Conclusion. The construct of neurasthenia was assessed to be characterized mainly by features of irritability and nervousness, which resembles more to the concept of stress rather than anxiety or depression. As predicted by recent theories on the relationship between negative affects, neurasthenia was found to share both unique and common characteristics with stress, anxiety and depression. In addition to sharing a common general distress factor, specific postulations were made about the distinctiveness of neurasthenia as a clinical syndrome from anxiety, depression and CFS. Between-group analysis showed a relatively stable and coherent construct of neurasthenia between the Hong Kong and Changsha samples. The early view that neurasthenia represents a disguise form of depression by way of somatization was not supported by the present results. The general tendency to endorse lower scores on both the somatic and psychological items for all of the administered scales in Changsha reflects a possible change in cultural templates of "neurasthenia" and "somatization" to more psychologically oriented templates of "stress" and "social desirability" for expressing somatic and psychological distress in modern china. The present research demonstrated the use and advantages of adopting a psychometric approach to investigate the construct of neurasthenia in a cross-cultural setting. / Methods. Two independent samples of Chinese from Hong Kong (N = 868) and Changsha (N = 1001) were compared on the newly refined Chinese Neurasthenia Scale (CN5-12), as well as a number of mood, personality and cognitive measures, including Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) and Automatic Thought Questionnaire (ATQ). The construct of neurasthenia and its relationship with the relevant measures was examined by way of detailed psychometric, correlational and factor analyses. Different structural models of neurasthenia in relation to stress, anxiety, and depression were tested and compared in the two Chinese samples using Structural Equation Modeling. Comparisons of sample means were assessed by ANCOVA with potential confounds being controlled as covariates. / Objectives. The present study employed a psychometric approach to investigate the construct of neurasthenia in respect of two fundamental issues: (1) the major characteristics that constitute neurasthenia as a distinctive construct; and (2) the cultural variability in the construct of neurasthenia between Chinese samples in different cultural settings. Another major aim of the present research was to refine and update the Chinese Neurasthenia Scale originally developed by the author for assessing the construct of neurasthenia. / Results. All of the scales administered including the newly refined Chinese Neurasthenia scale (cNs-12) were found to attain very good psychometric properties. According to factor analyses, the construct of neurasthenia as assessed by CNs-12 was found to comprise four major components, namely (a) Irritability and Nervousness, (b) musculoskeletal Aches and Pains, (c) Functional Impairment, and (d) Sleep disturbances and Fatigue. contrary to current taxonomic systems, irritability rather than fatigue or weakness was found to represent the major feature of neurasthenia. As shown by correlational and multiple regression analyses, the construct of neurasthenia also showed closer resemblance to the concept of stress when compared to anxiety and depression. According to the results of SEM, both irritability and chronic fatigue were found to be the specific markers for neurasthenia when distinguishing from anxiety and depression. Moreover, the presence of irritability might constitute a specific marker to differentiate neurasthenia from chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). No significant sample differences were found in the factor structure of neurasthenia, as well as its pattern of relationships with the relevant mood, personality and cognitive variables between the two Chinese samples. The most striking sample difference pertained to a general tendency for the Changsha sample to endorse a lower level of distress on both somatic and psychological symptoms than the Hong Kong sample. / Wong, Kit Ching. / "May 2008." / Adviser: Helen Chiu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-03, Section: B, page: 1587. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 158-178). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

Program--Univ. Heidelberg (Akademische Rede).

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2008. Graduate Programme in Psychology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-146). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38781

No description available.

