While our modern understanding of the psychological effects of warfare were as crude as the idea of "shell shock" even into the early twentieth century, I'm curious how the people of the ancient and medieval world (specifically the Mediterranean, Near East, and European milieus) dealt with the trauma of war and other forms of violence.

As an example, I've been re-reading John Julius Norwich's three-volume history of the Byzantine Empire and thinking about the experience of common people living in the Balkans and Anatolia in the centuries surrounding and during the first several Crusades. Wave after wave of warfare between the Bulgarian Empire and the Byzantines, the Byzantines and the Seljuk Turks, Crusaders and all of the above, etc.

Towns and cities besieged and sacked over and over again, countrysides marauded by rapacious armies... how did people cope with the constant and repeated threat (and reality) of hideous violence?

And this is not even to mention the soldiers themselves... do we have any insight into how the soldiery processed the experience of repeatedly hacking other humans apart with edged weapons while narrowly avoiding suffering the same fate?

Are there any sources which address the probability that large portions of the populace, both civilian and military, in the ancient and medieval world were likely living with PTSD on a generational scale?