Female hysteria

Female hysteria was a medical diagnosis applied to women for hundreds of years in Western Europe and beyond, and it is now recognized as a discredited historical category rather than a genuine disorder. Physicians who used the diagnosis described it as covering an extraordinarily wide array of symptoms, including anxiety, shortness of breath, fainting, nervousness, exaggerated or impulsive sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, a sense of heaviness in the abdomen, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, sexually impulsive behavior, and a vaguely defined tendency to cause trouble for others. Severe cases were sometimes treated with institutionalization or with surgical removal of the uterus. Modern medical authorities no longer recognize female hysteria as a medical disorder at all, and the American Psychiatric Association removed it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980. Contemporary understanding holds that much of what earlier physicians attributed to hysteria actually reflected the normal range of variation in women's sexuality and mood rather than any underlying pathology, and symptoms once grouped under the label are today understood through diagnoses such as anxiety disorders or functional neurological symptom disorder.