There was recently a promotional video released by the CIA on Twitter where a stonk independent brown woman bravely admitted, among other things, to having generalized anxiety disorder.
This may seem like a nascent phenomenon, representative only of our own times, but the trend of identifying with pathology has been present ever since the early industrial era, among the decadent upper classes (to no surprise).
I first started to notice this when listening to my parents converse in Polish. In the Polish language, there is no distinct term for "anxiety," or at least it is not used colloquially like it is in English. Instead, the concept is fully expressed by the term "nervous," and as it happens, nervousness was a legitimate medical category in the early industrial era, used to explain maladaption to the stresses of a changing world as a problem of the nerves.
But it was less the stresses of industrial workers who labored in inhumane conditions, and more the stresses of their social superiors in the bourgeoisie. It was popular in this social scene to admit to having a case of nervousness, and even Theodore Roosevelt, who otherwise warned about the perils of effeminizing "over-civilization," publicized his nervousness.
This may seem like a nascent phenomenon, representative only of our own times, but the trend of identifying with pathology has been present ever since the early industrial era, among the decadent upper classes (to no surprise).
I first started to notice this when listening to my parents converse in Polish. In the Polish language, there is no distinct term for "anxiety," or at least it is not used colloquially like it is in English. Instead, the concept is fully expressed by the term "nervous," and as it happens, nervousness was a legitimate medical category in the early industrial era, used to explain maladaption to the stresses of a changing world as a problem of the nerves.
But it was less the stresses of industrial workers who labored in inhumane conditions, and more the stresses of their social superiors in the bourgeoisie. It was popular in this social scene to admit to having a case of nervousness, and even Theodore Roosevelt, who otherwise warned about the perils of effeminizing "over-civilization," publicized his nervousness.
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