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A year ago, I was shocked to hear Melvyn Bragg, on his radio programme, Start the Week, shouting ‘hysterically’ at Elaine Showalter for daring to suggest that there is evidence for a psychological explanation for ME, or ‘chronic fatigue syndrome’. People still become furious at the idea that something is ‘only in the mind’, as if mental disorder and psychological distress are invalid. There is a search, and wish, for physical evidence which can, as Showalter puts it, ‘firmly place cause and cure outside the self.’
Showalter's overall argument concerns a ‘premature’ announcement of the death of hysteria, instead suggesting that its expression is what is different:
In the 1990s, the United States has become the hot zone of psychogenic diseases, new and mutating forms of hysteria amplified by modem communications and fin-de-siècle anxiety. Contemporary hysterical patients blame external sources—virus, sexual molestation, chemical warfare, satanic conspiracy, alien infiltration—for psychic problems.
Her book examines her hypothesis that hysteria survives in the 1990s as social stories of our time which are lived out, and, through modern information technology, are much more ‘contagious’ than in the past. This is linked with the ‘more generalised paranoias, religious revivals, and conspiracy theories’ plus the ‘apocalyptic anxieties that always accompany the end of the century.’ Showalter describes a pattern where the message of an initial well-meaning and authoritative crusader of a condition—for example, a doctor—is picked up by the media from which people then learn of the new ‘disease’. This is followed by unconscious development of symptoms and the attraction of more media attention, in a cycle.
For many, the term ‘hysteria’ is pejorative, associated as it is with being over-emotional, irresponsible and feminine; feminists argue that it has been used to trivialise women's medical and political complaints. As a feminist herself, Showalter believes that hysteria is ‘inevi