This would also explain why accounts of "shell shock" and PTSD rose so dramatically during WWI but were less common in prior wars where explosions were less common.
That's interesting that at the time, in WW1, it was assumed to be a physical injury to the brain caused by the shockwave of exploding artillery shells (hence the name). A few years later a consensus evolved that it's a psychological problem caused by the stress of combat, which was the prevailing opinion for about 100 years. And now it's looking like it might actually be a physical injury caused by shockwave damage to the brain.
Well the good thing they went forward back then and invented the modern helmet to protect people in trenches from overhead explosions.
And incredibly it seems that the Adrian helmet still outperforms modern helmet designs in the blast protection quality. [1] It can't stop a bullet sure, but I suspect that chances of being hit by an overhead blast are higher than that a of a headshot in a typical warfare scenario.
FYI, also modern helmets are not designed to stop bullets but rather to protect from shrapnel and hand grenades. Stopping a bullet would mean breaking the wearers neck. (The kinetic energy needs to go somewhere after all.)
The bullet's kinetic energy is absorbed by the deformation and fragmentation of the projectile, the deformation of the helmet shell, the deformation/compression of rigid helmet pads, and conversion to heat.
If your helmet stops a bullet, there's some risk of head injury if the helmet shell, upon deformation, comes into contact with your skull. Otherwise you'll be okay. There's some historical information on this at: https://www.ade.pt/bulletproof-helmets
Also, the kinetic energy of a fragment near the site of an explosion can be higher than the kinetic energy load of a 9mm handgun bullet, which is generally the only small-arms threat that combat helmets are rated to stop.
Older steel helmets don't but modern IIIA-class helmets (e.g. ECH) do.
Kinetic energy is not an unsolvable problem, energy can be dissipated. The momentum is in fact the problem that can't be really worked-around (except spreading it over longer period of time) but the momentum of a bullet is low.
UPD replaced "impulse" with "momentum", lost in translation
Level IIIA resists penetration from .357 SIG, 9 mm, and .44 magnum. Those are handgun rounds. It may stop some intermediate rounds if you’re lucky, but certainly not full power rifle rounds.
Helmets cannot deform as much as vests before seriously injuring the wearer, limiting their capacity to dissipate kinetic energy. And if you make them too rigid, concussion becomes a problem.
Yes, but dissipating kinetic energy is a solvable problem unlike dissipating momentum.
The initial statement that's being refuted here is that a bulletproof helmet would break your neck and thus cannot work.
This statement is false because (besides such helmets existing on practice) your skull can absorb the momentum without too much damage and helmet can absorb the kinetic energy.
In the movies, the good guy casually fires a shot - one handed. He experiences almost no kickback.
But then the bullet hits the villain’s 300lb henchman, who is lifted off his feet and goes flying.
This is why people think bullets are magical momentum machines when in reality, due to air resistance, the momentum transfered to the target is even lower than at the moment of firing.
It's more the area of the bullet that matters. A small bullet or a thin needle require much less momentum/energy to penetrate a body than a big object.
If you place a bullet between rifle stock and the shoulder, then fire the rifle, it’s going to be mildly unpleasant, but the bullet won’t penetrate the skin, let alone kill the shooter.
It indeed can't be too big because the shooter takes the same or greater momentum in the form of recoil. Conservation of momentum applies to the process of accelerating the bullet.
Shell shock was considered related to neurasthenia (weak nerves) which is the 18th century name for ME/CFS. TBI, ME/CFS and PTSD are highly correlated for what I believe are the same genetic predisposition plus an environmental trigger.
And the huge population movements, cramming exhausted people together in dense and often unsanitary conditions, characteristic of 20th century warfare are ideal conditions for.. guess what?
A lot of the medication for psychological issues is aimed at altering the bio chemistry in the brain to mitigate physical problems. The reason that stuff works is because the issues are physical and not imagined. It's also true that certain disorders (e.g. psychosis) actually cause brain damage when left unchecked. This technically is not a single thing but more like a group of disorders with widely varying symptoms. My understanding is that a lot of PTSD complaints overlap in terms of symptoms and are probably related. Or that some PTSD patients actually become psychotic.
So not surprising to see some brain damage in navy seals. Of course the question is what comes first, the brain damage or the ptsd. And whether something can be done before brain damage happens in terms of medication or therapy.
>The reason that stuff works is because the issues are physical and not imagined
Psychological doesn't mean "imagined", just means "in the realm of thought". Your thinking is not "imagined", nor is the impact of decisions, ruminating, etc to you.
Physical damage to the brain can easily cause phycological problem. It wouldn't make psychological problems any less real, merely help to prevent them better.