Orientador: Benito Pereira Damasceno / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Educação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-12T23:55:42Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Martinelli_JoseEduardo_D.pdf: 1621179 bytes, checksum: 1c984f95e30d98f7e2b8bd7a1e61a4c2 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2008 / Resumo: A Síndrome Astenoemocional (SAE) é uma das seis síndromes básicas da Psiquiatria Orgânica e a mais freqüente na prática clínica. É pouco conhecida no meio clínico pelo fato de ser oriunda do trabalho de dois pesquisadores escandinavos (Lindqvist & Malmgrem, 1993), que tomaram como base antigos conceitos da psiquiatria alemã e, baseados na experiência clínica, criaram um sistema classificatório para a Psiquiatria Orgânica. É importante divulgar no meio médico o que representa a SAE em termos de diagnóstico, mostrar que essa entidade não é tão incomum em termos de freqüência e salientar que o conjunto sintomatológico que a define é comum a várias doenças que ainda não se manifestaram plenamente. O presente estudo é uma continuidade da dissertação de Mestrado "Diagnósticos Diferenciais da Síndrome Astenoemocional em Idosos".O objetivo principal foi de detectar parâmetros diagnósticos relacionados a cada etiologia da SAE. Foram examinados 129 pacientes sendo identificados como suspeitos clínicos 72 indivíduos (52 homens, 77 mulheres, idade entre 60 e 93 anos, média 77.61). Após anamnese detalhada enfatizando os sintomas, todos os casos suspeitos foram submetidos a investigação laboratorial incluindo hemograma, glicemia, dosagem de eletrólitos, perfil hepático, renal, dosagens hormonais e outros exames que se fizessem necessários de acordo com a suspeita clínica de cada paciente; de neuroimagem incluindo tomografia comoutadorizada, ressonância magnética e outros exames que se fizessem necessários de acordo com a suspeita clínica de cada paciente; e neuropsiquiátrica que incluiu o mini exame do Estado Mental (FOLSTEIN et. al., 1975), o CAMDEX (The Cambridge Mental Disorders of the Eldery Examination) (Roth et. al., 1986), seu teste cognitivo (Cognitive Section of the CAMDEX-CAMCOG) e o teste de desenho do relógio (TDR). Foram identificados os diagnósticos de: Hipotiroidismo 29,2%; doença de Alzheimer 23,6%; Hipertiroidismo 13,9%; Hidrocefalia de pressão normal 11,1%; Hiperdensidade da substância branca 9,7%; Declínio Cognitivo Leve (DCL) 8,3%; câncer de pâncreas 1,4%; Hematoma subdermal 1,4% e Hepatite C 1,4%. Observamos que a dosagem do hormônio tireoestimulante (TSH) foi a única de valor no esclarecimento diagnóstico (MW p=0.014). Entre os testes neuropsiquiátricos, os casos de DCL e de Hipertiroidismo apresentaram desempenho superior à Hidrocefalia de Pressão Normal na memória total (KW p=0.032). Nos subtestes avaliatórios da memória recente e de evocação, os casos de DCL apresentaram pontuação maior que os de Hidrocefalia de Pressão Normal (KW p=0.045). Os pacientes com Hipertiroidismo mostraram melhor desempenho em relação à doença de Alzheimer, hiperdensidade da substância branca e Hidrocefalia de Pressão Normal (KW; p=0.001). Em conclusão, constatou-se que a SAE afeta o desempenho social e pode ser diagnosticada com alta confiabilidade através do quadro sintomatológico. A dosagem de TSH e os testes neuropsicológicos podem auxiliar em alguns diagnósticos etiológicos específicos. / Abstract: The Asthenoemotional Syndrome (AES) is one of the six basic syndromes described in Organic Psichiatry and the most frequent in clinical pratice. It is relatively unknown as it was described by two scandinavian researchers (Lindqvist & Malmgrem, 1993), who, based on old german psichiatry concepts and clinical experience, created a classificatory scheme for Organic Psichiatry. It is important to disseminate in the clinical environment what AES represents in terms of diagnosis, demonstrate that the disorder is not uncommon and that the sintomatologic ensemble that defines the syndrome is common to several diseases that are not entirely developed. The main objective of the present study was to identify the factors related to AES etiology. This study is a sequence of the master thesis "Diferential Diagnosis of the Asthenoemotional Syndrome of the eldery". We examined 129 Seventy two individuals (52 men, 72 women, age between 60 and 93 years, 77.61 ± years) were identified as possible SAE cases. All patients suspected of SAE identified by a thorough anamnesis emphasizing symptoms, were submitted to a laboratory investigation including blood counts, glucose, basic metabolic panel, hormones, hepatic and renal profiles and other specific exams depending on each patient evaluation; neuroimages investigation including computed tomography, magnetic ressonace exam and other specific exams depending on each patient evaluation; a neuropsichiatric exam including the mini-mental state test (MMSE) (FOLSTEIN et. al., 1975), the CAMDEX test (The Cambridge Mental Disorders of the Eldery Examination) (Roth et al., 1986) and its cognitive test (Cognitive Section of the CAMDEX-CAMCOG), and the clock drawing test (CDT). We observed: Hypothyroidism 29.2%; Alzheimer's disease 23.6%; Hyperthyroidism 13.9%; normal pressure hidrocephalia 11.1%; hyperdensity on cerebral white matter 9.7%; mild cognitive impairment (MCI) 8.3%; pancreatic cancer 1.4%; subdermal hematoma 1.4% and type C Hepatitis 1.4%. The thyrotrophic hormone (TSH) was the only one of diagnostic utility. MCI and Hyperthyroidism patients had a better performance on total memory tests than normal pressure hydrocephalus (MW p=0.032). Concerning recent memory and evocative memory tests, the MCI patients had higher scores compared to normal pressure hydrocephalia patients (KW p=0.045). The Hyperthyroidism patients displayed better performance than Alzheimer's disease patients (KW p=0.001), hiperdensity on cerebral white matter (KW p=0.001) and normal pressure hydrocephalia patients (KW p=0.001), whereas MCI patients had higher scores when compared to hiperdensity on cerebral white matter (KW p=0.032) and normal pressure hydrocephalia patients (KW p=0.045). We conclude that AES afects social performance and can be diagnosed accurately based on its symptoms. TSH measurement and neuropsychologic tests may help identify specific causes of AES. / Doutorado / Psicologia Educacional / Doutor em Educação

