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Neurasthenia is a term that was first used at least as early as 1829 to label a mechanical weakness of the ''actual nerves'', rather than the more metaphorical "nerves" referred to by George Miller Beard later. As a psychopathological term, neurasthenia was used by Beard in 1869 to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, neuralgia and depressed mood. Neurasthenia is currently a diagnosis in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Diseases (and the Chinese Society of Psychiatry's Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders). However, it is no longer included as a diagnosis in the American Psychiatric Association's ''Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders''. Americans were said to be particularly prone to neurasthenia, which resulted in the nickname "Americanitis" (popularized by William James). Another, rarely used, term for neurasthenia is nervosism.〔http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Nervosism〕 ==Symptoms== The condition was explained as being a result of exhaustion of the central nervous system's energy reserves, which Beard attributed to modern civilization. Physicians in the Beard school of thought associated neurasthenia with the stresses of urbanization and with stress suffered as a result of the increasingly competitive business environment. Typically, it was associated with upper class people and with professionals working in sedentary occupations, but really can apply to anyone who lives within the monetary system. Freud included a variety of physical symptoms in this category, including fatigue, dyspepsia with flatulence, and indications of intra-cranial pressure and spinal irritation. In common with some other people of the time, he believed this condition to be due to "non-completed coitus" or the non-completion of the higher cultural correlate thereof, or to "infrequency of emissions" or the infrequent practice of the higher cultural correlate thereof.〔 Later, Freud formulated that in cases of coitus interruptus as well as in cases of masturbation, there was "an insufficient libidinal discharge" that had a poisoning effect on the organism, in other words, neurasthenia was the result of (auto-)intoxication.〔Freud Encyclopaedia, pg 362, http://books.google.com/books?id=rX2w6QELtKgC&pg=PA362&lpg=PA362&dq=freud+neurasthenia+coitus&source=bl&ots=t8xg8MjzZ6&sig=JpinNvDo0RXuKn6bgFmS-s2tmLo&hl=en&sa=X&ei=qTtiUK-bFYrK9gS0moHwBQ&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=freud%20neurasthenia%20coitus&f=false〕 Eventually he separated it from anxiety neurosis, though he believed that a combination of the two conditions coexisted in many cases.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「neurasthenia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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