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Quotes about Hysteria from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"Practically a mass hysteria when it took off in the late 1800s, germ phobia swept the globe. Presently, the germ theory promoted by the medical, pharmaceutical and advertising industries remains a hugely powerful persuasive force worldwide. Even today, the public still demands pills and vaccinations to kill or stave off germs, thus carrying on the hysteria begun more than a century ago. It is, and always has been, a hysteria based upon a complete lie." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"Thanks to this long-held idea of hysteria, doctors were able to imagine that a disease like torsion dystonia (or any other disease with no obvious medical explanation, for that matter) derived from a family tendency toward hysteria rather than from a genetic cause. These dramatic examples of psychiatrically based symptoms became rather rare except in exceptionally stressful conditions like the battlefield. Finding a soldier who claimed he could not walk but who had an otherwise normal neurological examination led to the conclusion that such problems had no organic medical or neurological cause." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"Even today, the public still demands pills and vaccinations to kill or stave off germs, thus carrying on the hysteria begun more than a century ago. It is, and always has been, a hysteria based upon a complete lie. It makes a lot of people a lot of money as new diseases are identified or made up and blamed on new germ culprits suspected to be responsible for new diseases that are then put on trial and declared guilty! In our alternative model, microorganisms are termed either friendly or unfriendly, depending on whether they serve us in health or hasten our demise in disease, respectively." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"Webster's Definition of Hysteria: (1) a psychiatric condition variously characterized by emotional excitability, excessive anxiety, sensory and motor disturbances, or the unconscious simulation of organic disorders, such as blindness, deafness, etc.; (2) any outbreak of wild, uncontrolled excitement or feeling, such as fits of laughing and crying.1 The term hysteria was once one of psychiatry's most common diagnoses, and it was a common diagnosis more than 2,000 years before psychiatry ever became a profession." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"ASAFOETIDA Common indications include: • this is a good remedy for hysteria that comes on after suppressing chronic discharges • empty or ineffectual belching • sensation of a lump or a plug in the throat that causes frequent swallowing • abdomen very bloated without any passing any flatulence but much burping • discharges (for example, a running ulcer, suppressed diarrhea) • globus hystericus • the bowels, stomach and throat have reverse peristalsis, which is a reversal of the natural movement." - Heather Caruso, Your Drug-Free Guide to Digestive Health (Get the book.)

"Progesterone prevents hysteria and calms our moods, largely by raising levels of neurotransmitters such as GABA (gamma-aminobutyric acid) and dopamine. GABA is a calming neurotransmitter, a bit like Valium, which reduces anxiety and induces sleep. Dopamine also supports sex drive and curbs our appetite. When these hormones are out of balance, you've got an angry, carbohydrate-craving woman who can't sleep. Antidepressants have been the most popular answer to menopausal symptoms." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.) "Despite such high results, you haven't heard much press hysteria discouraging the use of alcohol the same way that hormone use has been discouraged. Some studies have shown that supplementing with folate can help to reduce this risk. A WHI cohort study showed that women who exercised the equivalent of brisk walking for 1.25 to 2.5 hours per week had an 18 percent reduction in the risk of breast cancer. This reduction increased further as physical activity increased, though not substantially. The reduction Exercise was less pronounced when a woman was overweight." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.)

"While his wartime experience had made him distinctly skeptical of Freud's view that the deep roots of hysteria lay in repressed sexual wishes and conflicts, Rivers insisted all the same that "there is hardly a case which this theory does not help us the better to understand—not a day of clinical experience in which Freud's theory may not be of direct practical use in diagnosis and treatment." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.) "The phenomenon of shell shock had indeed complicated his insistence that all hysteria is caused by childhood sexual fantasies, he admitted. It was now clear, he said, that one needed to distinguish between neuroses of war and neuroses of peace. [In] traumatic and war neuroses the human ego is defending itself from a danger which threatens it from without. ... In the transference neuroses of peace the enemy from which the ego is defending itself is actually the libido, whose demands seem to it to be menacing." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"The Greeks often described mental problems as hysteria, and as it appeared more in women than in men, it was assumed to have its origin in a female organ—specifically the uterus. Indeed the Greek word for uterus was hystera, and the origin of our word "hysteria" is the Greek word hys-terikos which literally means "suffering in the hystera" (womb). Old ideas can be slow to die no matter how silly they may be. Nineteenth and even twentieth century physicians would sometimes remove parts of the female anatomy in order to help the mind." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"At the same time as he challenged Freud on all these fronts, Janet began to say he was actually the originator of the theory of hysteria that found its source in traumatic memories and that Freud had borrowed all the key ideas for his own theories from him. The British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones later told the story of how, in 1913, he had defended Freud's originality in what he called a "duel between Janet and myself ... at the International Congress of Medicine." According to Jones, Janet had backed down before Jones's onslaught, and that had effectively been the end of the matter." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"But practicing physicians didn't miss the connection between hysteria and somatization—in the end, only the terminology had changed. It was one step from their viewing patients with chronic fatigue or widespread pain, like their Victorian predecessors, as a waste of time. This story explains one reason for the disconnect in communication between patients and doctors when facing unexplained illnesses. Patients reported real symptoms; doctors resorted to the SD diagnosis for reasons that seemed perfectly logical to them but that made no sense to their suffering patients." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "Somatization disorder is simply a polite, more modern way to describe what used to be called hysteria, a term that nineteenth-century male doctors originally applied to female patients who exhibited bizarre movements (such as bending backward to make an inverse letter C). It took more than two hundred years for doctors to realize that men could have this problem too, albeit substantially less often." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"In a 1927 essay, he told the famous story of how the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot had privately admitted to a young Freud that, in cases of hysteria, there was "always" a sexual issue at stake. In his autobiographical account, Freud recalled how he had said to himself: "If he knows that, why doesn't he say so?" Weizsacker then described an encounter he had himself had with an aging Freud, many years later, in which the great man had admitted that the sudden intrusion of an accident or organic disease in the life of a patient can cure that patient of his or her neurosis." - Anne Harrington, The Cure Within: A History of Mind-Body Medicine (Get the book.)

