RP

Yes. In fact, the middle, upper-middle classes, and elites were seen as having more sensitive nervous systems because they were doing more mental work.

So for women, the treatment for neurasthenia was to isolate them for weeks, put them in bed, and not allow them to read books or do anything. That was called the rest cure. Some men were given the rest cure, but it generally was considered too feminine for them. So they had to go out into the wilderness and do vigorous exercise. And then there were bizarre electrodes put on people to try to replenish their “nerve energy,” because neurasthenia was seen as a depletion of nerve energy.

Obviously there was something happening. Did these people physiologically suffer in relationship to what was going on economically with the rise of industrialization? And then by the 1910, 1920, it just disappeared. The diagnosis went out of fashion.

Hans Selye, a Harvard physician, was dubbed the father of stress in the 1950s. And with Selye, there’s a hidden history. Not many people know that Selye was being funded by the tobacco industry. The tobacco industry was interested in taking attention away from any connection between nicotine addiction and smoking and cardiovascular diseases and so on. They had lawyers tell Selye — for great sums of money — what to say. And he began testifying at government hearings saying that actually cigarette smoking was a form of stress relief.

But I think something important to say is that this is a biological model of stress — that stress is seen through the lens of a biomedical model, as an individualistic maladaptation to the environment. It’s seen as a privatized interior affair. It becomes completely depoliticized and pathologized. Not only that, the discourse of stress, which has now been disseminated throughout our culture, becomes a doctrine. So [now] stress is just a natural given within a capitalist economy that we as individuals have to learn how to adapt to. We have to “mindful up,” as I put it, to self-correct and compensate.

Dana Becker wrote a beautiful book (One Nation Under Stress: The Problem with Stress as an Idea), and she calls this the doctrine of “stressism” — where stress is seen as strictly a poor lifestyle choice. That disconnects it from the social and the economic and political factors. So that’s the explanatory framework for stress, and the mindfulness movement buys completely into that.