April 1935 was a nervous month. Unemployment in America stood at 20 percent. A potential polio vaccine was failing trials. The term Dust Bowl made its first appearance in newsprint. A thousand-mile storm carried away much of Oklahoma. And Fortune magazine introduced its readers to “The ‘Nervous Breakdown.’ ”
Soon reprinted as an 85-page book, the article cited experts “whose names loom largest in the fields of mental hygiene.” The takeaway? The nervous breakdown was deemed to be “as widespread as the common cold and the chiefest source of misery in the modern world.” Anyone could be susceptible; it could be precipitated by nearly anything, and it prevented one “from carrying on the business of normal living.” Resolution of the breakdown entailed a time-out, ideally at one of the deluxe sanitariums profiled a few pages in.
Right now—I think we can all agree—Americans are once again living in a nervous time. Pandemic. Wildfires. Indefinite homeschooling. Postelection political chaos. TikTok. Feelings of impending collapse have arguably never rested on firmer empirical ground. But today we no longer have recourse to the culturally sanctioned respite that the nervous breakdown once afforded. No longer can we take six weeks at the Hartford Retreat, one of the healing getaways described in Fortune—all long since closed or transmuted into psychiatric facilities that require a formal mental-health diagnosis for admission. No restorative caesura is forthcoming for us. The nervous breakdown is gone.
For 80 years or so, proclaiming that you were having a nervous breakdown was a legitimized way of declaring a sort of temporary emotional bankruptcy in the face of modern life’s stresses. John D. Rockefeller Jr., Jane Addams, and Max Weber all had acknowledged “breakdowns,” and reemerged to do their best work. Provided you had the means—a rather big proviso—announcing a nervous breakdown gave you license to withdraw, claiming an excess of industry or sensitivity or some other virtue. And crucially, it focused the cause of distress on the outside world and its unmeetable demands. You weren’t crazy; the world was. As a 1947 headline in the New York Herald Tribune put it: “Modern World Viewed as Too Much for Man.”