Why mind body disorder now and not in the past?

One common theme Ive read in TMS books are things like "People worked on typewriters in the 20s and 40s for hours and hours a day with no pain and now all of a sudden starting in the 80s RSI is a huge thing for everyone." Another example would be scholars, people who read tons of books, I dont remember reading anything about people in the past who did lots of near work like reading and stuff having eye strain issues which is now called CVS. They blame it on the computer now causing the eye strain. The question is how come this has started only in the past 30 years or so? What changed in society that created mind body epidemics like this that wasn't there previously? Was it the internet and the easy access to information that people could talk about the pain they were having and start exhibiting it?

I remember reading on another forum a while ago that a guy wouldn't sit next to a radio thing on the ceiling at his job because he thought it gave off radiation. He was deathly afraid of this thing and the technician who put it in said its absolutely impossible for it to give off radiation but this guy was convinced positively of it.

There is a book called something like "Total Health at the computer" that i've read in the past that talks about computer vision syndrome and its from 1993... i had never heard about this book at all and ive been working on the computer for around 17 years until i started getting eye strain problems. i didn't even know this term CVS existed until this all started. So I think its the media and the internet that spreads these problems/syndromes like wildfire.. all you have to read is on one forum somebody else got pain from doing an activity, like working on the computer, and then you start worrying about it and begin to exhibit the symptoms yourself. What do you guys think about all this? Why now and not in the past?

 

I absolutely agree. I think it's easier to get information on these conditions because of the Internet, etc. I also think there is a lot more uncertainty in the world right now--I think Dr. Sarno talks about the "9/11 Syndrome," a huge uptick in psychosomatic illness since 9/11.

There were psychosomatic conditions in the past too, but often different from what we have now. For instance, my grandmother often talked about girls fainting when she was growing up. I've never seen someone faint, but back then it was not that unusual.

 

interesting forest i hadn't read that from shubiner before. that pretty much sums it up then. the symptoms just shift to different things over the years. since computers are a relatively new thing to society its a perfect place to put the blame for symptoms getting worse. typewriters 90 years ago didn't cause RSI but computer keyboards in the 80s all of a sudden did. people read books for centuries and i dont recall any accounts of having a syndrome of eyestrain like computer vision syndrome that we have today now with computers. they try to blame the computer monitor, being up close to work, etc. as the reason behind the pain. some people (i know ive heard this from enrique) can work on computers 8-10 hours a day or even more than that and have no eyestrain while other people like me get it from doing nothing.

 

It could be, however, that cyberspace, by its very nature as a medium, tends to simultaneously bombard the psyche with emotionally charged events that cause the TMS patient to over-react with the fight-flight-freeze syndrome that Peter Levine talks about. If you're constantly reacting to such information as news of catastrophes like a Tsunami or an earthquake or a flood at the same time you're receiving inputs about various heinous crimes and atrocities, cyberspace could be creating a perfect environment for the development of psychogenic illnesses. I'm just throwing this out there for the purpose of generating a dialogue and am not really certain that my thesis is correct, but there may be something to this me thinks. What's that Marshall Mcluhen used to say about the medium being the message? Seems like the computer does bombard us with all kinds of random bits of information that could, in susceptible individuals, trigger a trauma response.

 

We now have unlimited access to information about everything in the world...and this is still relatively new so we might not know how to manage it. Just reading your post made me think of one of the "benefits" to the pain I thought was structurally based--it made me greatly reduce my time online so I was reading less of the news.