Neurasthenia

Neurasthenia, from the Ancient Greek for nerve and weak, is a term first used as early as 1829 to describe a mechanical weakness of the nerves; it became a major diagnosis in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after the neurologist George Miller Beard reintroduced the concept in 1869, describing a condition marked by fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, neuralgia and depressed mood, while the Michigan alienist E. H. Van Deusen, writing in the same year, associated it with farm wives made sick by isolation and a lack of engaging activity, and Beard connected it to busy society women and overworked businessmen. Neurasthenia was once a diagnosis in the World Health Organization's ICD-10 but was deprecated and is no longer diagnosable in ICD-11, and it no longer appears in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, though it is still described in the Chinese Society of Psychiatry's Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders. Americans were once said to be especially prone to the condition, earning it the nickname Americanitis, popularized by William James, and it is also rarely known by the term nervosism.