this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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I saw a claim once that PTSD only really became a thing as a result of the increased tempo of modern warfare. Supposedly, prior to industrialization the fact that armies had to march on foot to get anywhere gave soldiers time to decompress in between battles. I don't quite fully agree, since you absolutely can be traumatized by a single event, but on the face of it experiencing multiple events in a short span certainly wouldn't help. shrugs
Eh, there have been historical accounts that go back as far as written military history going over warriors/soldiers heart, railway spine, shell shock, battle fatigue, combat stress, and war neurosis.
War has changed, but our physiological response to stress has been the same since prehistory. If anything is different about modern combat it's more than likely the increase in prolonged accumulation of traumatic brain injuries sustained from receiving and firing modern concussive munitions. Unfortunately we still don't know exactly how bad it is for someone's brain to fire something like a recoilless rifle, but we know it's not great.
Does a recoilless rifle cause more of a concussion? My understanding of them is that the only difference is that there's some give between the receiver and frame (probably not using the correct terms, but the bit that holds the shell when the bullet is fired can move relative to the bit that you hold on to to absorb the force).
Or is it because it's easier to sustain fire when you don't have to deal with recoil, so their brains deal with a higher volume of the same thing?
If I remember correctly it's from a combination of overpressure when the projectile initially fires and the under pressure that happens when the projectile leaves the barrel.
The main problem is that it's a shoulder fired weapon with a 10lb projectile. You can fire a Gustaf a couple times, but if you're doing more than a couple it's gonna bang you up.
Oh 10lb projectile, that makes sense, I thought you were talking about recoilless assault rifles. Yeah, any explosion that can move something that big wouldn't surprise me having negative effects on anyone close enough to feel it in their chest. Same goes for artillery, tank cannons, or those big naval guns. Even if they aren't holding them directly, they are going off pretty close to people operating them (actually I'm not sure about the naval ones, pretty sure they are fired by wire from the bridge or something but dunno if they still need people to load them or if that's all automated now).
Ah, lol. I forgot that people had made somewhat functional recoilless in small arms.
Yeah, I was speaking mainly about the Gustaf gun which has been giving people tbi for nearly a hundred years now. It's basically the Browning M2 of the antitank world, but it gives you brain damage.
Still a super efficient weapons platform if you discount the brain damage, which like a hundred governments have agreed is a pretty cool idea.
There are a lot of contributing factors - paradoxically, some modern data suggests that keeping soldiers near the frontline during treatment for a combat stress reaction actually decreases the long-term development of PTSD. Something along the lines of that PTSD is caused, in part, by going from 0-100 and then back to 0.
WW1 was also particularly bad because lack of sleep contributes significantly to the development of PTSD in warzones, and in WW1, being posted on the trenches and getting shelled day and night, sleep was never guaranteed.
That makes sense. When drag was abused, completely disengaging from the abuser felt awful. Drag wanted to fight back and feel like the problem was resolved. Simply distancing dragself while the abuser still had the option to return and do more harm felt terrifying.