Galen's Anxious Patients: Lypē as Anxiety Disorder.

Abstract

Galen describes a syndrome he associates with an emotion called lypē, with specific symptoms and a course that may lead to humoral imbalance, disease, and death. Lypē is an emotion that encompasses distress at a loss, as the death of a close friend or the destruction of one's books by fire; but Galen also associates it with chronic worry about a future threat, and a physiology between the emotions of worry and fear (that is, 'anxiety'). Lypē can cause a progressive syndrome characterised by insomnia, fever, pallor, and weight loss that can kill patients or degenerate into psychotic illness. This syndrome can be described in modern terms as an anxiety disorder.