您最近是否失眠、焦虑还是心神不宁？如果您有，那么恭喜您得了“经济不景气综合症”。据调查，有半数美国人说他们比去年有更多的压力，更有三分之一的承受者着极度的压力，生活与内心苦苦挣扎在经济危机的泥潭里……

原文链接：http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_essay/

原文标题：Mental Downturn: Identifying the Symptoms of Economic Uncertainty

译者：艺术猴

Almost as soon as the economic meltdown began, the ominous warnings started. “Suicides: Watching for a Recession Spike,” read a February 2009 headline in Time magazine. Around the same time, USA Today reported, “Signs abound that the battered economy is causing serious damage to the mental health and family lives of a growing number of Americans … Nearly half of Americans said they were more stressed than a year ago, and about one-third rated their stress level as extreme in surveys [conducted by] the American Psychological Association.”

正在经济开始滑坡的时候，乌鸦嘴就开始广播了。“自杀：见证经济衰退的尖峰时刻”，时代杂志2009年2月版头条新闻如是说。大概在同时，今日美国报道，“经济萧条的信号正在给越来越多美国人的生理健康和家庭生活带来严重打击……根据美国心理学会的一项调查，大约半数的美国人说他们比去年有更多的压力，更有三分之一的承受者着极度的压力（极度为测量标准）”。

Then there was this front-page headline in The New York Times: “Recession Anxiety Seeps into Everyday Lives.” Quoting experts and individuals, the article listed a variety of mental health symptoms sparked by financial worries. These ranged from the mundane (sleeplessness, anxiety, constant worrying) to the alarming (breathing problems, rapid heart rate) to the bizarre (chills, choking sensations, numbness and tingling in the fingers).

接着，纽约时报的头版头条报道了：“经济衰退的焦虑渗透入了每天的生活。”通过采访一些专家和老百姓，这篇文章罗列了由经济困扰而引起的一大堆各种各样的心理健康症状。这些症状包括有些常见（失眠、焦虑、心神不宁），有些严重（呼吸困难、心跳加速）甚至有些千奇百怪（寒冷、窒息感、浑身麻木和手指僵痛）。

Such a wide-ranging list suggests that we are in the midst of creating what Canadian medical historian Edward Shorter calls a symptom pool for our economic uncertainty: We are debating as a culture which symptoms and feelings we will collectively recognize as legitimate expressions of distress over this particular problem. The idea is that, while our mental issues are totally real, they are often diffuse and hard to explain. So, as we strive to communicate our internal pain, we’re drawn toward describing symptoms that are culturally legitimized. Our unconscious minds, in short, are quick to learn the language of suffering for our given time and place, even if that means adopting symptoms we didn’t notice earlier.

这么个大表单说明我们正在被加拿大医学历史学家Edward Shorter所提出的经济不景气综合症所侵染：我们正在群体思考人们在经济恶化面前的表现方式，并将对这些症状和感觉达成共识。在经济的寒冬里，人人身陷其中，却一言难尽；人人内心苦闷，表达方式却各不相同。我们下意识地对各种负面信号心领神会，甚至被所传染而浑然不知。

This phenomenon is not new. Researchers have documented that women at the turn of the 20th century commonly reported a specific set of symptoms, including leg paralysis, temporary blindness, and facial tics. These symptoms happened to fit the accepted definition of hysteria. “Patients unconsciously endeavor to produce symptoms that will correspond to the medical diagnostics of the time,” Shorter explains. “This sort of cultural molding of the unconscious happens imperceptibly and follows a large number of cultural cues that patients simply are not aware of.”

这种现象不是新鲜事儿了。科学家记载了女性在90年代末普遍患有一系列综合征，包括下肢麻痹、短暂性失明和面部抽搐。这些症状刚好对应歇斯底里症的定义。“根绝当时的医学诊断，病人们下意识的表现出这种症状，”Shorter教授解释说“这种社会环境影响下的潜意识行文是逐步形成的，并有诸多的表现形式，而病人本身对此并无意识。”

More recently, an Americanized conception of depression caught hold and began spreading virally in Japan during that country’s lengthy and painful recession in the 1990s.

最近的一次，也就是90年代的经济萧条，它的影响如同病毒般扩散到日本冗长而痛苦的十年衰退过程中。（注：具体请搜索引擎中查询“1990日本衰退”。）

Once a symptom pool is agreed on, a new disorder is usually not far behind. And that seems to be where we are now: The American Psychiatric Association is currently deciding on additions and deletions to its influential diagnostic manual, the DSM-V. As if to demonstrate that creating categories of mental illness remains as much a social and cultural endeavor as a scientific process, the APA is soliciting public input. On the DSM-V Web site, you can “submit suggestions for a new disorder to be considered for addition to DSM-V.”

当经济不景气综合征接踵而至，通常新的病症也紧随其后——这正是我们现在所处的位置。美国精神医学学会正在决定对一本重要的心理卫生诊断手册，DSM-V，增删条目。为了兼顾社会参与性和科学严谨性，该学会正在征集民众建议。在DSM-V的网站上，你可以通过“提交建议”的链接，来建议该学会添加新的病症条目。

So what will we call our new, collective, global economic anxiety? The current front-runner is “posttraumatic embitterment disorder.” PTED, which has recently shown up in the psych literature, describes the reaction to a negative but not life-threatening event, such as workplace conflict, sudden unemployment, loss of social status, or separation from one’s social group. If PTED can get enough allies in the right DSM-V work groups — and perhaps a pharmaceutical giant to promote a drug treatment — the nascent disorder has a shot at superstardom. It seems well suited to describe many of the reactions to the precipitous cultural changes unfolding in this time of globalization and economic crisis. Indeed, the disorder was first “discovered” among East Germans who had become unmoored, unemployed, and insecure in the social upheaval following the fall of the Berlin Wall. We’re all Berliners now.

那么，我们怎么称呼这次新的全球性的经济焦虑呢？目前最流行的叫法是“创伤后悲愤症（Post-traumatic embitterment disorder，PTED）。”这个词条目前出现于精神学文献中来描述除了生命威胁以外的其他负面事件，如失业、社会地位下降或被群体抛弃等给人带来的反应。如果PTED能够被DSM-V所接纳，制药业巨头将会推销针对此种病症的新药，PTED也将会摇身一变成为热门词条。在全球化的经济危机里，这个词看起来很好地描述了突如其来的社会变化给人们带来的诸多反应。实际上，这个词是首先用在柏林墙倒塌后，那些解开束缚的，无业的，在社会动荡中感到不安的东德人身上的。我们现在都是柏林人了！

Given that we brought the world the recent economic crisis, the least we can do is offer a symptom pool by which people can learn to express their misery.

我们不幸的给世界带来了经济危机，万幸的是，我们将正视PTED并通过正确的方式来疏解人们的苦闷。

Ethan Watters (ethanw1@mindspring.com) is the author of the new book Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche.

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创伤后悲愤症, 心理健康, 经济危机, pted

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