If you’ve ever been told you’re being "hysterical" during an argument, you know it’s not a compliment. It’s a shut-down. But when people ask what do you mean by hysteria, they are usually tripping over a massive, two-thousand-year-old pile of medical baggage, sexism, and genuine neurological mystery. It is arguably the most controversial word in the history of medicine.
Hysteria isn't just "being over-the-top." In the clinical sense, it’s a ghost. It was a catch-all diagnosis for centuries, used to describe everything from seizures and paralysis to "faintness" and "a tendency to cause trouble."
Today, if you look in the DSM-5 (the "bible" of psychiatry), you won’t find it. It's gone. Scrubbed. But the symptoms that used to fall under that umbrella haven't vanished. They’ve just been rebranded into things like Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) or Somatic Symptom Disorder.
The Uterus That Liked to Travel
The word comes from hystera, the Greek word for uterus. For a long time—and I mean a long time—doctors literally thought a woman’s womb could detach itself and wander around her body like a lost tourist. They believed it would bump into other organs, causing coughing, choking, or even "fits."
Hippocrates and his contemporaries thought the uterus was basically a living animal inside the body that got "thirsty" or bored if it wasn't occupied by pregnancy. To "cure" it? They used "scent therapy." They’d put foul-smelling things near the woman's nose to drive the uterus downward, or pleasant smells near her lower half to lure it back into place. It sounds like a bad joke now. Honestly, it's terrifying that this was the peak of medical science for centuries.
By the Victorian era, the "wandering womb" theory evolved into "nerves." This is where the trope of the Victorian lady fainting on a velvet couch comes from. Doctors like Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris began treating "hysterical" patients with hypnosis. He treated it like a spectacle. Every Tuesday, he’d hold public lectures where he’d trigger "attacks" in his patients—mostly women—in front of an audience of writers, socialites, and other doctors.
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Sigmund Freud was one of those students. Freud took Charcot’s physical observations and turned them inward. He decided that when someone asks what do you mean by hysteria, the answer was repressed trauma. He believed that if a person had a traumatic memory they couldn't process, the mind would "convert" that psychic pain into a physical symptom. A soldier who saw something horrific might suddenly go blind, even though his eyes were fine. A woman who felt trapped in a marriage might lose the use of her legs.
It’s Not "All in Your Head"
We need to be clear about something. When a person experiences what we used to call hysteria, the symptoms are real. They aren't faking. If a person’s arm becomes paralyzed due to a conversion disorder, they aren't "pretending" to be paralyzed to get attention. Their brain is genuinely failing to send the signal to move that limb.
Modern neuroscience has started to peel back the layers on this. Using fMRI scans, researchers have seen that in patients with Functional Neurological Disorder (the modern term for many "hysterical" symptoms), the parts of the brain that control movement and the parts that process emotion are basically miscommunicating. It’s a software problem, not a hardware problem. The "wires" are intact, but the signals are getting scrambled.
Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan, a prominent neurologist and author of It's All in Your Head, has spent years documenting these cases. She points out that society still treats these patients with a huge amount of stigma. Because we can’t see a tumor or a lesion on a scan, we assume the person is "crazy." But the brain is incredibly powerful. It can shut down your legs, stop your speech, or cause a seizure just as effectively as a physical injury can.
The Problem With the Label
The reason "hysteria" was finally deleted from medical texts in 1980 wasn't just because it was sexist (though it was). It was because it was too broad. It was a "wastebasket" diagnosis. If a doctor couldn’t figure out why a woman was depressed, or why she was angry, or why she had chronic pain—boom—hysteria.
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It was used to pathologize normal human emotions. Wanting to vote? Hysteria. Not wanting to get married? Hysteria. Having a high libido? Definitely hysteria.
Even today, we see the remnants of this in how women are treated in emergency rooms. Studies consistently show that women are more likely to be given sedatives for pain while men are given painkillers. Women are told their symptoms are "stress-related" significantly more often than men. When you ask what do you mean by hysteria in a modern context, you’re often talking about the "medical gaslighting" of people whose symptoms don't fit into a neat little box.
Mass Hysteria: When It Spreads
Then there is the "mass" version. This is where a group of people all start exhibiting the same physical symptoms with no clear environmental cause.
Think about the "Dancing Plague" of 1518, where hundreds of people in Strasbourg danced themselves to exhaustion (and some to death) for days on end. Or the more recent "Le Roy Twitching" incident in 2011, where a group of high school students in New York all developed Tourette-like tics.
Sociologists call this Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). It usually happens in high-stress environments. It’s not a virus. It’s a collective response to extreme pressure. The brain is social. If we see others in our "tribe" reacting to a perceived threat, our nervous systems can actually mirror those symptoms.
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Why the Word Still Matters
We still use the word because it captures a specific kind of loss of control. But we have to be careful. In common parlance, it’s used to delegitimize someone's feelings. If you call someone hysterical, you are saying their reaction is disconnected from reality.
But history shows us that what we call "hysteria" is often just a reaction to a reality that is too painful or restrictive to bear.
Whether it was a Victorian woman restricted by a corset and a lack of rights, or a modern worker burned out to the point of a physical breakdown, the "hysterical" body is usually trying to say something that the mouth isn't allowed to speak.
Practical Steps for Navigating This
If you or someone you know is dealing with symptoms that doctors are calling "psychosomatic" or "functional," don't panic. And don't feel insulted. Here is how to handle it:
- Seek a Specialist: Look for neurologists who specialize in Functional Neurological Disorder (FND). They understand the bridge between the brain and the mind better than a general practitioner might.
- Validate the Physicality: Remind yourself that a "functional" symptom is still a symptom. If your hand is shaking, it is shaking. The cause doesn't change the reality of the experience.
- Check the Language: If a medical professional uses the word "hysterical" or "all in your head," it might be time for a second opinion. Those are outdated terms that usually signal a lack of updated training in modern neuropsychiatry.
- Integrated Therapy: The most effective treatments usually involve a mix of physical therapy (to "re-train" the brain's pathways) and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to address the underlying stress or trauma triggers.
- Audit Your Stress: Since these symptoms are often the body's way of "hitting the circuit breaker," look at where in your life you are overwhelmed. The body often yells when we refuse to listen to a whisper.
The history of hysteria is a long lesson in how little we actually understand about the connection between our thoughts and our nerves. We've come a long way from "wandering wombs," but we’re still learning how to listen to what the body is trying to tell us when words fail.