>It’s not either/or. The psychological shit is real
Depends, because we had millenia of wars, even much more gruesome (but without explosions), and much fewer accounts of psychological shit. It was just a fact of life, and most people carried on.
Throughout history most wars were fought primarily via pitched battles, a very different type of war than the continues trench warfare of the first world war.
Also throughout history there just wasn't much attention for regular people, and they're seriously under-represented in the historical record in pretty much
every way. Do you think some Roman general is going to write about his soldiers crying about how horrible war is? Of course not; that would make him and his army look bad. He was much more likely to under-represent his numbers to make his army look good ("we defeated the Barbarian horde of 50,000 with just 5,000 soldiers!" sounds a lot better than "our armies were of equal numbers but we won"). And the soldiers themselves typically didn't leave any records.
And throughout much of history there just wasn't all that much attention for these types of problems in the first place. Patton famously slapped some soldiers dealing with shell shock because he thought it was just fake and they needed to "man up". That was probably more or less the typical response for much of history.
Fewer accounts maybe but life used to be a lot shorter and more violent back then, more like in poor and unstable countries today. For long periods of history many children wouldn't grow to become adults and adult men would frequently get conscripted. Those who saw extensive combat experience would often succumb to injuries. Not to mention that most of them wouldn't know how to write and wouldn't be of interest to anyone who knew how to write.
The aristocracy generally fared relatively well in medieval battles as it was more profitable to capture a noble unharmed for ransom than to risk severely injuring or killing them, not to mention the class taboo and difference in training and equipment between a noble and a commoner.
But warfare was also extremely different. The use of crossbows against Christians was banned by the Catholic church because it was considered too horrifying because of its speed. Battles would often be won by forcing the other side to surrender or morale breaking down and being routed. Because the violence was also much more direct than the pull of a trigger or press of a button, humans were also much more hesitant to actually try and kill their opponent. The crusades are infamous because they actually involved a more modern level of dehumanization but throughout most of history wars would be fought against people who looked like you, spoke a similar language and shared a similar culture. The exceptions are so well-known because they were rare.
"It was just a fact of life" is something we say about all kinds of horrors of the past. You say "most people carried on" but this is literally survivor bias: most people who served in past wars don't go on to kill themselves even without treatment even when they suffer from PTSD or shell shock or whatever. That doesn't mean recognizing and treating their condition wouldn't drastically increase their quality of life. It also ignores that "most" is not all. People would simply starve themselves to death or go into the woods and never come back or get "battle frenzy" and throw themselves at the enemy with no regard for their safety and that too was "just a fact of life" but today we would call that suicide.
History is full of "psychological shit". We just lacked the understanding of psychology to properly classify and recognize it in ways that would allow us to address any of it.
I think cultural context can make the difference between a psychological traumatic event and another day at the office. Somebody who grew up on a farm might snap a chicken's neck without a thought, while a vegan city slicker being made to do the same might plausibly suffer severe psychological trauma.
It may be the case that being from a society in which violence is glorified and made into a virtue makes people less susceptible to war-induced PTSD. Or the circumstances of the war could make the difference; if you are fighting a just war you earnestly believe to be in the direct defense of your family and community, or whether you were drafted into a war that has nothing to do with you and society tells you is cynically or foolishly motivated.
Based on psychological research we know that early childhood trauma can help develop sociopathy. It's easy to see the effect of perpetual violence in terrorist hotspots like Palestine where children grow up to become terrorists because of the violence they experience in "counter-terrorism", which their existence as terrorists of course feeds into, repeating the cycle. As the saying goes "hurt people hurt people".
I think it's a mistake to look at a civilisation past or present that is defined by widespread violence and death and think of it as anything other than dysfunctional. It's just that the baseline of suffering is so high it drowns out all the easily identifiable forms of suffering we're accustomed to.
You often hear people talk about the cultural trauma of Japan, Russia, or Germany. As an outsider there's also a clear circle of violence in American society which pervades and informs cultural attitudes, social policy and conflict resolution. This shouldn't be surprising given the US's history of widespread suffering throughout its history: indentured servitude, religious prosecution, chattel slavery, genocide, disease, civil war. American hyperindividualism as well as both the Cold War and War on Terror "world police" eras of foreign policy and the more recent popularity of isolationism have all the trappings of a trauma response.
