Neurasthenia and the Modern City: Genealogical Speculations on Capitalism-Urged Anxiety, Stress, and Suicide in North America, 1890–1920
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The mental health of turn-of-the-twentieth-century urban North Americans declined under the predations and indifference of laissez-faire capitalism—so much so that physician George Beard associated the emergence of a new and modern “nervousness” with a novel “American” disease: neurasthenia. Neither new nor particularly American neurasthenia did, however, give psychiatric and cultural geographic shape to the pyroclastic eruption of stress in modern urban circumstances. Neurasthenic anxiety had fatal consequences: for many this meant suicide—which reached pandemic proportions by 1900. Here, we encounter an agony we know little about: the suicide club, which affected not just North America but the Western world from Russia west to Hawaii. Does this earlier neurasthenia resonate genealogically in our own late-capitalist, neoliberal, and neo-Victorian anxieties?
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".