thumb|alt=refer to caption|An 1893 depiction of a woman with hysteria
Hysteria is a term used to mean ungovernable emotional excess and can refer to a temporary state of mind or emotion. In the nineteenth century, female hysteria was considered a diagnosable physical illness in women. It is assumed that the basis for diagnosis operated under the belief that women are predisposed to mental and behavioral conditions; an interpretation of sex-related differences in stress responses. In the twentieth century, it shifted to being considered a mental illness. Influential physicians the likes of Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot had dedicated research to hysteria patients.
Currently, most physicians do not accept hysteria as a medical diagnosis. Today, psychiatrists may use the term to refer to behavior in which patients "imitate physical or psychological disorders of a kind that draws medical and nursing attention to them", usually as a self-deception rather than an attempt to defraud. The blanket diagnosis of hysteria has been fragmented into myriad medical categories such as epilepsy, histrionic personality disorder, conversion disorders, dissociative disorders, or other medical conditions. Furthermore, lifestyle choices, such as choosing not to wed, are no longer considered symptoms of psychological disorders such as hysteria. Plato and Aristotle expressed ideas that can retroactively be classified as hysteria. In Plato’s Timaeus, Timaeus tells a likely story about the universe (a myth) which includes an account of something akin to hysteria as a condition in which the womb, remaining barren beyond its natural time, becomes distressed and wanders throughout the body, obstructing passages and causing suffocation and various diseases. During this time the common point of view was that women were inferior beings, connected to Aristotle's ideas of male superiority. Saint Thomas Aquinas supported this idea and stated in Summa Theologica that "'some old women' are evil-minded; they gaze on children in a poisonous and evil way, and demons, with whom the witches enter into agreements, interacting through their eyes". This type of fear of witches and sorcery is part of the rules of celibacy and chastity imposed on the clergy. Joseph Raulin published a work in 1748 which associated hysteria with the air quality in cities. He suggested that men and women could both have hysteria, but women were more likely to have it due to laziness.
In 1859 Paul Briquet defined hysteria as a chronic syndrome manifesting in many unexplained symptoms throughout the body's organ systems. What Briquet described became known as Briquet's syndrome, or Somatization disorders, in 1971. Over a ten-year period, Briquet conducted 430 case studies of patients with hysteria. Both Charcot and Janet inspired Freud's work.<!--
During the twentieth century, as psychiatry advanced in the West, anxiety and depression diagnoses began to replace hysteria diagnoses in Western countries.<!-- Twentieth-century Western societies expected depression and anxiety manifest itself more in post World War II generations and displaced individuals; and thus, individuals were reported or diagnosed accordingly.<!-- suggested that Royal Free Disease (Royal Free Hospital outbreak, now also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, a neurological disease), which mainly affected young women, was an epidemic of hysteria. They also said that hysteria had a historically negative connotation, however that should not prevent doctors from assessing symptoms of the patient.
- Vomiting
- Deafness
- Bizarre movements
- Seizures
- Hallucinations
- Inability to speak
Historical treatment
- Regular marital sex
- Pregnancy Charcot theorized that hysteria was a hereditary, physiological disorder.
Charcot published more than 120 case studies of patients who he diagnosed with hysteria, including Marie Wittman. Whittman was referred to as the "Queen of Hysterics", and remains the most famous patient of hysteria.
Freud
In 1896 Sigmund Freud, an Austrian psychoanalyst, published "The Aetiology of Hysteria". The paper explains how Freud believes his female patients' neurosis, which he labels hysteria, resulted from sexual abuse as children. though he never ruled out that sexual abuse could be the cause of illness, simply not the only possible cause. Freud was also one of the first noted psychiatrists to attribute hysteria to men. The effects of hysteria as a diagnosable illness in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has had a lasting effect on the medical treatment of women's health. When applied to a situation not involving panic, hysteria means that that situation is uncontrollably amusingthe connotation being that it invokes hysterical laughter.