“The victim was diagnosed with hysteria, therefore they are lying.”
Histrionic personality disorder, also known as hysteria, has been used to discredit female victims for a long time. It’s a sexist and controversial diagnosis, unrecognized by many experts.
Time and again, researchers of medical history point to evidence that hysteria was little more than a way to describe and pathologize “everything that men found mysterious or unmanageable in women.” And while medical practices have evolved incomparably over the past couple of centuries, investigations still reveal that data about females are often scarce in medical studies.
Therefore, for a long time, hysteria remained an umbrella term that included numerous and widely different symptoms, reinforcing harmful stereotypes about sex and gender. While this “condition” is no longer recognized and started to “fall out of fashion” in the 20th century, this was actually a long and unsteady process.