05/17/2026
For those of us with Scots ancestors, and all the others who survived war and its ensuing trauma, carried in our DNA.
PTSD After Culloden: What Surviving Soldiers Couldn’t Say Out Loud
Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that I’m approaching Culloden and its aftermath through a lens that differs from most of what I’ve encountered in historical discussion.
History tends to focus on military movements, politics, leadership, casualties, and cultural aftermath. All of it important. All of it necessary.
But I cannot help looking towards the nervous systems of the people who survived.
What happens to human beings after surviving terror, displacement, violence, cultural eradication, grief, and prolonged fear? What happens to communities forced immediately from devastation into survival? What happens when those experiences unfold without language, treatment, safety, or any understanding of trauma itself?
That is the lens through which I wrote this piece.
….
This is something that has been weighing on my heart for several years, and it was one of the very first things I wondered about when I began learning my family’s story.
I spent a long time searching for answers and coming up empty, until I realised I had been looking in the wrong places. I had to shift my perspective back to music, and start searching in spaces where I might not have suspected to find much.
Instead, I found a wealth of information.
It helped me tie everything together.
And I want to share this tender subject because, as I’ve shared recently, this is very dear to my heart and has been since the beginning of my life. And of course, the first place I wanted to go in learning what happened was towards how those who survived fared - because it aligns with my life’s work. But it also reaches outward now, into my own family, and into everyone who walked beside them and endured this catastrophic series of events that still affects generations, including mine, to this day.
We usually talk about PTSD in the context of modern war.
Shell shock.
Trench trauma.
Combat stress.
But long before the Great War, long before clinical language existed, the Highlands experienced something just as devastating.
At Culloden Battlefield, the battle itself was only the opening wound.
For smaller clans and ordinary Highland families, Culloden wasn’t simply a military defeat.
It was total rupture.
Mass graves instead of funerals.
Burned homes and confiscated livestock.
Arrests, executions, forced oaths.
Bans on tartan, weapons, and Gaelic.
Surveillance of survivors.
Displacement and poverty.
There was no space to grieve.
People went straight into survival.
From a modern lens, we would recognise this as acute trauma followed by chronic nervous-system collapse layered with hypervigilance.
But in 1746, there was no language for PTSD.
So the trauma went underground.
Many families never recovered bodies. Sons and brothers were buried anonymously in clan pits. Widows didn’t receive closure. Children didn’t receive explanations.
Loss became private.
Muted.
Carried in the body.
Immediately afterward, Highlanders weren’t allowed the luxury of emotional processing. They had to hide relatives, find food, avoid soldiers, keep their heads down, protect what little remained.
This creates a very specific trauma pattern - freeze and function.
You keep moving while something inside you shuts off.
And that state can last generations.
Culloden wasn’t only about lives lost.
It was about identity being criminalised.
Language. Dress. Music. Kinship. Clan structure.
All suddenly dangerous.
For smaller clans especially, this produced what we now call collective or intergenerational trauma:
don’t be seen
don’t stand out
don’t draw attention
survive by blending
That emotional posture became inherited.
Not taught.
Absorbed.
People often ask whether the surviving soldiers wrote about it.
They didn’t, not in memoirs like we see after WWI.
Most Jacobite soldiers were illiterate. Speaking openly could get you imprisoned or transported. Former fighters were actively monitored.
Silence equalled safety.
So instead of journals, trauma shows up indirectly.
In church records noting “melancholy” or withdrawal.
In estate documents listing sudden disappearances.
In spikes in emigration.
In references to heavy drinking.
In increased domestic violence.
In ministers describing men as “hollow,” “changed,” or “spiritless.”
Behavioural evidence, not emotional testimony.
Survivors were often described as quieter, harder, disconnected, prone to alcohol, less engaged with community life.
Not because they were bad men.
Because their nervous systems had been shattered.
British military surgeons and parish doctors also recorded:
persistent insomnia
night agitation
startling from sleep
tremors
sweating
panic upon waking
chest tightness
digestive disorders
nervous exhaustion
They called it “melancholy,” “nervous disorder,” or “disordered passions.”
They did not yet have the word PTSD.
But they knew war broke people.
Reverends documented men who no longer took pleasure in company or kirk. Estate managers complained of formerly steady tenants becoming unreliable or withdrawn. Kirk session records show sharp rises in drunkenness citations and domestic disturbances.
Alcohol wasn’t moral failure.
It was self-medication.
And the trauma didn’t stop with the men.
Ministers began recording children who became silent, aggressive, detached, or “unmanageable.” Orphans increased. Early labour placements rose. Some children stopped speaking altogether.
That is secondary trauma exposure.
Intergenerational PTSD, long before we had language for it.
Whole communities changed.
Villages that once gathered for music and storytelling grew quiet. Observers described them as hollowed.
Entire families left the Highlands in sudden waves. Not just economic migration.
Trauma migration.
People fled landscapes saturated with violence.
And though I’ve touched on this previously in another piece, I would be remiss if I did not name another layer of trauma here as well.
Sexual violence.
After Culloden, British troops moved through Highland communities with near total impunity. Estate records and kirk session minutes quietly document assaults on women and girls. Some cases appear as sudden pregnancies. Others surface as “moral transgressions” recorded against victims rather than perpetrators. Many never appear at all.
Women carried this trauma silently, often while simultaneously grieving dead husbands, sons, and brothers.
There was no justice system for them.
No language for consent.
