Faculty Seminar ：4/24  Prof. Cory Han-yu Huang, Professor, Department of English , National Taiwan Normal University

Notice of the Faculty Seminar of the Institute of Public Health

Time: 12:10 PM, 24th April
Location: Rm221, Medical Building II
Speaker：Prof. Cory Han-yu Huang, Professor, Department of English , National Taiwan Normal University

Title：Tired, Always More Tired! A Cartography of Studies on Exhaustion

Abstract
According to the American doctor of rehabilitation John E. Sarno’s research, more than six millions of Americans are suffering from fibromyalgia, a chronic pain with no 100% verified diagnosis of organic causes. Fibromyalgia, often interchanged with “chronic fatigue syndrome” (CFS), is often comorbid with unexplainable sense of exhaustion, sleep disorder and disturbances to daily activities. Looking around us, we may easily find a lot of people constantly struggling with fatigue, weariness, depression and, hence, psychosomatic symptoms which cause serious havocs to daily life and makes it barely bearable and livable. Those symptoms also unsettle medical reasoning, diagnosis and treatment based on certain classification and causality. What is exhaustion, anyway? What physical and psychological conditions does it manifest? And how does it show our relation to the environment? My talk will first provide a general survey on the medical and cultural historical contexts of exhaustion and dwell on such psychosomatic illness as neurasthenia, hysteria and CFS. Then, I will examine how capitalist society—more specifically, what kind of “capitalist spirit” and work ethics—exhausts our life energy and makes burnout more and more prevalent. I will stress that we see exhaustion as social suffering so that we can start to imagine life beyond exhaustion.