These Famous Historical Figures Were Probably Traumatized and Mentally Ill

Changing perspectives on the biggest (disordered) personalities in history.

Photo by Peter Burdon on Unsplash

We have learned a colossal amount about trauma over the last two decades. Specifically, we’ve learned a lot about the costs of developmental trauma and the long-term consequences traumatic experiences can have on the brain and the rest of the nervous system.

This knowledge is interesting when one looks at it through the historical lens and the figures who dwell in the past. Knowing that the human brain has changed little in 10,000 years, we must assume then that the same experiences that rattle us and leave us scared had the same effects on our historical ancestors.

The entire way you see history changes when you look at it through a trauma-informed lens. It’s a bizarrely binding thread between the past and the present. Whoever it is you love most in history — be that Anne Boleyn, Leonardo da Vinci, Boudicea, Sacagawea, George Washington, or Amelia Earheart — the way you understand them shifts when you realize that they were battling their minds and their bodies much in the same way we do now.

The human nervous system is a constant.

Many look back at history with a distanced eye. They imagine that the people who existed hundreds or thousands of years ago were entirely different from them in every way. It’s easy and comfortable to assume that they were either primitive or admirably stoic. Any atrocities they committed, any strangeness they may have possessed, was sourced from a different pot of humanity.

Unfortunately, none of that is true. The past is irrevocably linked to the present, and one of the core binding threads of that unity lies inside the human brain, largely unchanged biologically in more than ten millennia.

While the outside world shifts shape and takes new forms, the human brain remains a constant. We still process the world much in the same way we always have. The same emotions are experienced. The same events inflict terror, anxiety, unease, and unhappiness. This reality leads us to a stark realization.

If the brain, the core of our complex nervous system, is unchanged. That means its response to trauma is also relatively unchanged. Your grandmother’s neural pathways were just as damaged by the neglect she experienced. You great-great-great-great-grandfather? His vagus nerve was probably just as deactivated (or overactivated).

Yes, we know more about our trauma now, but the body remains the same. It still is damaged and affected by the emotional trauma it experiences and has been for hundreds of thousands of human generations. Do you understand what that means? Take a new look at your favorite historical figures through a trauma-informed lens.