![]() ![]() To capitalize on this epidemic, the Rexall drug company introduced a medication called 'Americanitis Elixir' which claimed to be a soother for any bouts related to neurasthenia.īeard, with his partner A.D. Marcel Proust was said to suffer from neurasthenia. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper also suffers under the auspices of rest cure doctors, much as Gilman herself did. Virginia Woolf was known to have been forced to have rest cures, which she describes in her book On Being Ill. Data from this period gleaned from the Annual Reports of Queen Square Hospital, London, indicates that the diagnosis was balanced between the sexes and had a presence within Europe. Weir Mitchell was the rest cure, especially for women. A common treatment promoted by neurologist S. Diagnosis įrom 1869, neurasthenia became a "popular" diagnosis, expanding to include such symptoms as weakness, dizziness and fainting. This use was often synonymous with the term “ brain fag”. In 19th-century Britain and, by extension, across the British Empire, neurasthenia was also used to describe mental exhaustion or fatigue in “brain workers” or in the context of “overstudy”. Eventually he separated it from anxiety neurosis, though he believed that a combination of the two conditions existed in many cases. Later, Freud formulated that in cases of coitus interruptus as well as in cases of masturbation, there was "an insufficient libidinal discharge" that had a poisoning effect on the organism, in other words, neurasthenia was the result of (auto‑)intoxication. In common with some other people of the time, he believed this condition to be due to "non-completed coitus" or the non-completion of the higher cultural correlate thereof, or to "infrequency of emissions" or the infrequent practice of the higher cultural correlate thereof. Typically, it was associated with upper class people and with professionals working in sedentary occupations, but really can apply to anyone who lives within the monetary system.įreud included a variety of physical symptoms into this category, including fatigue, dyspepsia with flatulence, and indications of intra-cranial pressure and spinal irritation. Physicians in the Beard school of thought associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and with stress suffered as a result of the increasingly competitive business environment. The condition was explained as being a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to modern civilization. Another (albeit rarely used) term for neurasthenia is nervosism. The condition is, however, described in the Chinese Society of Psychiatry's Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders.Īmericans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname " Americanitis" (popularized by William James ). It also is no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Neurasthenia was a diagnosis in the World Health Organization's ICD-10, but deprecated, and thus no more diagnosable, in ICD-11. Van Deusen associated the condition with farm wives made sick by isolation and a lack of engaging activity Beard connected the condition to busy society women and overworked businessmen. Also in 1868, New York neurologist George Beard used the term in an article published in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, neuralgia, and depressed mood. Van Deusen of the Kalamazoo asylum in 1869. Īs a psychopathological term, the first to publish on neurasthenia was Michigan alienist E. It became a major diagnosis in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after neurologist George Miller Beard reintroduced the concept in 1869. Neurasthenia (from the Ancient Greek νεῦρον neuron "nerve" and ἀσθενής asthenés "weak") is a term that was first used as early as 1829 for a mechanical weakness of the nerves. / ˌ nj ʊər ə s ˈ θ iː n i ə/ NURE-əs- THEE-nee-əįatigue, lethargy, stress-related headache, insomnia, irritability, malaise, restlessness, stress, and weariness Īnxiety, asthenia, chronic fatigue, fatigue, lethargy. ![]()
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