Not sure if this enough of an answer, but I really recommend ‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England’ by Ian Mortimer. It gives a great insight into daily life across the social spectrum and all over the country, which will put a bit more context onto the bare bones of high infant mortality rates and lack of anaesthetic.

Re GoT - this has absolutely nothing to do with medieval Europe, or anywhere else. It’s a modern writer using the aesthetics of medieval Europe, as filtered through centuries of storytelling - and the last few decades of post-Tolkien fantasy in particular- to tell an epic as salaciously & violently as possible. As a rule of thumb, dramas set in historical periods- or fantasy lands that bare bear some superficial resembles resemblance to historical periods - tell us a lot more about what the writer/contemporary culture thinks about those periods than the periods themselves. So for GRRM, and arguably our society more widely, ‘medieval’ means a savage time of family politics and viciously imposed gender roles, before society was ‘tamed’ by the politeness and rationality of the Enlightenment. This is a good landscape for a story, but doesn’t tell us anything about how medieval people actually lived.

In the first instance, what is ‘medieval’? Is it a time period applicable to the whole of Eurasia between the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and the start of the Early Modern period c. 1500? That’s 1000 years of history across China, India, Arabia, Europe. So it’s obviously nonsense to talk about what ‘medieval life’ was like as a whole.

As your reference is GoT, I’ll assume you’re talking about medieval Europe. Again, 1000 years of history is a long time, with massive societal changes - the rise of Christianity among them. There were a lot of wars and other conflicts, but they were by no means constant. The 100 Year’s War for example (the one with Joan of Arc) was a big deal in France bc it caused so much suffering in the country, as farms were ransacked and cities cut off from supplies. It’s theorised that Joan of Arc came to prominence bc everyone was so desperate, they needed a source of a inspiration to cling to. This tells us that it wasn’t always like that. Within most people’s memories were more peaceful times, when only the very poor suffered real want (like in rich countries today).

Another earlier example is Lindisfarne. This was an island where a monastery was built in the early 600s that was famously attacked by Vikings in 793, marking the start of the ‘Viking Age’. The attack shocked Christian Europe, because the idea you’d need to defend a monastery was unthinkable. Lindisfarne in particular was a famous centre of learning, and had produced the Lindisfarne Gospels, a beautiful set of illuminated manuscripts. So again you have the contrast between the famous moment of violence and the peace that made it shocking - in this case, c.160 years of worship, scholarship, and artistic endeavour that felt so secure that the attack marked the beginning of a new age.

The vikings - or more specifically, the Viking sagas - are, along with Shakespeare’s history plays, the main cultural touchstones for GoT that give it that medieval ’feel’. You’ll notice they’re both fiction - stories to entertain, elucidate certain morals or ways of looking at the world, and demonstrate the rightness of certain ways of holding or exercising power. So they focus on the exciting bits - the drama of violence and betrayal. They’re not interested in the merchant’s apprentice carefully marking the stock in the ledger, the women churning butter and making beer, the ploughman walking home after another day in the field.

So no, not everyone had PTSD or was a ‘psychopath’, and getting info about medieval life from GoT makes absolutely no sense.

If you’re interested in getting more of a sense of the breadth of life and culture in ‘medieval times’, other than Mortimer, I’d recommend the prologue to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales - and/or ‘Chaucer’s People’ by Liza Picard, which is a really fascinating look at putting the characters of Canterbury Tales into context. I also love Simon Armitage’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian legend from the 1400s, looking back to a ‘lost age’ of noble knights on heroic quests. Going earlier, the Mabinogion is a brilliant collection of Celtic myths put together in the 12th & 13th century, though they’re likely much older. For Vikings, I’d say start with Neil Gaiman’s Norse Myths, or a decent translation of Beowulf. All of them give a much fuller sense of life and how it was understood by people at the time - and hopefully the variety will prove that even in this tiny selection, life in the ‘middle ages’ defies homogenising reduction!