I managed to grow up and leave home before I found out that my mother had once spent time in a mental ward. She was, at the time of her hospitalisation, a very new mother – of me – and consequently exhausted. What sent her to the mental ward was delirium. That, at least, was what the emergency room doctors thought when she arrived at the hospital extremely ill with encephalitis...
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present by Lisa Appignanesi. Mental illnesses often involve some degree of copycatting: homicidal mania inspires homicidal mania, and recovered memories of satanic abuse come not singly but in epidemics. But hysteria became known as the illness that, more than any other, mimics illness, mimics even itself, and so entirely that to many observers it looks like nothing more than malingering.