hysteria

IPA: hɪstˈɛriʌ

Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotions, in a wide range from joy to panic but usually including anxiety or fear.
(medicine, nosologically dated) A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.
(informal, psychopathology) Synonym of conversion disorder
(psychiatry, until early 20th century, now historical) Any disorder of women with some psychiatric symptoms without other diagnosis, ascribed to uterine influences on the female body, lack of pregnancy, or lack of sex.

Examples of "hysteria" in Sentences

The word hysteria comes from the Greek word for uterus.
The term "hysteria" comes from the Greek word for "womb" and refers to a disease that was once diagnosed almost exclusively in women.
His theories took hold in American psychiatry, and the term hysteria came to mean “emotionally charged situations … symbolic of underlying conflicts.”
Hippocrates, the “father of medicine” whose healing oath is revered to this day, used the term hysteria to describe overwhelming fear, sometimes accompanied by unexplained physical symptoms or loss of self-control.
"The term hysteria was coined by Hippocrates, who thought that suffocation and madness arose in women whose uteri had become too light and dry from lack of sexual intercourse and, as a result, wandered upward, compressing the heart, lungs, and diaphragm."