Meat is violence. This is why slaughter is often highly ritualized in "primitive" societies, often thanking the animal for its part and being deeply aware of the interplay of life and death that meat eating requires but also the importance of the slaughter for the survival of that society. Both the meat-eating urbanite having an existential crisis over having to kill an animal for sustenance as well as the farm hand thoughtlessly killing an animal are in unhealthy positions - one from the detachment of mass production, the other from the desensitization of their involvement in it. The vegan might be in a healthier space but given modern industrial production is likely as detached from the food they consume and the suffering and death that enables it (be it the field hands working in bad conditions for low pay, the animals dying in the process of industrial farming or the ecological damage caused by shipping exotic or out-of-season produce around the globe).
I say that as a city dwelling meat eater living in Germany, which is a deeply unwell country scared of understanding its own history beyond easy platitudes and simple stories of good and evil people. Humans are not a virus but humanity is very sick and it will take a long time and a lot of effort for it to get any better - if ever.
More to the point: as someone who has had a justified need for therapy before, I think it's important to recognize that of course you can often simply "push through it" because if you can't, you simply break. But importantly you won't get any better, you will just appear more functional for as long as you can keep it up. Therapy was a taboo in my lifetime and I'm not even 40. Suicide is still often a taboo but only started being acknowledged a few short decades ago because a number of celebrity deaths became widely publicized (in Germany it was a soccer player, the stoic masculinity equivalent of an American quarterback). That didn't mean these things didn't happen before. It just meant we didn't acknowledge they did and we didn't know how to get help.
You're talking in some absolutes here, but I don't think any of it is so set in stone. If a city vegan doesn't think about where his food comes from and isn't mentally bothered by this, then he's healthy. If a farm boy slaughters livestock casually isn't bothered by it, he too is healthy. Each are well adapted to their circumstance and is healthy so long as they remain in that condition. What other people think about either of them is the problem of those other people.
That pattern of reasoning is also used by people who defend hitting their children because "my parents hit me as a child and I turned out fine" when arguably the fact they think it's okay to hit their child demonstrates they're not fine.
Yes, there are people who aren't "bothered" by killing animals. There are also people who aren't "bothered" by killing people. I'm saying that's a bad thing. I live near an industrial slaughter house, in fact one of the biggest "meat factories" in Europe. The people who work there are not okay.
I'm not saying "don't eat meat". I'm saying if eating meat literally doesn't bother you, you should consider that a warning sign.
You spelled "occupation" and "resistance to occupation" in ways that make them hard to recognise. Might want to not do that next time you bring up the subject.
I'm not sure what you're talking about. If you're talking about Palestine, you should try to judge an argument by its content rather than by whether it uses words that offend you. Your time is better spent addressing other people than me, trust me.
You were using the wrong words, that's it. I think it would be good for you to use the right ones instead, for several reasons, one being that you might not get mistaken for a Ruggiu kind of person.
See the first commentator’s George Carlin video on Euphemisms. None of his commentators mention it (yet) but it’s the best part of his comment IMO.
I’ll summarize the video’s transcripts here partially.
In WW1, it was called Shell Shock. That was 70 years ago.
In WW2, a generation later, it was called Battle Fatigue.
In the War in Korea in 1950, it was called Operational Exhaustion.
In the War in Vietnam and because of that war, it has been called Post-Tramatic Stress Disorder.
The NYT Article basically concludes that PTSD has been Shell Shock all along. Progress has been hampered by Euphamisms. If the combat veterans were diagnosed with Shell Shock, we might have a solution or remedy for it 70 years later.
This problem is pretty bad. U.S. soldiers are almost 9x more likely to die by suicide than by combat, according to a Pentagon internal study ending in 2019.
According to data published by the CDC, if you’re a white male (civilian/military/all) the main thing you have to do to live to see your 44th birthday is not die by suicide. The data says that’s a lot harder than it sounds as it’s the second leading cause of death in all age brackets up to age 44. A staggering 70% of all suicides are by white males. What societal factors are disproportionately affecting them?
Maybe put out an ad campaign that says “Suicide is selfish, misandrist, and racist.” Although that doesn’t treat the underlying issue(s) and causational factors. It’s similar to when Foxconn added nets to the upper floors of their iPhone factory.
However also confounded with the rise very different forms of warfare.
Prior to ww1 there were limited periods where you would live on edge - if you have to march armies into position and have pitched battles (e.g. Waterloo) the soldiers have some warning and mental preparation time.
WW1 saw the start of widespread normality of living in trenches and never knowing when the artillery shell might kill you.
I had a friend who had tinnitus from repeated exposure to explosions in the army. To combat his tinnitus he developed the habit of talking incessantly and at home would always have music playing. Sounds kinda funny but I could tell that it was having a significantly negative impact on his life.
I think it's probably both. I think the negative consequences of being in a war increased significantly after the invention of artillery, but also psychological stuff was under-reported the farther you go back in time.
