A person suffering a nervous breakdown

Usage examples of neurasthenic.

It may have been to the glory of Prince Karol to resemble Chopin, but it was also quite creditable to Chopin to have been the model from which this distinguished neurasthenic individual was taken.

When at last an elevator arrived, the doors opened to reveal a solitary passenger, a thin-shouldered and neurasthenic young masseuse who lived with her mother on the 5th floor.

I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthenic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets.

That Madame Psychosis, an only child, had been extremely and heart-warmingly close to her father, a low-pH chemist for a Kentucky reagent outfit, who'd apparently had an extremely close only-child and watching-movies-together-based relationship with his own mother and seemed to reenact the closeness with Madame Psychosis, taking her to movies on a near-daily basis, in Kentucky, and driving her all over the mid-South for various junior baton-twirling competitions while his wife, Madame Psychosis's mother, a devoutly religious but wounded and neurasthenic woman with a fear of public spaces, stayed home on the family farm, canning preserves and seeing to the administration of the farm, etc.

But it shocked a Midwestern girl, transplanted into the neurasthenic garden of the New York intellectual set, even one who prided herself on her case-hardening in the streets and back rooms of Jokertown.

Hay was still energized by Marie-Jeanne—or electricized, to use the word made popular by the electric-shock machines that had recently become fashionable for sluggish men and neurasthenic ladies.

I sometimes ask myself how it happens that I attract nothing but crackbrained individuals, neurasthenics, neurotics, psychopaths – and Jews especially.