Neurasthenia

Neurasthenia is an old (19th Century) name for weakness of the physical nerves. It was first used in 1829 to be a mechanical weakness of the actual nerves. In 1869, an American neurologist, George Miller Beard, started using the term to mean metaphorical nerves, i.e., anxiousness, stress, or depression. In 1871, an American physician, S. Weir Mitchell, wrote the book, Wear and Tear, or Hints for the Overworked, detailing his belief that the condition was a result of the demands of modern life in the industrial era. The term began to transition out of use in medical pathophysiology and began being used in psychopathology.

When used in psychology, the term is used to describe a vague disorder marked by chronic abnormal fatigability, moderate depression, inability to concentrate, loss of appetite, insomnia, and other symptoms. The secondary symptoms were ill-defined and abundant, including headaches, muscle aches and pain, dizzyness, weight loss, irritability, inability to relax, anxiety, impotence, “a lack of ambition,” lethargy, insomnia or hypersomnia, "racing heart", and excessive sweating.

It became a catch-all for nearly any kind of discomfort or unhappiness that couldn't be explained with a known medical condition.

Simon Wessely has written about neurasthenia and M.E.

The term, neurasthenia, has been retired as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, however, it is still used as a diagnosis in the 2016 version of the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases(ICD-10) under the diagnostic code F48.0.

Learn more

 * Wikipedia - Neurasthenia
 * 2016, ‘Americanitis’: The Disease of Living Too Fast