Colonised and Neurasthenic: From the Appropriation of a Word to the Reality of a Malaise de Civilisation in Urban French Vietnam (2012)
Neurasthenia remains an important health problem in certain Asian populations, both in Asia as well as in a diasporic context. An anachronistic disease for Western observers, it has become an exotic culture-bound syndrome as well as a somatoform disorder too often hiding much more serious issues of depression. This article approaches this `problematic' health issue from a historian's point of view and offers a colonial genealogy that will discuss neurasthenia's outline in French Vietnam. By retracing and analysing the different mentions, definitions, and uses of the term neurasthenia in the interwar period, it aims to better understand certain historical realities that might have shaped the local identity and spatiality of this problem (concentrated in colonial cities in which social change and modernity were expressed in their most salient forms), and perhaps even identify reasons that facilitated its post-colonial survival.
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