Nervous Breakdown In 20th-Century American Culture

Journal of Social History, Spring, 2000 by Megan Barke, Rebecca Fribush, Peter N. Stearns

ENDNOTES

Our thanks to Caroline Acker and an anonymous reviewer for advice and suggestions. Comments by various members of the Carnegie Mellon Center for Cultural Analysis were invaluable.

(1.) Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York, 1997), esp. ch. 4; F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community 1870-1910 (Urbana, 1987); Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, 1991).

(2.) W. B. Wolfe, Nervous Breakdown, Its Cause and Cure (London, 1934; 3rd ed., 1949). The concept spread to Germany amid the tensions of post-World War II occupation, particularly among lay authorities. It also found uses in Australia, still more recently.

(3.) Janet Golden," 'An Argument that Goes Back to the Womb': The Demedicalization of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, 1973-1992," Journal of Social History 33 #2 (1999): 269-298.

(4.) Thus nervous breakdown does not move away from a basically medical vocabulary, in contrast to ideas like spirit posession, which in other societies describe similar symptoms.

(5.) Robert Kugelman, Stress: The Nature and History of Applied Grief (Westport, CT, 1992); George Cheyne, The English Malady (London, 1733).

(6.) George M. Beard, American Nervousness: its Causes and Consequences (New York, 1881), pp. 96-133; Gosling, Before Freud.

(7.) Abraham Myerson, American Women: Images and Realities (Boston, 1920), pp.19-20; see also Myerson, The Nervous Housewife (Boston, 1927).

(8.) Gosling, Before Freud; George M. Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia (New York, 1906); for a comparable, though unusual, discussion of sexual causes of nervous breakdown, Wolfe, Nervous Breakdown, ch. 4--the treatment is very similar to Beard's for neurasthenia, though with updated emphasis on homosexuality as potential cause.

(9.) Shorter, History of Psychiatry, ch. 4; John R. Lord, "The Evolution of the 'Nerve' Hospital as a Factor in the Progress of Psychiatry," Journal of Mental Science 75 (1929): 307-15; S. Weir Mitchell, "Rest in Nervous Disease," in Edouard C. Seguin, A Series of American Clinical Lecture I (New York, 1876), pp. 83-102.

(10.) Albert Adams, Nervous Breakdown (New York, 1901). See also Adams: Diseases of the Heart (Chicago, 1900) and Consumption (San Fransisco, n.d.).

(11.) Charles Myers, Present-Day Applications of Psychology with Special Reference to Industry, Education and Nervous Breakdown (London, 1918).

(12.) Adams, Nervous Breakdown; Frank Caprio, How to Avoid a Nervous Breakdown (New York, 1969), pp. 26-31; 0. Henry, Let Me Feel Your Pulse (New York, 1910), p. 30; Edwin Lancelot, The Problem of Nervous Breakdown (New York, 1920) (a British study).

(13.) William Loosmore, Nerves and the Man: a Popular Psychological and Constructive Study of Nervous Breakdown (London, 1930); Myerson, American Woman, p. 21; Caprio, How to Avoid; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, with other uncollected pieces.... ed. Edmund Wilson (New York, 1945).

(14.) Myerson, American Women, p. 18; Myers, Present-Day Applications; Walter Alvarez, How to Live with Your Nerves (Chicago, 1950) (condensed in Reader's Digest, Apr., 1951, pp. 103-5).