The American Tradition of Using Parks to Address Anxiety

As summer approaches, America’s national parks are preparing for an influx of visitors, even as deep federal cuts to park services potentially mean fewer camp staff, closed campgrounds, long lines and canceled programs. Travelers have been warned by experts to stay away from some national parks, and urged to reschedule for next year.

But millions of people are still choosing to go. Last summer, a record 332 million people visited America’s 63 national parks. Based on annual growth trends, projections for this summer are even higher. In the “hold your breath” year for national park tourism, Americans are still turning to the natural environment for relief from the stresses of modern life.

We should not be surprised by this frenzy. With growing concerns related to economic uncertainty, increased costs, and the blow of federal policy, the popularity of park vacations is no coincidence. Rather, the rush to escape into these beautiful sanctuaries reflects a long history of Americans turning to nature for relief from anxiety, especially during moments of sudden and widely felt change.

In the 1870s, the United States was undergoing some of the most dramatic changes in its history. The end of the American Civil War led to the end of slavery and the emancipation of approximately 4 million black people, while many new innovations brought irreversible changes to the daily lives of all Americans.

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The new machinery brought improved manufacturing, jobs, faster production of goods, and lower costs for consumers. Hundreds of thousands of miles of telegraph cables transmitted information at breakneck speed, forever changing the way Americans accessed news, communicated, did business, and imagined the world. And the completion of a continent-crossing railroad in 1869 revolutionized travel, making it possible to move people and goods over long distances in hours rather than weeks or months.

Driven by remarkable developments in technology, industry, and travel, more Americans than ever before – including new immigrants – turned to growing cities for work, education, entertainment, and exposure to new people, ideas, and possibilities.

The sudden and rapid change increased excitement about the future. But this also increased concerns.

During this time, American doctors saw more and more seemingly healthy patients complaining of complex medical problems, including digestive problems, hair loss, sexual dysfunction, pain from no identifiable injuries, and severe fatigue with no apparent cause.

In response, a widely respected neurologist named George Miller Beard proposed a theory. Americans, he said, were suffering from a disease called “neurasthenia.” I am writing Boston Medical and Surgical JournalBeard borrowed an old term used to describe “weakness of the nerves” and reintroduced it to the medical community as a “morbid condition” afflicting Americans at an alarming rate. In his 1881 book American panic, Beard also pointed to the main culprit: modern change.

For example, new communications technology brought shocking news of remote crime, disaster, and war; Mechanization in industry brought great economic instability and labor conflict; Fast rail travel introduced the real possibility of horrific accidents involving “wholesale killings”. Even the invention of the pocket watch, a simple hand-held watch, fueled a frantic obsession with punctuality. Americans were “under constant stress,” Beard warned, “to get somewhere or do something at a certain time.”

According to Beard and his contemporaries, constant stress was a major problem. Victorian era neurologists theorized that the body worked like an electrical machine, powered by energy distributed through the nervous system. When Americans spent too much energy dealing with the extreme changes and new concerns in their modern lives, they experienced aches, pains, fatigue, irritability, and malaise. Doctors also theorized that urban life only made such conditions worse by overtaxing the body and weakening it.

In response, a range of popular treatments and medical treatments for neurasthenia emerged. Some doctors advised that women suffering from symptoms should stop all physical and intellectual activities. Known colloquially as the “rest cure,” this treatment – ​​made famous in “The Yellow Wallpaper,” a horror novel written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – involves home isolation, weeks of bed rest and restrictions on reading, writing, drawing, socializing and exercise.

Female patients and doctors, including New York City physician Grace Peckham, successfully argued that the rest of the treatment was not only quack medicine, but even more harmful to patients than the neurological disease itself. Thus, it did not stick.

What caught on was the “waste cure”, a different kind of treatment originally reserved for men. Neurologists were concerned that urban environments, factory work and office jobs, and other modern pressures were making men tired, indecisive, and physically weak. On doctor’s orders, male patients went into the western woods, where, it was thought, the natural environment would inspire the mind and revitalize the body. The prescriptions emphasized physical exercise, including hiking and horseback riding.

Its legacies are remarkable. In the 1880s, Theodore Roosevelt, at the time a young, affluent New Yorker, suffered from several nervous conditions, including asthma, and sought treatment. Roosevelt was so inspired by his own privileged experience of the Western cure and its restorative results that later, as President, he created the State Park Conservation and Forest Conservation Acts to dramatically expand federal support for public access to park lands, including national parks. Most famously, in 1903, Roosevelt partnered with naturalist John Muir – also known as a neurasthenic – to extend federal protection to Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California.

Initially, it was urban elite white men, like Roosevelt, who were most likely to have the means to travel and pay for the therapy of riding horses, hunting game, and sleeping under the stars. But the notion of the natural world as an antidote to the stresses of modern life appealed widely across class, race, and gender lines.

By the late 19th century, city planners, envisioning more healthful, walkable, livable urban environments, also included green spaces for urban residents to enjoy for free. From small picnic areas and playgrounds to vast urban parks designed to feel like the urban countryside, American cities began to offer Western healing benefits without the hefty price tag or requirement of travel.

With modernity, camping has become a more popular and more affordable option for holidays. Working people could buy a simple tent, a one-burner stove, and a few other items, load up a horse and buggy, and head to a park or campground just outside town. This cheap and accessible alternative to West Cure travel grew in popularity in the early 20th century, with the proliferation of camping guides and camping clubs, the growth of the National Park Service, and the introduction of the car. Enthusiasm for camping and national park tourism as affordable restoration activities persisted into the 20th century. And they are just as popular today.

Neurasthenia, as a diagnostic category, has not endured. It disappeared in the early 20th century, largely due to the rise of psychoanalysis and the expansion of knowledge about mental health and conditions such as chronic fatigue, anxiety disorders, phobias, and depression.

But its most popular remedies – particularly exercise, outdoor recreation and reflection in nature – have actually proven beneficial for both mental and physical health.

Amidst the volatile changes, Americans appreciated the curative powers of the natural world, fostered the call for outdoor exercise and recreation, and laid the groundwork for the astonishing growth of national and state park tourism. Today, with so much anxiety, it’s important to remember how national and state parks, and the workers who run and maintain them, have long played a healing role in American society. As we head back to America’s many majestic park destinations—our favorite “mental health getaways” and “tranquility” escapes—this history may reinforce the need to preserve, protect, and invest in them, especially in uncertain times.