Word: insomnia
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...that they take subways in the wrong direction or wander aimlessly in front of speeding autos. Many walk home, to settle their seething tempers before facing families. Few can concentrate on any intellectual activity. Reading is difficult. More than half cannot sleep restfully, and 38% suffer from full-scale insomnia. Other effects: depression and thoughts of suicide, hypersensitivity to noise, palpitations, stomach troubles, nightmares, buzzing in the ears...
...Republican victory this year, Lubell thinks it likely that neither party will win a truly decisive majority before 1960 or possibly 1964, because the U.S. electorate is at "almost deadweight evenness." A sizable part of it has "developed what might be described as a strong case of political insomnia, tossing from one party bed to another." What the people want is to stay squarely in the middle, and, perhaps unconsciously, they use each party to check the other...
...Cure. In Victoria, B.C., Norris Harwood was fined $35 for careless driving after he took his car out at 4 a.m. to end an attack of insomnia, smashed into a parked truck when he fell asleep at the wheel...
...Insomnia, one of the most common complaints, usually originates in the mind rather than the body. Occasional bouts can be treated with drugs (which have become so popular that a woman patient debated: "I don't know whether to take a Benzedrine and go to a party or take a Seconal and go to bed"). But the chronic variety requires a plumbing of the patient's psychological difficulties. Modell also suggests some nonmedical remedies: changing sleeping habits, eating before bedtime, swigging a nightcap, reading in bed. Counting sheep is not much help...
...Some of Dickens' clinical observations may have been based on his own illnesses. He is reported to have suffered from kidney troubles, facial rheumatism, depression, insomnia, pains in the stomach and chest, flatulence, biliousness, nausea, painful foot symptoms and lameness. He died of a stroke...