#Shell Shock

[l3sbian-s0nia]

Goku after watching Krillin explode and die on Namek

[pizzawithwine]

Summer vibes are in full force

[yourespellbound]

"What The Guns Left Behind"

[redd956]

Writing Reference: Trauma Aging the Appearance

For my fellow angsty and whumpy writers who are writing characters that have been through a lot.

Does trauma actually speed up one's aging?

Yes, and no. Studies show mixed evidence, that requires more looking into as it's more complex than initially thought.

We mostly know that some people do seem to age faster during trauma like violence or some abuse, but not as much so for poverty or neglect. Genetic factors might play a role. People who seemed to age faster would have puberty earlier than others and even show signs of accelerated aging at a cellular level.

We're still doing ongoing research about what this means and what decides this.

The general theory behavioral scientists and biologists are leaning on is that aging faster during in dangerous traumatic times serves an evolutionary advantage.

As for adults, significant results show that depression can be a damper of lifespan, especially for elders, but there's a lot outside of trauma that influences this.

Graying Hair

Stress, not even just trauma, but stress alone can gray your hair. Genetics can play a role of course, but you've ever seen a single mom you know that they have to buy lots of hair dye.

Many hormones and chemicals activate when stressed, and double so when entering a form of shock, adrenaline rush, or total despair. One of those chemicals is norepinephrine.

Norepinephrine actually affects your melanocyte stem cells, the exact cells that stand at the base of each string of hair, and if these melanocytes die off they can't be replaced and the hair happens to lose pigment.

People typically start to gray around their forehead, sides of their faces, and central scalp. It takes a long time for someone's whole head of hair to completely gray, and usually someone will rock half-grayed hair for a long while before aging catches up if their gray is caused from stress. Facial hair can also gray.

Wrinkles and Tear Troughs

Dark eye circles, stress wrinkles, deep tear troughs, heavy eye bags... We've all heard it. Do these actually happen though?

Yes, absolutely. I can even vouch anecdotal evidence, as a severe abuse survivor myself, if you pull up old pictures of me I look like I was just pulled out of someone's back shed that had a magical portal to a world war.

Stress Wrinkles

Stress causes tenseness, and that includes in the face. This tenseness for long periods of time can cause wrinkles, especially in individuals past their late twenties. Some common stress wrinkles we see is between the eye brows known as frown lines, forehead lines, bunny lines that are between the nose and cheeks often near the nostril area, and smile lines that around the mouth.

Tear Troughs

Those lines you typically see right at the top of the nose and underneath the eyes are actually deep tear trough lines, I have these myself.

They can sometimes give the appearance of sunken eyes, dark circles, and heavier eye bags due to lighting on your face. Deep ones are referred to in the cosmetic industry as tear trough deformities. They can be caused by genetics of course, but also heavy sleep deprivation, dehydration, stress, and significant weight loss.

Many would describe their appearance as making a person always look extremely tired. They can also have a sort of darker hue to them as they leave the skin thin against your sockets. They can help eye bags form as well.

Eye Bags & Dark Circles

When you're always tired or experiencing a lack of sleep the muscles around the eyes can become strained, leading to puffiness and color tinting. Fatigue, depression, and lack of sleep messed with your blood flow. We can the see the results of so in places with thin skin such as the eye area.

Inflammation, dehydration, malnourishment, and weight loss cause these areas to discolor as well.

Sunken Eyes

One day I found an old picture of my brother and I. We looked mostly like normal kids besides our eerily sunken eyes.

Sunken eyes look different from eyebags and dark circles, and you typically know when you see them because they leave you feeling chilled or spooked. Something just looks so very very wrong in them. They are dramatic, really really dramatic, and can even be frightening depending on their severity.

Dehydration is a major player in causing sunken eyes, as well as damage to the facial structure from physical trauma. Sleep deprivation can cause it. Pair this with all the other above stress agers, and one can walk out into the world with a sunken appearance.

Sunken eyes can appear very dark, red, purple, or black even, and leave deep grooves underneath the eye. They can cause the eyelids to appear droopy, and the eyes intense and bulging. The eyes are literally deeper into the socket and they truly are best described as sunken.

Sunken eyes can also cause eye dryness, give the face a sense of asymmetry in eye positioning, cause double vision, difficulty focusing, and a sagging look to the skin around the eyes and eyelids.

Thousand Yard Stare & PTSD Eyes

I'm sure you've seen the famous artwork by Thomas Lea going about capturing an American soldier looking to the perspective with these horrific eyes.

PTSD eyes and the thousand yard stare are two completely different things.

