Fuzzy Necromancer wrote:That...is a really good point I had never even considered. =o
One thing I will add: there's a folk belief I've run into that this sort of mental illness - post-traumatic stress disorder, and the associated depression and other problems - is somehow an exclusively modern phenomenon, or that it is only confined to certain cultures or peoples. I sometimes hear that PTSD "first appeared" in the context of the First World War, for instance, or that some super 'badass' people (Knights, Zulu, the Fremen, Vikings, Samurai, whatever) wouldn't have suffered from it.
It's not true. Shell-Shock or PTSD didn't 'start' in WW1, it merely was first noticed in quantity there and was the first time that the phenomenon got a proper name. But you can see clear symptoms of PTSD, for instance, in the writings and literature from the Crimean War, or from the American Civil War. All over,
all over the American Civil War.
Moving further back in time, into the pre-modern period ( = Ancient/Medieval) you can still find evidence, but you have to look harder, because those societies tended to stigmatize or normalize PTSD symptoms, and the historical sources for those periods are generally uninterested in talking about them. Every so often though - sometimes in a religious or superstitious context - you'll get references to extreme examples of PTSD symptoms (the less extreme examples almost certainly existed, but escaped notice by the sources). Famously, a Greek soldier at Marathon, Herodotus reports, was struck blind by the sight of the battle - he took no wound, but could no longer see ('hysterical blindness' or conversion disorder).
The Romans fought continuously - it's estimated that the average Roman male probably spent 7 to 10 years in the army actively deployed - and were as 'warrior' a warrior culture as you might imagine. But they had laws for soldiers who might injure themselves to avoid combat, and we hear reports of men who went mad with despair or terror in combat or sieges. I would suggest that Roman society, especially in the Republic, which was very much a society set up by soldiers (as all Roman adult males of property served), had a lot of cultural practices and institutions which might serve to soften the impact of trauma, or else to normalize that trauma.
It has also been suggested that different cultures will 'work out' that trauma in different ways, so the cultural context may change the symptoms of trauma. But the trauma is still trauma. So far as I can tell, there is no 'badass' culture which is immune to the terror of battle, or the trauma of watching a buddy injured or killed. What you are more likely to find are societies that aggressively discard the broken people (usually men) that war produces, stigmatizing them (as cowards, for instance).
So much of speculative fiction these days - both sci-fi and fantasy - is overrun with the 'cult of the badass' (phrase lifted from youtube's MrBTongue, link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek2O6bVAIQQ&t= ), that goes beyond lionizing courage and valor (virtues that remain important in our unstable world) to glorify callous violence and honestly sociopathic behavior. And while sometimes we're shown the cost in the dead, we're almost never shown the cost to the living. We never see the broken men and broken women whose lives are up-ended by trauma.
Fiction didn't used to be that way. The Odyssey is a story about a man who spent 10 years returning home from Troy, but who brought the war home with him in his heart. The Real Ultimate Badass of the Trojan War, Ajax, goes mad with violence and eventually turns his sword on himself - his violence consumes him. The other Real Ultimate Badass, Achilles, weeps openly at the loss of his best friend, gives violent vent to his frustrations, and eventually finds himself only able to properly grieve in the company of an enemy (Priam).
Or consider, for a more modern example, Frodo or Faramir from the Lord of the Rings. Frodo saves the world - but "I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me." Faramir (along with Eowyn), the moment his part in the war is ended, declares his intent never to war again, and instead to plant a garden and grow things. His regret at the violence he has to engage in is explicit in the text too, when he wonders about the sad tales that brought his slain enemies to his lands.
There's far too little of that in much of our modern speculative fiction.