Hysteria

Question 1

In what field did the term ‘Hysteria’ originate?

Answer 1

Hysteria is a concept that originated in Psychiatry and is now a part of common language.

Question 2

What was another term for ‘hysteria’, back in earlier days? And when was this term coined?

Answer 2

‘Moron’, which was coined during research on intelligence around 1910.

Question 3

What is a modern example of what could be considered ‘hysteria’? For both girls and boys?

Answer 3

For women: ‘fan-girling’ - over the Beatles, Justin Bieber, etc.
For men: football crowds, when emotions get very high.

Question 4

One slide in the lecture had a picture from the 1950s of a women in ecstasy holding an apple, what was written under the picture?

Also - what did the apple represent?

Answer 4

‘Hysteria, a psychoneurotic disorder, involving intense emotionalism with various psychic and physical disturbances. It often results from repressed conflicts within the person, and occurs most frequently in young women.’

The apple was quite symbolic in that it represented repressed sexual desire.

Question 5

Before it was diagnosed in human beings, where was hysteria common?

Give two examples.

Answer 5

It was very common in novels before it was diagnosed in human beings, for example, Anna Karenina & Madame Bovary.

Question 6

Who was ‘Charlotte’?

Answer 6

Before the common prevalence of ‘hysteria’, Charlotte, a schoolgirl, was seen to have strange behaviour. She looked pale, had lost weight, became unresponsive, but something seemed to bother her.

At a picnic, where everyone was playing, Charlotte was not participating but staring off into the horizon. And then, she started to tremble all over, she was screaming and seemed to have an epileptic fit. She then fell asleep for 24 hours and didn’t remember what was happening. People thought she had experienced some sort of trauma.

Question 7

When/where did Hysteria first become popular?

Answer 7

In France in the 1880s, before it went over to Vienna where Freud picked it up. Then, it went to London and the US as a very typical condition treated by psychiatrists training in psychoanalysis.

Question 8

What are three main ideas underlying ‘hysteria’?

Answer 8

1. It is a ‘historical disease’: bound to time and place.
2. Very clear medical symptom: not just ‘in the head’.
3. Nonetheless, it is the enigma of medicine: ‘doctor cannot find anything’.

Question 9

When Sigmund Freud was visiting Charcot’s clinic, what did he discover about ‘hysteria’?

Answer 9

He believed that ‘hysteria’ behaves as though the nervous system does not exist.

Question 10

‘Hysteria’ was a fashionable new disease, did arise through a ‘grass-roots’ model, or a ‘hysteria’ model?

And by whom?

Answer 10

It arose through the ‘Hysteria’ model - no surprise there. However, there were people in different areas suffering from similar issues.

Charcot first introduced it, and then others took interest.

Question 11

Why did ‘hysteria’ become such a popular disorder at the time?

Answer 11

Different theories:

• because there is pain and suffering and people/their families wanted them to get better.
• The ‘framing’ theory: ‘hysteria’ is a framing disease that provides an outlet for pain, suffering, trauma, or violence (today there are different illnesses that do the same thing).
• ‘Symptom selection’: symptoms that are embraced depending on cultural factors. What symptoms are available at the time for expression of distress? A legitimate outlet to express mental distress that is bound by time, place and culture.

Question 12

What is ‘secondary gain’?

Answer 12

‘Secondary gain’ is a theory that people play the symptoms of illness to be rewarded, a popular theory for a long time. Anything to do with trauma has been looked at with suspicion.
E.g.:
- Shell shock: ticket home from war.
- Hysteria: no responsibilities.

But, what is the ‘reward’?

Question 13

What does the ‘secondary gain’ theory really indicate?

Answer 13

The suspicion that doctors have had about certain illnesses.

Question 14

What makes a mental disorder, like Hysteria, proliferate, become more common?

Answer 14

The attitudes and reactions of patients, their symptom selection. Recognition by physicians, and friends and family.

Question 15

What are the symptoms of ‘hysteria’?

Answer 15

Starts with ‘catalepsy’: fainting, trance states, rigidity of limbs, unresponsive.
Then we have ‘hysterical fits’: fits, convulsive attacks, screaming, extreme bodily movements.
They were, overtime, replaced by ‘hysterical paralysis’: paralysis, blindness, deafness, inability to speak (mutism).

Question 16

What is the course of the ‘hysteria’ disease?

Answer 16

• starts with: loss of appetite, weight loss, pains, headaches, stomach aches, wasting away.
• then, a traumatic event or shock, sets of a hysterical attack.
• symptoms appear: catalepsy.
• sometimes followed by convulsions.
• later, paralysis.

Question 17

What explanations were introduced to explain ‘hysteria’?

Answer 17

Charcot came up with different explanations for men and women.
Men: traumatic shock (e.g., railway accidents).
Women: it is in the female nature.

