Just as the gender continuum of feminine-masculine can be understood as social construction, in many ways culturally contingent descriptions rather than solely essential biological traits, so can the pathological continuum of sick-healthy. Yes, biological factors may often be involved, but deciding at what point feelings, behaviors, or states of being change from healthy to unhealthy is in many ways cultural choice and social construction. What cultural beliefs, prejudices, and dreams are involved in disease definition, diagnosis, and treatments? In his history of neurasthenia, Tom Lutz advances the concept of disease as cultural complex, a polysemic and extremely pliable discourse within which groups are able to voice, frame, and negotiate complex social changes. Such a cultural and historic perspective examines the cultural work of a disease. Disease discourse can be understood as performing the cultural labor of pathologization: legitimizing, through medical science, preexisting social divisions and inequities. Examples include drapetomania (the irrational desire of slaves to escape), hysteria (feminine weak minds and excessive emotions controlled by the uterus), housewives syndrome (depression caused by watching feminists on TV) and ghetto headache (distress among inner-city poor caused by the civil rights movement). Socially contingent degrees of good-bad or more-less are naturalized as normal-abnormal or healthy-sick.

As a marker of the valued continuum of normal-abnormal, sickness maps onto and reinforces other hierarchical continuums: masculine-feminine, rational-emotional, good-bad. In marking certain characteristics, expressions, or experiences, those that are devalued are pathologized. Diseases associated with gender mark good and bad femininity and masculinity. Diseases associated with technology mark good and bad technology use: healthy and sick users.

What sort of cultural complex was neurasthenia? Neurologist George Miller Beard conceptualized the disease in 1869 as a bioelectrical nervous system exhausted by overstimulation. Today, the most familiar vestigial form of this diagnosis, no longer used in the West, would be nervous breakdowns. Neurasthenia was thought to be particularly American, due to climatological uniqueness and social competitiveness and ambition. The chief and primary cause of this development and very rapid increase of nervousness, wrote Beard, is modern civilization, which is distinguished from the ancient by these five characteristics: steam-power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women. Technologies of transportation and communication, plus a challenge to gender roles, created more stress than the human nervous system could handle, spawning a wide variety of mental and physical illness.

Today, electrosensitivity refers to people who suffer a wide variety mental and physical illness due to close and persistent electromagnetic radiation, even at levels that do not harms others. This hypersensitivity—to sources such as cell phones and computers—appears alone and in conjunction with other diseases of disputed authenticity, such as environmental illness, multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and various autoimmune syndromes. Its widespread, varied, and flexible nature suggest a similar “cultural complex,” like neurasthenia. Both share bioelectrical and central nervous system overstimulation, technological etiology, common and varied symptoms (headache, muscle pain, fatigue, insomnia, confusion, etc.), and frequent comorbidity with other conditions.