Hysteria

Hysteria is ungovernable emotional excess, and the term has indicated either a temporary mental state or an emotional condition. During the nineteenth century, female hysteria was regarded as a diagnosable physical ailment in women, reflecting assumptions that women were predisposed to mental and behavioral disorders and to sex-linked differences in stress reactions. By the twentieth century it came to be classified as a mental illness, and influential physicians including Sigmund Freud and Jean-Martin Charcot devoted extensive study to hysteria patients. Most physicians today reject hysteria as a valid medical diagnosis; where the term is still used by psychiatrists it describes conduct in which a patient imitates physical or psychological disorders in a way that draws medical or nursing attention, typically through self-deception rather than intentional deceit. The broad historical diagnosis has since fragmented into more specific conditions including epilepsy, histrionic personality disorder, conversion disorders and dissociative disorders, and behavior once read as symptomatic, such as remaining unmarried, is no longer treated as evidence of psychological dysfunction.