I am going to deviate a bit from the standard format, here, to address your question. My answer is not very "historical" in nature. .

Are you familiar with the sociolinguistic frameworks of structuralism and post-structuralism? The core l conceit is that everything about the way you think is rooted in culturally-dependent conceptual understandings of language. Your words make your world.

This is not a new idea. "Logos" and epistemology have been inextricably linked since antiquity. But it was all described more thoroughly in the 20th century than in the past.

So, the idea goes, you, being from the Anglosphere, have an entirely distinct ontology and perception of the world than, say, the Penan people of Borneo. I will simply use the word "culture" to encapsulate the entirety of these ideas in the remainder of my post.

Now, contemporary psychological disciplines strongly agree with this understanding of human conscious thought. . But that is only the beginning. We are swiftly learning that culture reaches far deeper into your brain than your prefrontal cortex. It dictates how you feel fear and how you feel pain. It dictates emotional schema. That is, there is no universal definition of fear, anger, joy, lust...indeed, your processing of the phenomena of reality is a product of culture.

The universal nature of, say, fear, or anger, though, is that they are present in all human groups. They might be different across cultures, but they are never absent. PTSD is also a universal human experience, so far as we can tell. But, like emotions, what that PTSD changes is very culture-specific.

For instance, PTSD causes one to dissociate from the autobiographical self. But collectivist and individualistic cultures have very different perceptions of what me" is. The former is concerned with internal thoughts , and the latter with external impression.s To be clear , such culturally divergent self-construals have been found to impact the very nature of individual experience and modulate brain functions governing emotional well-being and thinking, so, already, PTSD is going to manifest very differently on these two ends of the spectrum..

All the other features of PTSD - fear dysregulation, intrusive involuntary memories, are likewise radically altered across cultures.

Thus, I offer that this is not an answerable question, ans it is forever unknowable. Because the Iliad could be full of Bronze Age Near Eastern manifestations of PTSD, but we do not have the ingrained cultural knowledge to understand them.

You've received a really interesting answer from u/Emperorofprussia

You'll find this is such a common question it has a whole section in the Military History FAQ: https://reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/w/faq/militaryhistory?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app (sometimes links to the faq don't work right especially since it's coming from my android app but it's prominently featured under Military History)

What's interesting about their answer is it agrees and supplements many of the answers in the FAQ. To probably badly summarize the gist of the answers, the things that caused ptsd back then are probably different from now because of different cultures and corresponding very different attitudes towards life: your own and your wartime enemy's. When you see ptsd-like symptoms described it might be in the context of failure and dishonor, rather than violence, for example.

That's not entirely different from now of course, I think most soldiers would tell you that making a mistake that puts their comrades in danger is top of their fears.

Thank you. This is very informative; I really appreciate your compiling the source list for further study.