"Certain epidemics might grip societies as a physical manifestation of a type of energetic hysteria. If intention creates health ?that is, improved order ?in another person, it would suggest that illness is a disturbance in the quantum fluctuations of an individual. Healing, as Popp's work suggests, might be a matter of reprogramming individual quantum fluctuations to operate more coherently. Healing may also be seen as providing information to return the system to stability." - Lynne Mctaggart, The Field - The Quest for the Secret Force of the Universe (Get the book.)

"The word hysteria itself comes from uterus—hence the term hysterectomy.) The word that Spitzer settled on to cover the vast majority of all three hundred diagnoses was disorder. Disorder had the same bland, theory-neutral qualities. It was not neurosis or reaction (both heavily associated with psychoanalysis), nor was it disease or illness (terms associated with the brain scientists). Disorder wasn't entirely new: it had appeared briefly in earlier DSMs to describe general categories of distress. Everybody was happy—or, perhaps, everybody was unhappy." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"These are terms that supersede hysteria, conversion disorder, and a litany of discarded labels, such as neurocirculatory asthenia, neuromyasthenia, railway spine, and the like. However, all this labeling tends to belittle the symptoms and stigmatize the patient. It is but a New Age form of "in your mind." This takes us back to Cartesian mind-body duality. As important as that paradigm was in pushing back the frontier of ignorance and metaphysical obfuscation in the seventeenth century, it is an impediment today. First, it is wrong. The "mind" is no longer an abstraction." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "In generations past, soos evoked labels such as hysteria, neurocirculatory asthenia, epidemic neuromyasthenia, and more from the medical establishment. There is a history to labeling by alternative practitioners that is as colorful and rarely grounded in the scientific inferences of the day. One does not seek the ministrations of a physician to hear magical thinking such as the invoking of some vitalistic forces to explain symptoms. Nor does one seek the ministrations of a physician to hear, let alone to learn, that one's symptoms are perceptual in nature." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"It is, and always has been, a hysteria based upon a complete lie. It makes a lot of people a lot of money as new diseases are identified or made up and blamed on new germ culprits suspected to be responsible for new diseases that are then put on trial and declared guilty! In our alternative model, microorganisms are termed either friendly or unfriendly, depending on whether they serve us in health or hasten our demise in disease, respectively. Bacteria remain our friends so long as we keep ourselves internally clean." - Susan E. Schenck, The Live Food Factor: The Comprehensive Guide to the Ultimate Diet for Body, Mind, Spirit & Planet (Get the book.)

"He initially promoted the existence of this condition, and it was his many medical acolytes who sustained hysteria as an accepted label through a diagnostic epidemic persisting more than a generation beyond Charcot. hysteria, as defined by Charcot and his followers, was a peculiar affliction. It was characterized by a variety of different physical complaints seemingly of a neurological nature. In particular, paralytic symptoms were typical in the hysteric patient. Moreover, the onset of the condition was often abtupt, even apoplectic." - Paul D. Blanc, M.D., How Everyday Products Make People Sick: Toxins at Home and in the Workplace (Get the book.)

