How true that while distress, trauma and dysfunctional behavior are still very common, the term "hysteria" to describe the condition is no longer popular.
Hysteria seemed to be a vanished 19th-century extravagance useful for literary analysis but surely out of place in the serious reaches of contemporary science.
There is something quaint and antiquated about the word though the idea is now represented by a range of euphemisms that are meant to be more politically correct and gender neutral.
Unofficially, a host of inoffensive synonyms for “hysterical” have appeared: functional, nonorganic, psychogenic, medically unexplained.
Clearly, killing the messenger has not helped.
Throughout that cloud of shifting nomenclature, people have kept getting sick. “The symptoms themselves have never changed,” said Patrik Vuilleumier, a neurologist at the University of Geneva. “They are still common in practice.”
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
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I recently discovered your blog, and I must say that I am very impressed. Your blog is "one of a kind," and I do not say that either with subtle derision or lightness. Instead, the remark stands as the highest form of compliment I have paid anybody on the blogging scene.
Your postings have an intellectual flair; and they carry a rich writing style that is uniquely your signature. Nonetheless, I must confess that I enjoyed reading your blogs on the subject matter of relationships and "desi" culture the most; perhaps because I was able to identify with what you had written on those topics, I wanted to ask you to write more on the same whenenever you next get the chance and/or feel the inclination.
Sincerely,
Ek Umeed :)