Neurasthenia – A Disease For the 20th Century

~ Meg

The years leading up to the Great War were a time of huge upheaval. The dizzying pace of change which preceded the outbreak of hostilities undoubtedly set the stage for that horrible conflict. The turn of the century brought with it rapid technological advancement as well as changes in the roles of women and a blurring of the previous century’s class structure. The world was shifting on its axis and a new feeling of anxiety presented itself during those times.

Neurasthenia was the name given to this new dis-ease, which affected more men than women —a surprise to the establishment, given its similarity to hysteria, which was largely viewed as a female disease. (On a side note, hysteria was an overused, misogynistic diagnosis. Have a bad day? Hysterical. Don’t feel like having sex tonight? Hysterical. A woman could be labeled hysterical for simply disagreeing with her husband’s demands. It was diabolical. Anyway…) The psychiatrists saw this nervous exhaustion as a result of the fast pace of life in the modern world. For example, with the advent of the assembly line, manufacturing was transformed from a system in which one worker saw the building or assembly of the product from start to finish to one in which the product was built or assembled by a team of workers each repetitively performing one task. The faster the process, the more machines built, the more units sold, with lower the cost to the consumer and more profits to the company. The pace could be as frenetic as the work was mind numbing.

The condition was even more common among the professional class: doctors, lawyers, judges and businessmen were finding it difficult to cope with their lives. The pressure to work hard, play hard resulted in irritability, sleep deprivation, depression, various physical pains and eventual breakdown. Those professions in which new technology was being employed suffered the greatest. Telephone operators, typesetters, railway workers, and engineers working on ever faster machines struggled to keep up. All throughout the Western World, the numbers of new diagnoses of neurasthenia rose at a frightening pace. For example, in Germany, just over 40,000 patients were registered in mental hospitals in 1870. By 1900, that number had risen to nearly 116,000 and to 220,000 by 1910. These numbers don’t include those who consulted a doctor without being admitted to hospital or those who spent time in a private sanatorium for respite. One German doctor called the illness ‘the pathological signature of the time in which we are living.’

Imagine a world where the great powers were rapidly developing their economies, competing for dominance in the colonial holdings, embracing new technologies, expanding their military might and simultaneously trying to hold on to the political systems of the past. The working classes were primed for revolution and the professional classes were having nervous breakdowns. It was a recipe for disaster and inevitably culminated in a global catastrophe like the world had never seen before.

Published by Meg

Easily amused, never bored and constantly distracted. My creative pursuits include writing, drawing, painting and photography.

17 thoughts on “Neurasthenia – A Disease For the 20th Century”

      1. Call it PTSD and I think we all do have it in one degree or another.

        Just as those who experienced any degree of WW2 had “it”. And by “it’ I mean sustained and /or repeated periods of uncertainty, life or death moments, existential experiences of being bombed, or bereaved or living with constant anxiety and fear.

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  3. Interesting…. and even more so that it seems to be the condition of today’s world as well.

    I wonder if people will someday hark back to the time when they only had to work 40 hour weeks, those halcyon days of long ago when they’d come into an inbox of only a thousand emails or on the social side be content with just a few hundred likes per hour on their latest Facegram post.

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    1. Exactly. I thought the same thing. It’s happening again and manifesting in a similar way: depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol addiction. A tragic result of getting caught up in the wave of modernity

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  5. As others have pointed out, we see history repeating, once again. Today’s deaths of despair are becoming epidemic (suicide, overdoses, alcoholism, etc.). Technology is a pitiless master. Thanks for sharing this research. Fascinating, in a tragic sort of way.

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  6. ‘Imagine a world where the great powers were rapidly developing their economies, competing for dominance in the colonial holdings, embracing new technologies, expanding their military might and simultaneously trying to hold on to the political systems of the past.’

    Yeah, imagine… 😨

    Oh. *tugs collar* Oh, right. Oof.

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