Neurasthenia and Modern Cities: Genealogical Speculations on Capitalism-Urged Anxiety and Suicide in Turn-of-the-Twentieth Century North America

Phillip Gordon Mackintosh, Brock University

The mental health of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban North Americans declined under the predations and indifference of laissez-faire capitalism—so much so that physician George Beard associated the emergence of a new and modern “nervousness” with a novel “American” disease: “neurasthenia.” Neither new nor particularly American neurasthenia did, however, symbolize the pyroclastic eruption of stress in uniquely modern circumstances—social, cultural, economic, and urban geographical. Neurasthenic anxiety had fatal and near-fatal consequences, for many, in the form of suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts and completion—which reached pandemic proportions by 1900. This included an agony we know little about: the suicide club, which affected not just North America but the Western world from Russia west to Hawaii. Does this earlier neurasthenia resonate genealogically in our own late-capitalist and neoliberal anxieties?

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 Presented in Session 196. Disparities in health care