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Notes -
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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