much we live life on easy mode, which interferes with the development of mental toughness. A terrible experience for a young adult in a modern, western city is likely to be fairly minor compared to the same child in Tudor England. Add in that we tell our young that bad experiences cause trauma and trauma causes permanent mental health problems. And we teach kids to focus on feelings and to set hopes very high.
I agree with much of your post but the initial part isn't very convincing imo. There is a massive difference between being worried about the occasional famine and sitting in a trench that is pounded by artillery. The life of a substinence farmer isn't high stress, it's almost constant low mulling worry.
Is PTSD, especially c-pstd very overdiagnosed today? Absolutely! But it's also a real condition mostly associated with post Napoleonic frontline warfare, that isn't at all comparable to historic environmental or social stressors.
Sort of. If helplessness is going to make an event traumatic, I can easily point to plagues, mothers dying in childbirth, famines, etc as all being particularly traumatic. Imagine being 10-12 and seeing baby’s first be heading in town with dad. Or your mom has a baby and bleeds to death while you watch. Or the Black Death killing a third of your village. And knowing that if you got it, they’d basically shut you in the house and brick you inside entombed in the house. Death in the medieval and renaissance world was common and brutal. Only maybe modern combat comes close, and even then, I suspect that the way normal deaths happen in modern times make combat harder. Death before 65 is a black swan for us.
Helplessness can make an event traumatic and it's a part of what is believed to cause PTSD.
I actually thought of bringing up particularly severe plagues as a possible comparison, with a major difference being things like things like very high levels of noise from explosions, artillery, gunfire, grenades etc, that probably would make severe trauma manifest in different ways.
Surely people were traumatised by the black death and things like plagues resulting from the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, but they might not have gotten PTSD specifically because the circumstances surrounding the trauma and stress was very different, even if death levels were the same or worse than frontline combat roles.
Finally, the first major recorded outbreaks of PTSD did not coincide with people having gone soft in a cosy environment unused to adversity, violence and war. It was pre-penicillin, most people were still agrarian or working in industry under terrible conditions, in societies that were violent and regularly at war. What it did coincide with was the advent of modern industrialised warfare.
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