Arctic Hysteria Inuhuit Women

Introduction When Polar explorer Josephine D. Peary (1894) published an innocuous reference to the term “pibloktoq”, never would she and her husband, Admiral Robert E. Peary, imagine the textual production it would inspire throughout 18th century exploration literature. The proliferation of knowledge around the prevalence of arctic hysteria among Native Inuhuit of Northwestern Greenland, led to a massive rise in psychoanalytical literature, monographs, and scientific hypotheses. This illness continues to perplex researchers to this day, the striking feature of this mystery is that it only occurs among indigenous women residing in circumpolar regions. The term “pibloktoq”, was translated as arctic hysteria through the cultural perspectives
The American Psychiatric Association defines CBS as a culturally relative approach to mental health conditions. They are recurrent, locality-specific patterns of atypical behavior resulting from troubling experiences.2 In theory, CBS are folk illnesses in which alternates behavior— in actuality, they are instinctive ways of explaining a wide range of misfortunes.3 With this definition, arctic hysteria in defined as a culture-specific reaction among Inuhuit women, who may perform abhorrent or life-threatening acts, followed by no recollection of the event.4 Symptoms of pibloktoq vary from individual, but most exhibit similar set of traits. A pibloktoq episode usually begins with a person suddenly becoming ill tempered or introverted. This individual may then begin to portray behaviors as wild and erratic, show extreme violence, tear their clothes off, run out into sub-below temperatures, and imitate cries of animals.4 Reports of pibloktoq has only been recorded among adult men and women, there have not been confirmed cases among children or elderly.4 Various popular clinical terms have been offered to provide reason for this erratic behavior such as, “transitional and temporary madness”, “frenzied dissociative neurosis”, “shock and fright neurosis” or “atypical culture-bound psychogenic
Several potential explanations from Europe and America emerged, such as the environmental and ecological (seasonal phenomena) argument. This is based on the assumption that arctic hysteria is influenced by the seasons, which is most likely to occur in the winter, or early spring.4 Environmental and ecological determinants of arctic hysteria was first suggested by Danish ethnographer H.P. Steensby (1910), who reported a relationship between the seasonal changes in the intensity and duration of the onset of symptoms and susceptibility.4 Steensby observed that arctic hysteria was more prevalent among groups residing in the Arctic regions. He argued that the key contributing factors were: length and darkness of winters, the brevity of summer, and the sharp contrast between summer and winter.1,4 He also posited that hysteria was more common among women, this assertion was that gender differences and sexuality played an important role in the incidence and prevalence.1 As explorer Robert Peary documented during his journeys, he continually pursued to explain that this peculiarity was common among groups around the Polar Basin due to the long winter darkness, loneliness, and silence of a hunter’s life, which makes the life of arctic people more susceptible to disorders than the