an answer to my question about fainting?

I’ve wondered several times on this blog why people seemed to be fainting all the time 100 years ago, and now almost never. This additional NY Times article seems to be onto the same point:

“We might think of the culture as possessing a ‘symptom repertoire’ — a range of physical symptoms available to the unconscious mind for the physical expression of psychological conflict,’ Edward Shorter, a medical historian at the University of Toronto, wrote in his book Paralysis: The Rise and Fall of a ‘Hysterical’ Symptom. In some epochs, convulsions, the sudden inability to speak or terrible leg pain may loom prominently in the repertoire. In other epochs patients may draw chiefly upon such symptoms as abdominal pain, false estimates of body weight and enervating weakness as metaphors for conveying psychic stress.”

It contains some great examples, such as the “running amok” phenomenon of men in Southeast Asia going into murderous rage followed by amnesia.

The idea behind the article is that treaters of mental illness (doctors, shamans, whatever) tend to shape their culture’s repertoire of recognized symptoms, and that the spread of Western medicine has also spread specifically Western (and predominantly American) symptoms across the globe: post-traumatic stress disorder, anorexia, etc.

It’s a fun idea, anyway. And it would provide an answer to my question about why fainting largely seems to have vanished from our culture.

But if true, it also makes me wish that some other culture would soon take the lead in diagnosing mental illnesses, because I’m becoming a bit bored with our current repertoire.