Question 18

What was the percentage of men vs. women of Charcot’s patients with ‘hysteria’?

Answer 18

Men: 10%.
Women: 90%.

Question 19

What was the general attitude of physicians toward hysteric patients?

Answer 19

Physicians generally didn’t like hysteric patients, because no matter what they did, the patients would just keep coming back.

Question 20

What were some earlier treatments for hysteria?

Answer 20

• denial, scolding, punishment and threat.
• suggestion (a form of hypnosis).
• hydrotherapy (hot and cold baths, electrotherapy (small waves of electricity through the body - like for neurasthenia).
• surgery (amputate limbs that were paralysed.
• hypnosis (people like to please the hypnotist, sometimes memories are constructed under hypnosis).

Question 21

Who was the first person to practice hypnosis and what did he call it?

Answer 21

An Austrian doctor called Franz Anton Mesmer, he called it ‘animal magnetism’. He believed there was a magnetic force between all human beings that could be channelled.

Question 22

Who brought hypnosis back as a legitimate treatment after it was discredited?

Answer 22

Mesmer’s practice of hypnosis was discredited, and Charcot brought it back as a legitimate treatment.

Question 23

What was Charcot’s typical pose for hypnosis/treatment of hysteria?

Answer 23

He would put his hand under his jacket (similar to a pose that Napoleon did).

Question 24

What was Salpetriere Hospital?

Answer 24

A big hospital in paris, where Charcot worked. He separated out the patients with clear neurological problems (damage to the brain), from people with no neurological damage but similar symptoms.

Question 25

Charcot did believe that there are neurological symptoms, but how did they manifest?

Answer 25

Charcot believed hysteria is a functional disease of the nervous system - so could not see.
He believed that hysteria (in women) is hereditary, constitutional and degenerative - part of the bodily makeup, cannot be cured and only gets worse.

Question 26

What part of the female body did Charcot believe was implicated in a diagnosis of hysteria?

Answer 26

The ovaries. He believed that pressing the ovaries would set off an episode.

Question 27

In Charcot’s clinic, ‘La Grande Hysterie’, or ‘major hysteria’ involved four periods. What did they include?

Answer 27

1. Epileptoid periods (fits).
2. Periods of contortions, bodily movements, or clownism.
3. Impassioned poses.
4. Delirious withdrawal, terminal period, patient falls asleep and did not remember anything.

Question 28

The clinical performances of hysteria in Charcot’s clinic were like… what?

Answer 28

They were like theatre, they were well rehearsed, they followed a script.

Question 29

What did Charcot do to capture the hysteric illness?

Answer 29

He took a lot of photographs.

Question 30

The epidemic of hysteria surpassed even the hospitals, where else in society did it appear?

Answer 30

In ballet companies in Paris, soon there were lots of displays of hysteria on the stage. In magazines, it became very popular.

Question 31

Some more theories on the prevalence/epidemic of hysteria?

Answer 31

1. hysteria as a form of protest.
2. Child-rearing practices (girls had really difficult expectations
3. Role conflicts (supposed to be sweet and dependant on a man, but also capable of many responsibilities. Lot’s of conflict in how women were raised).
4. Somatisation (bodily symptoms coming out in other ways).
5. Secondary gain (get out of responsibilities).
6. Hysteria as disease model.
7. Abuse and trauma (sexual abuse mostly, but Charcot didn’t listen to this but Freud paid attention later on).
8. Diagnostic practices: did the prevalence go up, or was it the RECORDED prevalence?

Question 32

How did hysteria disappear?

Answer 32

1. Physicians discouraged symptoms of hysteria.
2. Hysteria was considered to be caused by ‘suggestion’ (hypnosis), and therefore not real.
3. Hysteria was no longer a place to hide, so patients stopped producing the symptoms.
4. Physicians stopped diagnosing it, changed their diagnostic practice.
5. A new explanation: mental causation introduced by Freud - as opposed to physical causation.

Question 33

Why did hysteria disappear in men?

Answer 33

‘Railway spine’ -

Question 34

In conclusion, hysteria represents the ‘medical enigma’ that many disorders are dealing with, the disorders that are mysterious… what is going on?

Answer 34

• many mental disorders are still considered ‘medical enigmas’ from vague complaints and having no cause.
• physicians don’t know how to deal with a lot of them.
• but, it is important to remember that they cause REAL suffering.
• and, are a product of the individual, the field of medicine and the wider society.

Question 35

When/where was the vibrator developed?

Answer 35

In London, with practitioners trying to treat hysteria. They believed hysteria was best treated with orgasm.

Question 36

There are many forms of hysteria today, what is morgellon’s disease?

Answer 36

The feeling that plastic fibres are growing out of your skin or that ants are crawling under your skin.
aka ‘delusional parasitosis’.