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Rhode Island, 2007. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 168-170).

Throughout an adult life that witnessed drastic cultural upheaval between the Civil War and World War I, Bertha Honoré Palmer (1849-1918) was continually called on to deploy her Victorian values in response to modern events. Being a woman only complicated this negotiation. But being a child of the American frontier granted her a latitude and mobility that were rare for women of her class and era – allowing her to challenge gender boundaries and occupy more than one cultural space at a time. Most of what has been written about Bertha Palmer’s life has been exceptionalist in approach and tone, ascribing her outsized social and political successes to her physical beauty and perfection of temperament. I believe Bertha Palmer’s importance as a crucial transitional bridge between True Woman and New Woman has been underestimated in this discourse. Near the end of her life, a move to Florida offered her the potential to resolve the inside/outside, domestic/public, feminine/masculine dialectics that lay at the heart of her restless movements. These contradictions and dichotomies that Bertha Palmer embodied on a grand scale do more to make her knowable to us today than the record of her words and actions can accomplish. Both her Victorian reticence and her modernistic construction of a seamless public façade have a way of hindering our best efforts to understand her motivations – especially the choice to move to Florida – despite a wealth of biographical material, including her correspondence housed in Chicago and Sarasota history centers, and contemporary news accounts. In the end, the cultural history of the Gilded Age gives us the only reliable lens for penetrating the veneer of Bertha Palmer.

