Prairie madness

Settlers moving from urbanized or relatively settled areas in the East faced the risk of mental breakdown caused by the harsh living conditions and the extreme levels of isolation on the prairie.

Prairie madness is not a clinical condition; rather, it is a pervasive subject in writings of fiction and non-fiction from the period to describe a fairly common phenomenon.

It was described by Eugene Virgil Smalley in 1893: "an alarming amount of insanity occurs in the new Prairie States among farmers and their wives.

This isolation also caused problems with medical care; it took such a long time to get to the farms that when children fell sick they frequently died.

Another major cause of prairie madness was the harsh weather and environment of the Plains, including long, cold winters filled with blizzards followed by short, hot summers.

Farmers would be stuck in their houses under several feet of snow when the blizzards struck, and families would be cramped inside for days at a time.

[1] There is a debate between scholars as to whether the condition affected women more than men, although there is documentation of both cases in both fiction and non-fiction from the nineteenth century.

However, the descriptions of prairie madness in historical writing, personal accounts, and Western literature elucidate what some of the effects of the affliction were.

The women affected by prairie madness were said to show symptoms such as crying, slovenly dress, and withdrawal from social interactions.