No recognition of sexual trauma.
Just survival.
This matters, because sexual violence profoundly alters the nervous system. It reshapes attachment. It impacts parenting. It affects how safety is experienced in the body.
So now we are not only looking at combat trauma.
We are looking at layered trauma:
war
occupation
cultural erasure
sexual assault
bereavement
displacement
All unfolding at once.
And here is something modern medicine now understands that deepens this picture even further.
Today, we know that people who are within a blast radius, even far outside the kill zone, often sustain traumatic brain injury. Shockwaves alone can alter brain tissue. Add concussive forces, head impacts, explosions, fi****ms, cannon fire, bodies colliding in close combat.
Now imagine Culloden.
Cannons.
Musket volleys.
Explosions.
Charging lines.
Falls.
Blows to the head.
Shockwaves rippling across open moorland.
The men who survived did not return home carrying only psychological trauma. Some quite likely returned with injured brains as well, though no one at the time would have understood that this applied.
Many would have been living with undiagnosed traumatic brain injury.
TBI alters emotional regulation.
It affects impulse control.
It disrupts sleep.
It heightens aggression or withdrawal.
It impairs memory and judgement.
And PTSD overlaps with TBI so closely that even today it often takes careful untangling to determine which is driving which.
Back then, no one knew.
So these men came home with shattered nervous systems - some who may indeed have incurred traumatic brain injury - trying to re-enter civilian life inside communities that were themselves traumatised, under surveillance, stripped of culture, and living in fear.
This matters.
Because when we talk about the drinking, the violence, the emotional collapse, the broken families that followed Culloden, we are not looking at moral failure.
We are looking at unrecognised neurological injury layered on top of catastrophic psychological trauma and sexual violence.
This is tender territory.
There is no one to vilify here.
Only human beings pushed far beyond what bodies and minds were ever meant to endure.
Highlanders didn’t process trauma through written memoir.
They processed it through music, poetry, and oral memory.
The Gaelic laments that emerge after Culloden do not sound like victory songs.
They mourn absence. Youth. Broken futures. Exile.
They carry the emotional record when speech was unsafe.
Songs like:
Mo Rùn Geal Òg
My Fair Young Darling - often understood as mourning young men lost in battle or executed after the Rising, a love song on the surface and a grief song underneath.
Cumha na Cloinne
The Lament of the Children - a collective cry for orphaned and abandoned children, one of the clearest emotional records of post-Culloden family rupture.
Òran Eile don Phrionnsa
Another Song for the Prince - a sorrowful address to Bonnie Prince Charlie, layered with defeat, longing, and emotional aftermath.
Tha mi sgìth ’n fhògar seo
I Am Weary of This Exile - a stark expression of displacement and homesickness, written from the perspective of someone forced from their homeland.
These are not heroic anthems.
They are nervous-system documents.
They encode despair, grief, and rupture in melody because language itself had become dangerous.
Culloden trauma didn’t live in books.
It lived in bodies.
In parenting patterns.
In emotional restraint.
In migration.
In silence.
In music.
It moved down family lines.
Unspoken.
Unprocessed.
Inherited.
So when descendants feel a deep pull towards Culloden, a somatic grief, or a quiet familiarity with endurance and watchfulness, that isn’t imagination.
That may be part of why the grief still feels strangely familiar to some descendants.
Highland PTSD existed long before the term did.
And it was compounded by traumatic brain injury and sexual violence no one understood.
Smaller clans survived Culloden by going emotionally quiet, practically focused, and internally fractured.
Their trauma wasn’t documented in journals.
It was carried in songs, in behaviour, and in bloodlines.
If you want to find these people, if you want to meet them where they were or where they stood, you will find them in the music. That’s where they’re waiting.
And with them, you’ll find my heart.
My life’s work centres around helping combat veterans and survivors of severe trauma heal from the very kinds of wounds discussed here.
I work with combat veterans and people moving through post-traumatic growth after severe, compounded trauma. I work primarily with men who have been through multiple combat deployments, alongside my work with veterans in equine-assisted therapy - where what someone brings out to put down can remain between them and the horse if they choose. They do not have to explain every wound aloud for healing to begin.
Yet most often, eventually, they do.
Because that grief, that pain, has had nowhere to land otherwise.
And human beings were never meant to carry unbearable things entirely alone.
And over the years, I’ve learned something important:
The symptomatology of trauma does not fundamentally change across eras.
Technology changes.
Weapons change.
Language changes.
Belief systems change.
The nervous system does not.
Human beings still freeze.
Still hypervigilate.
Still dissociate.
Still grieve.
Still carry shock in the body.
So when I look at Culloden through a modern trauma-informed lens, I do not see people who were weaker, more primitive, or somehow emotionally different from modern veterans.
I see the same injuries.
The same shattered sleep.
The same startle responses.
The same emotional numbing.
The same self-medication.
The same fractured attachment.
The same desperate attempt to survive after reality has been violently broken apart.
But without language.
Without support.
Without treatment.
Without protection.
Trauma didn’t end back then.
It carried forward.
It became combat PTSD.
It became TBI.
It became intergenerational grief.
It became bodies holding terror with no language for it.
It became people who don’t know why they ache.
The nervous system does not care what century it inhabits.
And perhaps that is part of why Culloden still feels so close to so many descendants now.
Some wounds do not disappear.
They simply travel quietly through bloodlines, behaviour, silence, music, and memory.
