was a term first coined by
George Miller Beard in
1869 . Beard's definition of "neurasthenia" described a condition with symptoms of
Fatigue ,
Anxiety ,
Headache ,
Impotence ,
Neuralgia and
Depression . It was explained as being a result of exhaustion of the
Central Nervous System 's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to civilization. Physicians of the Beard way of thinking associated neurasthenia with the stresses of
Urbanization and the pressures placed on the intellectual class by the increasingly competitive business environment. Typically, it was associated with
Upper Class individuals in sedentary employment.
Beard, with his partner
A.D. Rockwell , advocated first
Electrotherapy and then increasingly experimental treatments for people with neurasthenia, a position that was controversial. An 1868 review posited that Beard's and Rockwell's grasp of the
Scientific Method was suspect and did not believe their claims to be warranted.
In the late
1800s , it became a popular diagnosis that began to include such symptoms as
Weakness ,
Dizziness and
Fainting , and led to rest cures, especially for women, who were the gender primarily diagnosed with this condition at that time.
Virginia Woolf was known to have been forced to undergo rest cures, which she describes in her book ''
On Being Ill ''. In literature,
Charlotte Perkins Gilman 's protagonist in ''
The Yellow Wallpaper '' also rebels against her rest cure.
In 1895,
Sigmund Freud reviewed electrotherapy and declared it a "pretense treatment." He highlighted the example of Elizabeth von R's note that "the stronger these were the more they seemed to push her own pains into the background," perhaps a precursor to modern-day
Biofeedback .
Nevertheless, neuasthenia was a common diagnosis in
World War I - every one of the c.1700 officers processed through the
Craiglockhart War Hospital was diagnosed with neurasthenia, for example — but its use declined a decade later.
The modern view holds that the main problem of neurasthenia was that it attempted to group together a wide variety of cases. In recent years, Richard M. Fogoros has posited that perhaps neurasthenia was a word that could include some psychiatric conditions, but more importantly, many physiological conditions marginally more understood by the medical community, such as
Fibromyalgia ,
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome , and various forms of
Dysautonomia , among others. He emphasizes that the majority of patients who would have once been diagnosed with neurasthenia have conditions that are "real, honest-to-goodness physiologic (as opposed to psychologic) disorders... and while they can make anybody crazy, they are not caused by craziness."
