Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?

Honestly: Does Glorifying Sickness Deter Healing?
commonsense.news

“…“the gentrification of disability,” how sickness became chic…“

is quite something.

Reminds me of Luis the 14th and his anal fistula [1]. Courtiers started faking anal fistulas after the king had an operation to remove his. It got to the point where they would get treatment for them, or fake getting the treatment, regardless of health. This was not a simple operation at the time. Chances of death were high, to the point where the first was performed on a condemned criminal who was pardoned if he survived.

[0] https://www.insider.com/who-is-youtube-star-nikocado-avocado...

[1] https://tidsskriftet.no/2016/08/sun-kings-anal-fistula

> Around the Meiji Restoration, when everyone was obsessed with how great foreign stuff was, Japanese medical students went to Germany, learned psychiatry, came back to Japan, and told everyone they were neurasthenic. Being neurasthenic became first a fashion, then a class marker. The idea was that neurasthenics were people who were working too hard (good, admirable), and who were so smart and doing so much furious intellectual activity that it was straining their nerves (impressive). Also, they were probably sensitive souls too pure for this world. The most embarrassing extreme of this happened in 1903, when some photogenic Japanese youth carved a poem in a tree, went to a beautiful waterfall, and leapt to his death. Everyone praised him for how sensitive and artistic and neurasthenic this was, and turned him into a posthumous national hero. Meanwhile, “in 1902 an article reported that fully one-third of patients visiting hospitals for consultations were suffering from the new disease.”

> Eventually Japanese psychiatrists got fed up, and started announcing that actually neurasthenia sucked and you should not have it. From a 1906 Japanese neurology journal:

>> These days, young students talk about such stuff as “the philosophy of life”. They confront important and profound problems of life, are defeated, and develop neurasthenia. Those who jump off a waterfall or throw themselves in front of a train are weak-minded. They do not have a strong mental constitution and develop mental illness, dying in the end. How useless they are! Such weak-minded people would only cause harm even if they remained alive.

> Finally everyone struck a compromise and agreed that most of the lower-class patients weren’t real neurasthenics (hard-working, intelligent, sensitive, admirable), but had a similar condition, imitating the symptoms of neurasthenia, based on being too weak and pathetic to cope. This seemed to do the trick, and people stopped coming to the hospital with neurasthenia symptoms. Watters writes:

>> Looking back on the debate, it seems as if acceptance of neurasthenia had been so successful that psychiatrists felt obligated to restigmatize this mental disorder in hopes of limiting its adoption. By the end of World War II the diagnosis had almost completely gone out of style among both psychiatrists and the population at large.

> He who has ears to hear, let him listen.

Glorifying illness causes a lot of harm.