The “disease” of “hysteria” was the scourge of the front parlors and hospitals of the European elite in the 19th century. Even Sigmund Freud had a conflicted diagnostic go at hysteria. It was in the medical textbooks, in the meetings of surgeons and head shrinks, in the broadsheets, and in the minds and conversations of many a concerned lady. Fees for services flowed into the purses of medical practitioners — and doubtless also some quacks who worked to seek a cure for the overwrought ladies, inside and out, and rid them of the terrible hysteria menace.
The Wilkie Collins Society describes:
As the origins of the word “hysteria” illustrate, the characteristic that had remained constant throughout the disorder’s nosological history was its firm links with female sexuality through medical obsessions with the uterus….
Ubiquitous, multidimensional, undefined, and indefinable, “hysteria” is itself a significant expose of the workings of the Victorian ideological economy/economical ideology as a network of preconception and contradiction.
Retrospective analyses of hysteria offer insight into the error of accepting radical social “scientific” movements with conflicting and partially proven basis in fact or reality. As a contemporary discussion of hysteria explains:
[S]ocial changes seem to offer a fertile substrate for the evolution of complex innovative systems of interpreting reality, of attributing the causes and controlling events, of living emotions. A critical study of the historical development and the interpretations of mental diseases may contribute to providing an explanation for the means of psychopathological expression. Moreover, it may provoke a re-discussion of the threshold and vulnerability concept in cases where it could be hypothesized that the new cognitive systems, although adaptive to new social requirements, might represent a factor of vulnerability (“culturally specific”) to specific mental disorders [emphasis added].
In America, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders deleted the concept of hysterical neurosis in its 1980 DSM-III, with a clear dismissal, as the above study puts it: “The evolution of these diseases seems to be a factor linked with social ‘westernization.’” (READ MORE: Climate Activists Have Exploited Our Children)
Yes, hysteria was a disease, formally and in urgent medical demand, in a sophisticated Europe — until it wasn’t. But what do we make of “social westernization” as an alternative medical diagnosis? Why prioritize feelings and ideas in the evolution of science?
In America, we like to think that we understand science and that the rest of the world imitates us. That’s not always the case. The ruckus about “climate change” first started in Europe. The U.N. got the ball rolling in Stockholm in 1972, as its website claims:
Held in Stockholm, Sweden from 5 to 16 June 1972, the UN Scientific Conference, also known as the First Earth Summit, adopted a declaration that set out principles for the preservation and enhancement of the human environment, and an action plan containing recommendations for international environmental action. In a section on the identification and control of pollutants of broad international significance, the Declaration raised the issue of climate change for the first time warning Governments to be mindful of activities that could lead to climate change and evaluate the likelihood and magnitude of climatic effects [emphasis added].
The EU also has been a gradual force in the climate agenda since the 1980s, with very mixed results.
Multi-nationals and NGOs are more effective in advancing dreadful and arguable “climate change” scenarios as fact rather than addressing specific, current environmental concerns — those almost universally sourced in human mistakes or criminality, such as corporate and industrial energy-producing abuses, mass immigration policies, and massive amounts of global carbon generated by jetting globe-hoppers who convene to threaten the peons with climate change. (READ MORE: The ‘Climate Crisis’ Isn’t an ‘Emergency’)
Transparent hypocrisy is the “climate change” calling card for a slew of grotesquely rich climate activists, but the way has lately grown rougher for Al Gore and his speech-fee-grabbing acolytes. Reports the Epoch Times:
Recently, Mr. Clauser joined another Nobel laureate and over 1,600 professionals in signing the World Climate Declaration (WCD) organized by Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL). This declaration asserts that there is no “climate emergency,” that climate change science is not conclusive, and that the earth’s history over thousands of years shows a consistently changing climate.
We know from the ongoing debacle with the “COVID pandemic” that science is often prematurely “settled” when our minders deem it should be. Far fewer would support the transgender movement — which has quickly morphed to gender change, and on to criminal acts and violent extremism in recent cases — if the white coats were not, just enough, behind it. Gender change seems to be on the upswing in America. But does that mean it’s even remotely a sound development? Gender “modifications” seem to be more about profit than about formal diagnosis:
Gender Dysphoria (GD) became a psychiatric diagnosis in the fifth edition of DSM (2013), and Gender Incongruence (GI) appeared in ICD-11, the WHO classification that was approved in 2019 and should be effective in 2022. GI was not included in the section on mental health but instead in a section on sexual health. The introduction of GD and GI in today’s medical nomenclatures [in 2019] was hailed as progress because it intended to facilitate the provision of hormonal therapy and surgical reassignment in the context of sexual transition [emphasis added]. However, some critics argue that gender identity is a free choice that medical authorities should not sanction. In addition, a diagnostic category is a simplistic way of describing all the nuances of gender fluidity that have asserted themselves in recent decades.
Transgender surgery comprises several surgical procedures that you can avail individually or as a package. According to Cost Aide, “[t]he average transgender surgery cost for each procedure typically ranges from $1,500 to $26,000 but the total for all could be as high as $200,000 to $300,000.” (READ MORE: Gender Dysphoria in Kids: It’s Time for Some Serious Research)
The industry specifically targets the most vulnerable — children. The Daily Caller reports:
The surge in gender transition surgeries in recent years has largely been in young people, and the number of kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria skyrocketed by 70% from 2020 to 2021. That growth in young people is a key reason analysts project the sex change market will increase to $5 billion in the next decade.
As with climate change, there are some outspoken medical professionals distressed as their professional virtue is compromised by transgender ideology. As the Heritage Foundation explains:
In an expert declaration to a federal district court in North Carolina concerning H.B. 2, Dr. Deanna Adkins stated, “From a medical perspective, the appropriate determinant of sex is gender identity.” Adkins is a professor at Duke University School of Medicine and the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care (which opened in 2015)….
At the core of the [transgender] ideology is the radical claim that feelings determine reality. From this idea come extreme demands for society to play along with subjective reality claims. Trans ideologues ignore contrary evidence and competing interests, they disparage alternative practices, and they aim to muffle skeptical voices and shut down any disagreement….
A transgender future is not the “right side of history,” yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas.
Each of the four quasi-scientific phenomena profiled here, by rational standards, indicates social and personal flight from reason into fantasy and self-destruction. The deluded, multi-faceted fearfulness that sustains these very costly extremes — ever with us, courtesy of the internet, supported by a perverse media, encouraged by corporate, governmental, and medical/pharmaceutical greed, and sanctioned by the major money brokers internationally — has no standing as unalloyed science.
Victoria White Berger, a published poet and author, is a career professional in executive nonprofit administration and fund development on behalf of children and families.