"He became an expert in hysteria diagnosing an average of ten hysterical women each day, transforming them into... "iatrogenic monsters," turning simple 'neurosis' into hysteria.96 The number of women diagnosed with hysteria and hospitalized rose from 1% in 1841 to 17% in 1883. hysteria is derived from the Latin "hystera" meaning uterus. Dr. Adriane Fugh-Berman stated very clearly in her paper that there is a tradition in U.S. medicine of excessive medical and surgical interventions on women." - Gary Null PhD, Carolyn Dean MD ND, Martin Feldman MD, Debora Rasio MD, Dorothy Smith PhD., Death by Medicine (Get the book.)

"Lyme hysteria," as well as the excesses of the drug companies and why medicine's approach to saving women from breast cancer was an unconscionable overreach.. I highly recommend Disease Mongers as a template for print and media medical journalists. Shannon Brownlee needed no such template. Her Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (2007) picks up where Payer left off and does so brilliantly. Lynn left me with memories and lessons, lessons that relate to the difficult task faced by journalists attempting to make sense of "health care" in the United States." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"Doctors heard about and saw these reactions but generally dismissed them as female hysteria until the 1980s. Eventually researchers and drug companies took these concerns more seriously, and in the 1980s lower-dosage versions of the pill were created, many with 1 mg of synthetic progestin (ly-nestrenol or norethindrone), along with 100 meg of estradiol, the synthetic estrogen, which is still considered high by many scientists. (The most recent forms of the pill contain 20 meg of estradiol." - J. Douglas Bremner, Before You Take that Pill: Why the Drug Industry May Be Bad for Your Health (Get the book.)

"I do not agree with this hysteria. Just as we need darkness to support our sleep cycles, we need light—particularly morning sun—for our day cycles. The sun literally gets us going in the morning. We need its light to trigger our metabolism, alertness, and overall ability to function and perform. Fortunately, in the last few years, the pendulum has swung back in this direction. Now it seems as if every month there is a new study documenting the beneficial effects of sunlight and vitamin D, which, as you know, we get from the sun." - Frank Lipman, Mollie Doyle, Spent: Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Feel Great Again (Get the book.)

"Medicated enemata offered another route to rebalancing the body's input and output, particularly in conditions such as hysteria, and disorders of the menses. And of course, there were the leeches. One American patient, Emily Mason, wrote to her sister of the treatment she was due to receive for facial pain: 'Today, I am threatened with leeching—Don't you envy me having those sweet little worms in my mouth?'1 These harsh therapeutic tools formed the backbone of a rising medical trend: 'heroic medicine'." - Roberta Bivins, Alternative Medicine?: A History (Get the book.)

"Unfortunately, after the Prempro arm of the study was ended prematurely, mass hysteria ensued. Millions of women went off all hormone replacement. Two years after the first reports, the Premarin-only group reports were released to little fanfare despite some very encouraging results (including less heart disease in women using estrogen alone, particularly women aged fifty to fifty-nine). Many hormone-positive critiques and reevaluations of the studies have been published." - Phuli Cohan, The Natural Hormone Makeover: 10 Steps to Rejuvenate Your Health and Rediscover Your Inner Glow (Get the book.)

"Indeed the Greek word for uterus was hystera, and the origin of our word "hysteria" is the Greek word hys-terikos which literally means "suffering in the hystera" (womb). Old ideas can be slow to die no matter how silly they may be. Nineteenth and even twentieth century physicians would sometimes remove parts of the female anatomy in order to help the mind. Concerning insanity, one physician wrote in 1850, "Among the causes, females are alone exposed to those which grow out of the uterine and mammary structure and functions." - Dr. Timothy Scott, America Fooled: The Truth About Antidepressants, Antipsychotics and How We've Been Deceived (Get the book.)

"Epidemic Hysteria [The following description of an episode of epidemic hysteria is taken from Witchcraft in British History by Ronald Holmes (published by Frederick Muller, Ltd., London 1974)] But such cases [of "contagious hysteria"] do not lend themselves to scientific analysis; to overcome this objection the following has been selected from the January, 1970, edition of the British Medical Journal. It is the story of the "Royal-Free Disease". During a polio scare in 1955 five people were admitted to the Royal Free Hospital, London." - John Lauritsen, The AIDS War: Propaganda, Profiteering and Genocide from the Medical-Industrial Complex (Get the book.)

"Psychologists have a name for this kind of phenomenon: conversion hysteria. Words are converted into hysteria, into panic, and the panic is converted into disease. If hundreds of healthy football fans can be first made ill and then cured by a few words over a P.A. system, imagine what can happen to people with cancer or heart disease. They bring their collection of symptoms to a physician, and the doctor applies the magic word, "CANCER," or "HEART ATTACK." And those words are processed into hysteria and panic. Panic constricts blood vessels." - Berkeley Holistic Health Center and Shepherd Bliss, The New Holistic Health Handbook: Living Well in a New Age (Get the book.)

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