Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture

National Review, Sept 1, 1997 by Steve Sailer

SOMETIMES you get what you ask for. Back in 1985 Elaine Showalter, a Princeton English professor specializing in the social history of mental health, concluded her critique of the traditional psychotherapy profession by proclaiming: "The best hope for the future is the feminist therapy movement." By 1997, the mental-health industry has become thoroughly feminized, but Professor Showalter has had second thoughts: "The therapist's role is more and more to affirm, support, and endorse the patient's narrative, . . . and not to challenge the truth or historical reality of the patient's assertions." This credulous atmosphere, she believes, has helped unleash "hysterical epidemics," such as the disgraceful witchhunts for satanic cults running day-care centers. Mrs. Showalter cites five other "hysterical" outbreaks: the booms in recovered memory of incestuous abuse, multiple-personality disorders, alien abductions, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and Gulf War Syndrome. For an academic treatise with a first printing of only 7,500 copies, Hystories has already generated quite a backlash. In hounding the author, Chronic Fatigue sufferers have proved especially energetic.

Mrs. Showalter's strongest chapters are on epidemics like the satanic-abuse and alien-abduction scares, whose alleged causes are wholly imaginary; and on Gulf War Syndrome, whose primary cause is real but not specific to that conflict: "war makes people sick." While it may turn out that chemical weapons or sand fleas really did afflict some minority of the sufferers, on the whole GWS appears to be the latest version of what other eras labeled "shell shock," "battle fatigue," or "post-traumatic stress disorder." America must realize that one of the costs of going to war is later paying fully for treatment and disability leaves for a substantial number of psychologically injured soldiers, although treating mental traumas as honorable wounds will no doubt let some hypochondriacs and malingerers slip through.

Unfortunately, Miss Showalter's literary world view is too black-and-white for those epidemics where some but not all of the patients' stories are true, e.g., incestuous abuse. The acrimony of these debates stems in part from both sides' thinking about all patients as Platonic abstractions ("incest victims" v. "hysterics"). In reality, mental health is more like an unsettlingly random pachinko game. The classic case study of how psychological debates tend toward dogmatism has been running for a full century since Sigmund Freud analyzed 18 unhappy young women. After much bullying by Freud, they all produced stories of childhood sexual abuse. First announcing an epidemic of incest, Freud then publicly changed his mind and blamed all the women for repressing Oedipal fantasies. Millions of words have since been written about this controversy. Most feminists contend that all 18 really were incest victims. In contrast, after a decade of listening to the nonsensical narratives that present-day therapists can elicit, Professor Showalter thinks Freud was right to recant.

Few, however, seem to have remarked how unlikely it is that any single diagnosis was right for all 18. In truth, some of the troubled women probably were child-abuse victims, while some others may have been repressing guilty fantasies. Probably a large proportion were suffering from other root problems that weren't understood back then, such as chemical imbalances in the brain that strike largely at random. Serotonin, for instance, acts rather like motor oil for your emotional engine, keeping your mental gears from grinding. It can run low -- often, it appears, just from wear and tear. Since the cause of the emotional illnesses stemming from serotonin shortages is commonly not apparent, victims are susceptible to whatever tall tales (a/k/a hysterical epidemics) their therapists or the media happen to be spreading at the moment. Thankfully, we now have drugs like Prozac, and a new, more pragmatic school of psychiatrists who no longer set out on ideologically motivated searches for the root causes of your unhappiness, but instead concentrate on rebalancing your brain chemistry.

A beneficial side effect of a more realistic conception of hysterical epidemics allows this useful concept to be profitably applied to other current brouhahas where facts and feelings get hopelessly entangled, e.g., date rape and sexual harassment.

This sensible but limited book illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of what has recently become a lonely rump of feminism: "equity" or "rationalist" feminism. Appalled by the flapdoodle peddled by most feminists today, Mrs. Showalter wearily protests, "Feminism has a strong Enlightenment, rationalist tradition of debate and skepticism, whose memory I attempt to recover and reassert." She bravely points out that the great majority of these epidemics' self-proclaimed victims are women, even the alien abductees. (Gulf War Syndrome, of course, is the exception, but the number of soldiers' wives who have also come down with GWS is striking.)