Did humans that lived hundreds or thousands of years ago have thicker skins than people in the modern era? I sometimes wonder if modern humanity causes more psychological trauma harm to itself than is necessary due to our expectations and world-view.
For example, if people in 1000BC felt it was a natural occurrence to have neighboring tribes rape pillage and plunder perhaps they could brush a violent raid and attack off and get on with life in a way that someone from the modern era might not.
Are we right to look at atrocities which occurred in antiquity with the eyes of modern sensibilities? If the people who lived in ancient times wouldn't have thought those actions to be "atrocious" perhaps we shouldn't either.
On the other hand, if it really is true that modern man has a completely different set of sensibilities and psychological makeup than ancient man then perhaps there were things that would have made our ancestors psychological wrecks that we would just shrug off.
It's very difficult to say, as it's extremely difficult to diagnose any sort of mental/psychological trauma without interacting with the person face-to-face. However, we do have texts from the ancient Assyrians that appear to depict psychological trauma from the many wars that were part of daily life for Assyrian citizens. Some modern scholars take these depictions and see them as manifestations of something similar to what we would diagnose as PTSD. I've adapted a previous answer I've posted about PTSD in ancient times.
One recent study examined ancient Mesopotamian accounts and discovered behaviors that they attribute to PTSD in Assyrian warriors coming back from battle. (Abdul-Hamid, Walid Khalid, and Jamie Hacker Hughes. "Nothing New under the Sun: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders in the Ancient World." Early science and medicine 19.6 (2014): 549-557.) (PDF Warning)
In this study, they discussed the fact that basically the entire adult male population was subject to military service every three years. A number of them suffered from symptoms they believed were caused by the ghosts of the enemies they had killed during battle, causing uneasiness and other symptoms. The authors of the study believe that if one of them were to walk into a clinic today and be diagnosed, it would be called PTSD.
They cite several examples of ancient Assyrian medical texts describing symptoms of people afflicted in this way:
14.34 “If his words are unintelligible for three days […]37 his mouth [F…] and he experiences wandering about for three days in a row F…1.”
14.35 “He experiences wandering about (for three) consecutive (days)”; this means: “he experiences alteration of mentation (for three) consecutive (days).”
14.36 “If his words are unintelligible and depression keeps falling on him at regular intervals (and he has been sick) for three days F…]”
Also,
19.32 “If in the evening, he sees either a living person or a dead person or someone known to him or someone not known to him or anybody or anything and becomes afraid; he turns around but, like one who has [been hexed with?] rancid oil, his mouth is seized so that he is unable to cry out to one who sleeps next to him, ‘hand’ of ghost (var. hand of […]).”
19.33 “[If] his mentation is altered so that he is not in full possession of his faculties, ‘hand’ of a roving ghost; he will die.”
19.34 “If his mentation is altered, […] (and) forgetfulness(?) (and) his words hinder each other in his mouth, a roaming ghost afflicts him. (If) […], he will get well.”
(I'm not sure which tablets these inscriptions come from, as they are not cited as I would expect, given that the article is a medical journal rather than an archaeological one)
Another example they cite is the description of the King of Elam (a Near Eastern polity located in western Iran) and how his "mind changed" after a war.
As I mentioned above, they would not have called it "trauma" or "mental illness" or "post-traumatic stress" and they would not have understood it the way we do today. Their opinion of the cause of these symptoms was basically being haunted by the ghosts of the enemies that you killed on the battlefield. There is in fact some similarity there, as one could poetically describe modern PTSD among soldiers in similar terms.
The really tricky part is whether these ancient stresses and reactions to the violence and brutality of war result in the same disorder as PTSD, or whether there are subtleties that make modern PTSD and the modern stresses that cause it a different ailment. We can't directly diagnose an Assyrian soldier haunted by the ghosts of the enemies he killed, so we can't answer that question, all we can do is interpret what they tell us about their lives in a framework that we can understand.
The article I cited above describes several other ancient accounts of afflictions resulting from battle stress, including a soldier who fought in the battle of Marathon, who suffered from blindness that appears to be psychosomatic in nature, resulting from psychological trauma suffered during the battle:
Epizelus, the son of Cuphagorus, an Athenian soldier, was fighting bravely when he suddenly lost sight of both eyes, though nothing had touched him anywhere – neither sword, spear, nor missile. From that moment he continued blinded as long as he lived. I am told that in speaking about what happened to him he used to say that he fancied he was opposed by a man of great stature in heavy armour, whose beard overshadowed his shield but the phantom passed him by and killed the man at his side. (p. 3)
Therefore, scholars believe we have depictions of mental illness similar to PTSD occurring during the time of the Assyrians, ~1300-600 BC. Given the depictions I have cited above, it seems clear to me that humans have been traumatized by the horrors of war for as long as there have been wars, and no, they were no less sensitive to it than we are today.