hysteria

Noun

hysteria (usually uncountable, plural hysterias or hysteriae or hysteriæ)

1. (usually) Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotions, in a wide range from joy to panic but usually including anxiety or fear.
   • Zinoviev was unwell and feverish. He was told he was to be transferred to another cell. But when he saw the guards he at once understood. All accounts agree that he collapsed, yelling in a high-pitched voice a desperate appeal to Stalin to keep his word. He gave the impression of hysteria, but this...1968, Robert Conquest, “Old Bolsheviks Confess”, in The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, Macmillan Company, →LCCN, →OCLC, →OL, page 117
   • At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted country folk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap.1999, Robert Lacey, Danny Danziger, The Year 1000: What life was like at the turn of The First Millennium, London: Abacus, published 2000, page 102
2. (usually, nosologically dated) A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.
   • The typical cases of hysteria cited by Freud thus involved a moral conflict—a conflict about what the young women in question wanted to do with themselves. Did they want to prove that they were good daughters by taking care of their sick fathers? Or did they want to become independent of their...1974, Thomas S. Szasz, M.D., chapter 13, in The Myth of Mental Illness, →ISBN, page 218
3. (informal, usually) Synonym of conversion disorder.

   Synonyms:

   conversion disorder

4. (historical, obsolete, usually) Any disorder of women with some psychiatric symptoms without other diagnosis, ascribed to uterine influences on the female body, lack of pregnancy, or lack of sex.

   Synonyms:

   uterine melancholy