You mentioned your (this) medical background some weeks ago
I don't have a medical background. Broadly speaking, one can divide brain research into two categories: medical/clinical research and research in the cognitive sciences. In the former one finds neurologists, medical doctors (i.e., people with an MD rather than a Ph.D.), etc. In the later, one finds neuropsychologists and other neuroscientists.
Psychiatrists already defined mental illness as a disease in the 80s for a variety of reasons (a central one being that their territory was being threatened by other therapists who said that as psychiatry wasn't medicine, psychiatrists shouldn't have pride of place). As a result, psychiatrist adopted a biomedical model of mental disorders and defined all mental disorders as diseases. The problem, however, was that they had no idea what caused any of these (etiology). So they classified them based upon symptoms alone. They still do this, and they still have no basis for claiming that the "diseases" they identify actually have some underlying pathology.
Ironically, "hysteria" is defined in terms of a lack of underlying pathology, but as it is a diagnosis rooted in sexism, symptoms once labled as evidence of hysteria have been re-classified.
and even 40 years ago psychiatry was helpless.
Even within psychiatry, a great deal of research has gone into cases where patients manifest symptoms of "hysteria". The difference between the medical framework and that adopted by the neurosciences is that the former has already decided the nature of mental illness and is now looking for evidence to support it (and treat it), while the latter (people who work in labs like mine) seek to understand how the brain works- period. When speech disorders, hysterical blindness, proposagnosia, etc., are studied in the cognitive and neurosciences the idea is to study the relationship between neural activity, various theoretical frameworks (e.g., embodied cognition), and the manifestation of symptoms. Some of the most fruitful work in cognitive science comes from case studies like Phineas Gage, HM, Clive Wearing, etc. Because neuropsychologists and other cognitive scientists want to understand how the sensorimotor system, memory, consciousness, etc., all work (and how they work together), the cases which medical science can't do much with in terms of cure are often extremely helpful for neuropsychologists.
Acupucture, psychedelic states, hypnosis, etc., are all studied in neuroscience much more than in medicine because the focus is so much broader.
There is another in Caucasian medicine....... folks don't like hysteria because it tends to polarise to caucasian females. In Latin lands this is not so.
In a recent study on hysteria, professor Gorbach (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Xochimilco), wrote about hysteria and "Latin lands", noting first that "the Mexican corpus on hysteria is made up of a few graduate theses and the occasional clinical studies" and second (as far as treatment of females goes), noting examples such as "F. Altamira, who, after trying different remedies, decided to appropriate the womans unhealthy will and work on her behavior and José de Jesús González, who taught women to control their emotions through suggestion. Meanwhile, Aragón tried to cure them by issuing strict orders."
Both Europe and their Mexican imitators abandoned the "it's the uterus" theory of the 19th century. Mexico turned to hypnosis "in which the doctor functions as the model while the patient mimics her relationship with him". The US had a similar model for what was then called multiple personality disorder (MPD) in the 80s and which is often called the "recovered memory movement". Therapists would "recover" instances of sexual abuse in order to help their patients, and part of this involved asking to speak to alternate personalities. All of a sudden, after the release of a book and the movie version (and subsequent media releases) MPD went from a disorder with a handful of cases in a century to a major epidemic. Lives were ruined as unfortunate patients "recovered" memories of trauma that, it turned out later in court trials, could not have happened (but which were now as real as any other memories). Also, it was some time before court trials were presented with evidence that the techniques used to "uncover" memories actually created them, and so families were ripped apart and innocent family members, neighbors, etc., went to prison for crimes they never committed.
No....... pschos don't talk about hysteria as it can actually manifest itself.
Unfortunately, there are probably more cognitive science and and neuroscience labs in Massachusetts or in California than in all of South America combined. La V Jornada Internacional sobre Aprendizaje, Educación y Neurociencias had a handful of participants. A major neuroscience society in South America, SAN (Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias) has, as most academic societies do, an (usually) annual conference to interact with other labs across the world (even in national conferences, it is unusual for no representatives from other countries to show), share research projects and goals, go over the state of the field, etc. The next SAN conferences is XXVIII Congreso de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias (the program page, which is mainly in English for some reason, is
here).
It's sponsored by SFN (Society for Neuroscience), an "international" organization and the largest neuroscience group in the world. In fact, its annual conference is larger than most academic conferences regardless of the field (most of the big ones are under 10,000, while the SFN conference brings in about 30,000 scientists).
However, you can see from a
this global map of the society's chapters (it might take a minute for the ballon landmarks to show up) that while there are chapters across the world, the majority are in the US. Of course, that isn't a representative sketch of neuroscience research centers, as there are plenty in Europe (my old lab was affiliated with one in Italy), but it is sadly rather representative of "Latin lands". Neuroimaging equipment is unfortunately a rather large obstacle thanks to the price-tag. Also, as the US began the cognitive sciences and these spread across Europe rapidly mainly due to existing ties between US and European academic organizations, certain regions of the globe are more than a little under-represented.
I am excited that he even had the guts to include it.
That kind of description is in littered across historical Jesus research. It is not unique at all.
Strokes can be supported. (I have cured a serious 'stroke' in about ten seconds!)
You can't know if someone is having a stroke for sure without brain imaging equipment. Also, I'd be curious as to how physical barriers in arterial blood flow to the brain (a major cause of stroke), or actual hemorrhage (Intracerebral hemorrhage (ICH) is the most common non-ischemic form of stroke) can be cured.
In fact, I'll stick my neck out and tell you I've seen most of the above, over a 20 year period (1972-1991). If I wrote about my observations neither you, nor Sanders would be able to easily accept my story.
That's the thing. Most people in the medical field or the brain sciences would probably accept a lot of it if not all. What would differ, however, is the interpretation.
I wish I could remember which book or study I read it in, but I can't even remember if it was a crique of western psychiatry, a book on witchcraft and magic, or some anthropology study. At any rate, some time fairly recently (last few decades), a man came into a hospital in an country which had many regions without a lot of technology, education, etc. The man said he had been cursed and was going to die. The people at the hospital said their was nothing medically wrong with him, and supplied him nutrients to survive through IV because he refused to eat. And he died. Suggestion is extremely powerful, and among particular people it is more powerful than average.
In my post to you I think I asked you whether the incidence of male-hysteria in Eastern Mediterranean lands was similar to Male-hysteria in Latin lands.
As the various types of symptoms which have been cross-culturally identified with demonic or spirit possession, being touched by god or a similar power, witchcraft, being cursed, etc., can't be easily categorized into one modern classification vs. another, and as this holds true of 1st century Palestine, it is impossible to say. Did an individual Jesus "cured" who was supposedly possessed by an unclean spirit suffer from a mental disorder, or from a seizure caused by any number of things, or something else? A modern therapeutic technique dealing with people who have e.g., hear voices is to take them through the logical implications in a non-confrontational way (e.g., "why is it that you think no one else hears them?") and this has had success.
I am looking for a gender balance in hysteria incidence.
Hysteria isn't a diagnosis.
