Data from this period gleaned from the Annual Reports of Queen Square Hospital, London, indicates that the diagnosis was balanced between the sexes and had a presence within Europe. Virginia Woolf was known to have been forced to have rest cures, which she describes in her book On Being Ill. Charlotte Perkins Gilmans protagonist in The Yellow Wallpaper also suffers under the auspices of rest cure doctors, much as Gilman herself did. Marcel Proust was said to suffer from neurasthenia. To capitalize on this epidemic, the Rexall drug company introduced a medication called Americanitis Elixir which claimed to be a soother for any bouts related to neurasthenia. Treatment
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 Beards and Rockwells knowledge of the scientific method was suspect and did not believe their claims to be warranted. William James was diagnosed with neurasthenia, which he nicknamed Americanitis, and was quoted as saying, "I take it that no man is educated who has never dallied with the thought of suicide. "In 1895, Sigmund Freud reviewed electrotherapy and declared it a "pretense treatment." He emphasized the example of Elizabeth von Rs note that "the stronger these were the more they seemed to push her own pains into the background." Nevertheless, neurasthenia was a common diagnosis during World War I for "shell shock", but its use declined a decade later.
Neurasthenia (from the Ancient Greek νεῦρον neuron "nerve" and ἀσθενής asthenés "weak") is a term that was first used at least as early as 1829 for a mechanical weakness of the nerves and became a major diagnosis in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after neurologist George Miller Beard reintroduced the concept in 1869. As a psychopathological term, the first to publish on neurasthenia was Michigan alienist E. H. Van Deusen of the Kalamazoo asylum in 1869, followed a few months later by New York neurologist George Beard, also in 1869, to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, neuralgia, and depressed mood. Van Deusen associated the condition with farm wives made sick by isolation and a lack of engaging activity, while Beard connected the condition to busy society women and overworked businessmen. Neurasthenia was a diagnosis in the World Health Organizations ICD-10, but is no more diagnosed in ICD-11, marked as deprecated. It also is no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The condition is, however, described in the Chinese Society of Psychiatrys Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders. Americans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname "Americanitis" (popularized by William James). Another, rarely used, term for neurasthenia is nervosism. Symptoms
The condition was explained as being a result of exhaustion of the central nervous systems energy reserves, which Beard attributed to modern civilization.