Thousand Yard Stare

The thousand yard stare is a biological response people can have due to extreme violence and danger such as war. Wikipedia describes the stare as blank and unfocused. It is a reaction to shellshock or CSR which are both really terms for active PTSD while still under extreme duress such as in war combat.

In fact there are plenty other reactions that can happen alongside the thousand yard stare or in its stead, including...

Catatonia

Hypervigilance

Dissociative Amnesia

Uncontrollable Laughter

Tremors

Headaches/Migraines

Tinnitus

Neurasthenia (Sudden Muscle Weakness)

Mutism

Fugue

Sensory Overload

Screaming

Paralysis

Fear Response

Dissociation

And many many more

This is shellshock/combat stress reaction, and these things actually aren't limited to those in war. Anyone experiencing any kind of extreme shock in traumatic situation such as sexual assaults, murder, sudden death of a loved one, torture, kidnapping, and more.

These things very much often develop into PTSD, and although a rare reaction to returning extreme stress, those with PTSD can sometimes mimic these reactions during a flashback episode.

PTSD Eyes

Then what is PTSD eyes?

PTSD Eyes is a term coined to describe that sort of unique look in the eyes that those with PTSD can exhibit. This is caused by a lack of pupil reaction to threatening or upsetting imagery compared to the average person, and meanwhile an exaggerated reaction to nonthreatening imagery.

People with PTSD eyes can actually have a harder time focusing on things with their sight. This can also give people with PTSD a general unfocused sort of look.

In a series of pictures showing soldiers before, during, and after war we can see this very often in the after image.

Weight Loss

Malnutrition and starvation is extremely hard on the body, and very dangerous. It will show in every facet on your appearance. Your face can grow sunken and sharp, your arms and chest boney and gangly, and the muscles and bone structure underneath starts to show.

Often times trauma and weight loss can go hand in hand, not even through relation, but just due to circumstance.

Pale Complexion

Pallor, or medical paleness, can be a result of fatigue and stress, giving the skin a paler or grayer appearance.

Other causes can be shock, malnutrition, vitamin deficiencies, anemia, recent blood loss, and even low blood sugar. After some time and care to the body people will eventually brighten back up.

Extra Sources & Farewell

Here's some awesome sources if you want to look into things even more!

[chachaco1998]

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - The IDW Collection TPB #3

Michelangelo is a little angel 🥹🥹🥹

[ashintheairlikesnow]

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

Yuri Ivanovich Pimenov, Disabled Veterans, 1926.

Walter Benjamin on World War I: “A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body.” “This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling class sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath.”

Education of the Movements of the Wounded Soldier,” from Jules Amar, The Physiology of Industrial Organization (1918).

Henry Ford on mass production: The production of the Model T required 7,882 distinct work operations, but, Ford noted [in his 1923 autobiography], only 12% of these tasks—only 949 operations—required “strong, able-bodied, and practically physically perfect men.” Of the remainder—and this is clearly what he sees as the major achievement of his method of production— “we found that 670 could be filled by legless men, 2,637 by one-legged men, two by armless men, 715 by one-armed men and ten by blind men.” ///

Walter Benjamin’s understanding of modern experience was neurological. It centered on shock. Benjamin wanted to investigate the “fruitfulness” of Freud’s hypothesis, that consciousness parries shock by preventing it from penetrating deep enough to leave a permanent trace on memory, by applying it to “situations far removed from those which Freud had in mind." Freud was concerned with war neurosis, the trauma of “shell shock” and catastrophic accident that plagued soldiers in World War I. Benjamin claimed that this battlefield experience of shock had become “the norm” in modern life. Perceptions that once occasioned conscious reflection were now the source of shock impulses which consciousness must parry. Nowhere was this defensive reflex more apparent than in the factory, where (Benjamin cited Marx) “workers learn to coordinate their own ‘movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton.’” “Independently of the worker’s volition, the article being worked on comes within his range of action and moves away from him just as arbitrarily.” Exploitation was here to be understood as a cognitive category, not an economic one. The factory system, injuring every one of the human senses, paralyzed the imagination of the worker, whose labor was “sealed off from experience”; memory was replaced by conditioned response, learning by “drill,” skill by repetition: “practice counts for nothing.” Under conditions of modern technology, the aesthetic system undergoes a dialectical reversal. The human sensorium changes from a mode of being “in touch” with reality into a means of blocking out reality. Aesthetics—sensory perception—becomes anaesthetics, a numbing of the senses’ cognitive capacity that destroys the human organism’s power to respond politically even when self-preservation is at stake. Someone who is “past experiencing,” writes Benjamin, is “no longer capable of telling . . . proven friend . . . from mortal enemy.”

- Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2000. p. 103-104

[itsyveinthesky]

This video shows a soldier suffering from shell shock

(there are no injuries or casualties in this video, however you can hear gunshots as the soldiers are being shelled)

Shellshock soldiers are prone to shoot friendly fire. You can see his comrade being aware of that danger as he moves the rifle out of the way the moment he realizes its a shell shock condition.

It's possible that the shell shocked soldier thought a Russian soldier was talking to him, since his comrade first ask him if he was ok in Russian (A huge percentage of Ukrainians speak Russian as their first language to this day because Ukrainian was not seen as important during the USSR and these things take generations to change). To which you can hear him scream "Ukrayina'! (Україна)" which makes his buddy switch to Ukrainian to assure him he is not the enemy.

The assurance of his comrade immediately pushed him back into reality as he goes out of his catatonic state within a second after hearing "Yes, Ukaine" as if his brain has locked in again.

This video captures so many elements of the raw savagery that is war - the shell shocked soldier, the bullets flying through the air, the massive explosion in the background and the retreating platoon.

[silentzombies]

COMING SOON...

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[loozzerpupp]

theres a chance that alonso might retire in a few years..,

[oxventurequotes]

dob: it was one of those situations where we had to leave because there were lots of witnesses.

dob: to crimes that we had committed.

corazon: that we were tangentially involved in!

[shellshockedstudio]

Transformers the movie

Arise Rodimus Prime click to see full image Transformers: The Movie holds a special place in my heart. As a kid, it was the first time I realized that your heroes can fall—and it’s up to someone else to rise and take charge. I’ve watched this film more times than I can count and the soundtrack? Let’s just say it’s been on repeat for a lifetime. Art and after effects by me Colors by Wilson…

[mysticaltora8276]

So quick question to the Tumblr website for everyone to see. How many people got into Beetlejuice via the cartoon only to see the movie later on in life and we’re a little bit shall we say shellshocked at the total difference of the two? Because that happened with me. I saw the cartoon as a kid then when I heard there was a movie I was excited and then I saw the movie and while I enjoyed it, I remember thinking “wow this was nothing like the cartoon I grew up with.”

[guy60660]

Marc Andre Fleury | Cole Redhorse Taylor | Shell Shock

[doctormastertardis]

Peri Brown and sexual abuse?

Apart from one novel, it was never mentioned again that Peri was supposedly sexually abused by her step-father Howard (who was in Planet of Fire). I find that strange. Even the TV writers and producers of the episode said in a commentary that they never intend for Howard, her stepfather, to have a "sexually abusive" relationship toward his step-daughter Peri DESPITE the novel "Shell Shock" mentioning it... I don't know if we're supposed to just presume that the sexual abuse from her stepfather was just "another reality"??

In another novel, Peri supposedly married her childhood sweetheart, who was abusive to her... in which the story mentions her step-father being WORRIED about her (thereby indicating that there was "not" sexual abuse in her childhood from her step-father Howard).

ANYWAY! What is with male writers obsession with PUTTING HER CHARACTER IN SEXUALLY VUNERABLE SITUATIONS ?????? I mean we already know how much the TV series sexualized Peri Brown.

What do Whovians think about this? A part of me appreciate that the novelization of the series tried to explore "monsters" in realistic situations like child abuse... but another part of me is like, NOOOO DO NOT PUT PERI IN ANOTHER SEXUALLY VULNERABLE AND PREDATORY SITUATION!

I genuinely want to know what other Whovians think about this.

[vikkicomics]

Why does Otto always deny about his shell-shock? (And poor him fr... And not only him...)

Thanks for your question. Otto finds it difficult to accept his weaknesses and as long as he does that he can't self-improve. He thinks if he pretends he is not mentally ill it will go away. This is a pretty common misunderstanding of mental illness, often someone is too afraid to unpack their trauma or accept that they need help.

Otto's attitude is NOT reflective of the German cultural opinion on it at that time; in that point in the war, every other culture considered shellshock to be the same thing as corwardice, while the Germans considered it a desease of the mind and subsequently cured it before anyone else. I say 'culture' because although it was mostly Military Establishments making decisions about how to diagnose soldiers, British men, on leave, with shellshock, were much more likely to be harassed by civilian women for exhibiting any feeling other than bravery and stoicicism, whilst German women were more understanding of trauma and aversion to violence and loud noises ect. One of the most famous indicators for that is that in Britain a man would be given a white feather to simbolise cowardice if he was seen in civilian dress. This is one example of many comparatively harsher and more ignorant attitudes in English culture in this period. But since Otto is German, the social pressure is not there, this speaks to his relationship with the zietgeist, because regardless of the social pressures, he himself has decided that Shellshock is unacceptable.