Neurasthenia and the Modern City: Genealogical Speculations on Capitalism-Urged Anxiety, Stress, and Suicide in North America, 1890–1920

The mental health of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban North Americans declined under the predations and indifference of laissez-faire capitalism—so much so that physician George Beard associated the emergence of a new and modern “nervousness” with a novel “American” disease: neurasthenia. Neither new nor particularly American neurasthenia did, however, give psychiatric and cultural geographic shape to the pyroclastic eruption of stress in modern urban circumstances. Neurasthenic anxiety had fatal consequences: for many this meant suicide—which reached pandemic proportions by 1900. Here, we encounter an agony we know little about: the suicide club, which affected not just North America but the Western world from Russia west to Hawaii. Does this earlier neurasthenia resonate genealogically in our own late-capitalist, neoliberal, and neo-Victorian anxieties?