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117 A Mad, Mad World Medical historians have noted that it was customary to describe the nineteenth century as “the nervous century.”1 The clinical term for “the nerves” was “neurasthenia,” a condition marked by fatigue, headaches, indigestion, listlessness , and impoverished sexual activity. George Beard, member of the College of Physicians, began lecturing on the impoverished nervous system in the United States in 1868, describing various symptoms of neurasthenia. S. Weir Mitchell, who wrote extensively on the subject of public hygiene, in 1899 singled out the connection of neurasthenia to “mental hygiene,” intending to identify a cause. That in one or another way the cruel competition for the dollar, the new and exacting habits of business, the racing speed which the telegraph and railway have introduced into commercial life, the value which great fortunes have come to possess as means toward social advancement, and the overeducation and overstraining of our young people have brought about some great and growing evils, is what is now beginning to be distinctly felt. I should like therefore at the risk of being tedious, to re-examine this question—to see if it be true that the nervous system of certain classes of Americans is being sorely overtaxed—and to ascertain how much our habits, our modes of work, and haply, climatic peculiarities, may have to do with the state of things.2 The state of “neurasthenia” was now linked to the modernization of American life, the excessive excitement of civilization. Throughout the twentieth century, however, nerves were heightened by anxiety attacks to such a degree that W. H. Auden named the modern era the “Age of Anxiety.” The elevation of neurasthenia to modern anxiety disorder as a distinctive clinical condition can be dated to 1895.3 After the First World War and for most of the twentieth century, both veterans and civilians experienced Epilogue  anxious expectation or neurotic anticipation accompanied by physical symptoms like cardiological and respiratory disturbance, tremors, chills, sweats, and night terrors. By the mid–twentieth century, what had first been considered “war neurosis” had come to be considered a free-floating anxiety illness that affected a large portion of Americans and appeared to be a normal part of life. Again, this anxiety has been attributed to contemporary standards of material consumption and social status, technical change and economic growth, medical science and major epidemic diseases, pathologic agents and radioactive gas, personal attractiveness and physical defects, according to Michael Clark, who asks whether today’s ubiquitous condition of extreme anxiety means that we have moved “from the ‘Age of Anxiety’ to an Era of Panic.”4 While anxiety may be considered a normal experience, its more extreme manifestation—panic—is considered catastrophic; Clark describes it as “the sudden and complete breakdown and collapse of individuals or whole societies in the face of extraordinary or overwhelming pressures.”5 The history of panic is sparse. In 1980, the term “panic disorder” was first used to describe recurrent episodes of psychic terror. Jackie Orr, in Panic Diaries: A Genealogy of Panic Disorder, situates panic in “the entangled fields of social science and psychiatry, the U. S. Government and the military, the mass media and the transnational drug industry.”6 Her work in the book is to relocate panic as a technosocial construction . Orr also takes note that where panic was once situated in historically specific and collective behavior, the disorder is now understood as “generalized ”—episodes occur without any discernable stimulus from social forces. The anxious and frantic voice making itself heard in Panic Diaries bears witness to panic as a “temporal disorder.”7 Has the “era of panic” notched up yet again so that we are in the middle of another “temporal disorder”—a manic phase? Two popular books, both published in 2005—American Mania, by Peter C. Whybrow, and The Hypomanic Edge, by John D. Gartner—argue that the United States historically and presently exhibits hypo/mania. Whybrow writes as a practicing psychiatrist and director of the Neuropsychiatric Institute at UCLA. His view of the nation in the twenty-first century is dark; he describes the country’s increased frenzy as “a dysfunctional state of mind that begins with a joyous sense of excitement and high productivity but escalates into reckless pursuit, irritability, and confusion.” According to Whybrow, “unwittingly, in our relentless pursuit of happiness we have overshot the target and spawned a manic society with an insatiable appetite for more.”8 He identifies the causes as linked to a changing...

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