The darker past of nostalgia, once a deadly mental illness

This post is part of Mashable’s You’re Old Week. Break through the haze of nostalgia with us and see what holds up, what disappoints, and what got better with time.

Asylums for the psychotic emerged in the 1800s, when it was deemed immoral to simply throw insane people into jails. And among the most serious afflictions in these wards was nostalgia. 

“It was once a medical disease that could end fatally,” Edward Shorter, a professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry at the University of Toronto, said in an interview. 

Today, nostalgia certainly isn’t viewed as anything even approximating mental illness. It’s thought of as an emotion, a mild, wistful longing for the past that is, in fact, good for you. But in the 1800s, among halls of the hysterical, delusional, and unintelligible, there were those suffering from a homesickness so extreme, it drove them mad. Read more…

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Source: Mashable | The darker past of nostalgia, once a deadly mental illness