Hysteria has been researched from many different angles, but this thesis focuses on the persistence of gendered medical diagnoses following the demise of hysteria. In Chapter One, I provide an overview of hysteria’s long history, beginning with the first reference to the disorder in Ancient Egypt. I then conduct a study of nineteenth-century hysteria in Chapter Two, where I highlight the interactions between medicine and culture that characterized the hysteria epidemic in Victorian Britain and America. Chapter Three continues this discussion of nineteenth-century hysteria, detailing the rise of psychological explanations for hysteria in Europe. My most important research, however, comes in Chapters Four and Five where I chronicle the rise of specific diagnoses that replaced hysteria in the twentieth century. I focus on gendered wastebasket diagnoses—illnesses that predominantly affect women, are categorized based on shared symptoms rather than causes, and are defined in relation to femininity. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the descriptions of certain psychiatric conditions that are more frequently diagnosed in women contain stigmatizing language used to describe hysteria, especially in the nineteenth century. Outside of the psychiatric realm, chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia are also wastebasket diagnoses that are described by both doctors and academics using the dismissive language of earlier descriptions of hysteria. I argue that throughout all of this history, the mutual influence of medical theory and cultural assumptions—particularly about gender and femininity—has allowed women’s mysterious medical complaints to remain unexplained. The ambiguous nature of conditions descended from hysteria and their association with femininity causes doctors to return to long-standing stereotypes that diminish the suffering of these patients. Many patients with these conditions struggle to access effective treatments for their symptoms. Understanding these illnesses in the historical context of hysteria can help explain and address these experiences. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA) / The medical field has long been influenced by its surrounding cultural context. Social factors, including gender, race, and class, all colour the ways in which illnesses are understood and patients are treated. This thesis examines these interactions between medicine and culture in the context of nineteenth-century hysteria and the related diagnoses that arose to replace it in the twentieth century. The disease entity hysteria disappeared in the early twentieth century, but patients continued to experience the symptoms associated with hysteria under a range of diagnostic titles. Situating these illnesses in the historical context of hysteria can help address patient complaints and deconstruct the stigmatizing stereotypes that affect these patients— particularly those stereotypes associated with femininity that were once attributed to hysteria patients

Prior study of Craiglockhart War Hospital has focused on the hospital's two most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, along with the work of the psychotherapist W. H. R. Rivers. Craiglockhart's literary culture is studied in detail for the first time in this thesis and the hospital's therapeutic ethos used as a framework by which the creative work produced at the hospital can be examined. This thesis argues that the British Army's lack of consensus regarding the best treatment of war neuroses facilitated the development of Craiglockhart's expressive culture, in which patients were encouraged both to articulate their wartime memories and return to purposeful activity. The hospital's magazine, The Hydra, is examined at length; both in terms of its links to the wider genre of wartime soldier publications and as a telling document of the hospital's therapies in action. Owen and Sassoon's time at the hospital is also discussed, with particular emphasis on the hospital's central importance in Owen's poetic development and its troubling legacy in the post-war life of Sassoon. Finally, readers are introduced to George Henry Bonner, a patient of the hospital whose creative work is discussed here for the first time. This study makes clear the fact that, for the hospital's literary-minded patients, creative endeavour was an ideal means by which to negotiate the movement away from repression to the articulation of their wartime experiences.

Cultural and historical accounts of self-help literature typically describe its development and focus in terms of the autonomous, public male subject of the nineteenth century. This literary study recognizes that as masculine self-help discourse became widely accessible in the mid nineteenth century, mid-Victorian feminist novels, periodicals, and tracts developed versions of self-help that disrupted the dominant cultural view that the single female was helpless and “redundant” if she did not become a wife and mother. I argue that the dual focus of Victorian self-help discourse on the ability to help oneself and others was attractive for Victorian feminist writers who needed to manipulate the terms of the domestic ideal of woman as influential helpmeet, if women’s independence and civic duty were to be made culturally palatable. Chapter One focuses on how Dinah Mulock Craik drew on self-help values popularized in mid-century articles and collective biographies by Samuel Smiles, while rejecting the genre of biography for its invasiveness into female lives. By imagining a deformed single artist heroine in the context of her 1851 bildungsroman, Olive, Craik highlighted and contested the objectification of women within Victorian culture while reproducing other forms of female difference based on dominant constructions of class, sexuality, and race. Chapter Two extends formal and thematic considerations of self-help discourse to a comparison of masculine colonial accounts of class-climbing and the projection of a self-reliant, yet deeply unstable, domestic female by Maria Rye and the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society. Chapter Three exerts critical pressure on the tension between individual and mutual help by charting the debate that raged between liberal individualism and collectivism in the labour movement, particularly in The Women’s Union Journal. Returning to a focus on the binary of female aberrance and normalcy within Victorian culture, Chapter Four analyzes late-century case studies of nervous illnesses alongside Ella Hepworth Dixon’s 1894 New Woman novel that promoted self-help for women as desirable yet unattainable in a society still largely structured around the domestic ideal. At its broadest, this dissertation explores points of convergence and departure between Victorian masculine and feminine self-help texts, and touches on reverberations of this Victorian discourse in today’s self-help works directed at women in Western culture.