Soldier’s Heart: The History of PTSD
Whether we called it “shellshock” or the “thousand-yard stare,” we’ve been aware of the ways that trauma impacts the human mind and body for about six thousand years. Our ideas about what it does to people and what we can do about it have shifted, evolved, and been shot through with stigma and misconception over time.
Although we made plenty of mistakes along the way, there are symptoms of PTSD we see repeatedly depicted in many stories, poems, and scientific records, from The Odyssey to present-day scientific studies. From the beginning, we knew what hurt us and where it hurt, but we didn’t know what to do about it. To a certain extent, we still don’t know what to do about it, but, today, we do have a limited yet empathetic understanding of PTSD and how to treat it. This understanding comes from and has been enriched by a blend of theories and research from many eras and cultures.
Our first recorded observations of the effects of trauma weren’t by doctors but by writers: novelists, poets, and everyday people keeping journals and diaries. Studying these records along with centuries of medical and military documents has deepened our understanding of traumatized people’s symptoms and what they need in order to recover.
