Nervous Breakdown In 20th-Century American Culture

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

(15.) Tom Lutz, "'Sweat or Die': The Hedonization of the Work Ethic in the 1920s," American Literary History 8 (1996): 259-82; Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925; reissued Charlottesville, VA, 1938); Farnsworth Crowder, "But Is the World Going Mad?" Reader's Digest 30 (May, 1937): 53.

(16.) Myerson, American Women, pp. 25, 26, 44 and Nervous Housewife. p. 13 Note that this later work also included insistence on a dramatic restructuring of marriage and of household chores, as remedies. But this radical approach might resonate less than the diagnosis. See also Robert O'Brien, "What is a Nervous Breakdown?" Reader's Digest 76-7 (Aug., 1960): 73-6; Agnes Repplier, "The Nervous Strain," Atlantic Monthly 106 (1910): 198-201.

(17.) Repplier, "Nervous Strain," p. 200.

(18.) Josephine Jackson, "That Tired Feeling," Reader's Digest (Sept., 1922): 427-8; Myerson, American Women, pp. 44-5.

(19.) Eleanor Kelly, "The Fashionable Subconscious," Reader's Digest (Aug., 1923): 340; Lutz, "'Sweat or Die'."

(20.) Jackson ,"Tired Feeling," p. 428; "It's My Nerves," Time, Apr. 14, 1952.

(21.) O'Brien, "What is a Nervous Breakdown," p. 75; Frederick Painton, "There is No Such Thing as Shell Shock," Reader's Digest 43 (Oct., 1943): 59-63; "Give Us a Break," Reader's Digest 45 (Nov., 1944): 8-11; Roger Spiller, "Shell Shock," American Heritage 41 (1990): 75-87.

(22.) Joseph Jastrow, Sanity First! (New York, 1935); Edmund Bergler, Tensions Can Be Reduced to Nuisances (New York, 1960), pp. 26-7.

(23.) Keene Sumner, "The Secret of Sound Sleep," Reader's Digest (Jan., 1923): 764. Jastrow, Sanity, pp. 176-7; Bergler, Tensions, pp. 206-10; Wolfe, Nervous Breakdown.

(24.) Vanessa Ochs, "Taking the Cure," Tikkun 10 (1995): 47; George Stevenson, "How to Deal with Your Tensions," Reader's Digest (Mar., 1969): 89-92; Gladys Rush Alexander, I'm Glad I Had a Nervous Breakdown (New York, 1966), pp. 4-5.

(25.) John Spurlock, "The Problem of Modern Married Love for Middle-Class Women," in Jan Lewis and Peter N. Stearns, eds., Emotional History of the United States (New York, 1998), pp. 319-32; Peter N. Stearns, American Cool: Constructing a 20th-Century Emotional Style (New York, 1994).

(26.) Keith Purdie and Jim McLennan, "'After My Breakdown': Implications for Counselors of Accounts of Change in Self-Understanding," Counseling Psychology Quarterly 6 (1993): 17-27; Peter N. Stearns, Battleground of Desire: The Struggle for Self-Control in Modern America (New York, 1999).

(27.) David Courtwright, Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in America Before 1940 (Cambridge, 1942); David Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control (New Haven, 1973); W. Wayne Morgan, Drugs in America: A Social History, 1800-1980 (Syracuse, 1981); Jeffrey Foster, "The Rocky Road to a 'Drug Free Tennessee': A History of the Early Regulation of Cocaine and the Opiates, 1897-1913," Journal of Social History 29 (1996): 547-64.

(28.) Cynthia Crossen, "Losing It: Nervous Breakdowns, By Any Name, Aren't What They Used To Be," The Wallstreet Journal, Dec. 3, 1996, p. 1; Shorter, History of Psychiatry.