At the end of the first act of the bombastic musical show cats, based on poems by TS Elliot, and written and composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, the character Grizabella sings the song “Memory”, considered one of the most emblematic in the modern history of American musical theater. The song is an ode to nostalgia, that bittersweet emotion you feel when a past experience is put into perspective with your current life.
This is due to memories that include powerful impressions of certain feelings, such as fear, happiness, satisfaction. These are the ones that seem most likely to be remembered and can form important parts of autobiographical memory. Enhanced emotional memory helps preserve information useful for human behavior, such as knowing how to behave in a given situation.
Longing for the past is triggered by nostalgia, an experience that can include smells, tastes, sounds, objects, times of year, feelings, or many other characteristics. The mind is more likely to experience nostalgia when it is in a relatively low mood, as well as in the presence of loved ones or scrolling through a social media feed.
A study published in Current directions in psychological science has shown that people who tend to feel a lot of nostalgia generally experience episodes of sadness. Some believe this is why Nostalgia was once considered a psychiatric disorder.
“Nostalgic Afflictions”
The 19th century saw the proliferation and popularization of mental hospitals, especially in Europe, willing to isolate themselves from society and treat people suffering from psychiatric disorders, as it was considered immoral to throw them into prison. But in reality, these institutions acted as a means to control their patients and torture them in medical experiments for the scientific advances of the time, from mutilations, implant attempts, ingenious resources of suffering to other darker practices.
Furthermore, the government transformed psychiatric hospitals into real human warehouses, evicting the people it wanted to get rid of, whether suffering from disorders or not. In the midst of this chaos were those who suffered from being too nostalgic, considered psychotic.
Due to economic, political, and social factors, there were several exoduses throughout the 19th century, such as the Irish migration during the Great Potato Famine of 1840 and the displacement of Chinese to the United States to escape the Opium War of 1839. book What Nostalgia Was: War, Empire, and the Time of Deadly Emotion, historian Thomas Dodman highlights how grief, caused by nostalgia and fueled by forced displacement, can progress to death and madness. After hysteria, this feeling was the most studied among French academics of the 19th century.
Many people who abandoned their homes, to escape or in search of a better life, soon became ill and went mad from the longing caused by nostalgia for their homeland.
Even men who went to war were affected by the same problem. Indeed, army doctors took nostalgia very seriously, especially in cases of isolated soldiers transferred to foreign and hostile lands.
For 200 years, nostalgia manifested itself as something that today might be interpreted as post-traumatic stress disorder, turning soldiers into unhappy, apathetic people who showed signs of clinical depression. They died because the condition prevented them from eating and maintaining basic hygiene, leading to deadly opportunistic diseases from the battlefield.
Dodman’s extensive research estimates that the Union Army during the American Civil War suffered 5,213 cases of “nostalgia afflictions” among white soldiers, of which 58 were fatal. During the Revolution and the Napoleonic wars the suffering was so great that the armies “infected” by nostalgia saw the soldiers despair with insomnia, anorexia and the continuous desire to return home.
Understanding nostalgia
On the battlefields, doctors tried to cure patients suffering from extreme melancholy with herbal drinks and even the use of medicinal leeches. When hospitalization was the only alternative, patients were often kept in isolated rooms or areas because it was believed that limiting movement would cause the brain to “forget” the sensation while it concentrated on other problems. Revitalization using cold water baths also occurred in psychiatric hospitals and almost always led to death from hypothermia.
Returning home in the hope that this would relieve the symptoms was only used for soldiers, while migrants ended up being hanged, as returning was not an option, nor was living with them “infected” by society.
In the 17th century, the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer, who described nostalgia as “a neurological disease with essentially demonic causes,” coined the word “nostalgia” based on the German word heimweh (which translates as “desire”). The term quickly became a definition of the suffering experienced by soldiers and migrants, before being called “migrant psychosis” and even “repressive-compulsive mental disorder”.
At the turn of the 20th century, the term nostalgia fell out of use and began to be confused with schizophrenia, losing its status as a distinct and independent disease. The evolution of medical and psychological understanding during the second half of the 20th century led to a redefinition of nostalgia and its removal from medical classifications of mental illnesses.
This happened because the medical community understood that nostalgia is a mixed-spectrum emotion, in which a person tends to experience a pleasant sensation when they are in a good emotional moment. However, in adverse times, nostalgia can be so bitter that it evolves into nostalgic depression. The use of the term “depression” does not constitute the condition as an official mental health disorder or diagnosis, it simply describes the feeling of negative emotions in relation to current circumstances, which may cause the person to regret what they have lost.
Today, anyone suffering from persistent homesickness can seek help from a mental health professional to understand what’s going on. No one will ever be persecuted again, thrown into prisons or mental hospitals as they were in the 1800s because they are by nature a “creature that desires things that they do not have”, as Dodman describes.
Source: Terra
Ben Stock is a lifestyle journalist and author at Gossipify. He writes about topics such as health, wellness, travel, food and home decor. He provides practical advice and inspiration to improve well-being, keeps readers up to date with latest lifestyle news and trends, known for his engaging writing style, in-depth analysis and unique perspectives.
