2008, April 27, Kathryn Harrison, Diagnosis: Female, Victorian women who weren’t locked up for falling victim to lypemania (melancholy), monomania, homicidal monomania or “moral insanity†were at risk of neurasthenia, a “mirror image of rebellion†in which their “nervous depletion†was explained as the result of their “incursion into the masculine sphere of intellectual labor,†a strain that constitutions formed for tender sentiment couldn’t be expected to support.
