nervous breakdown

1. 1.

   a severe or incapacitating emotional disorder

   Broaderbreakdown

   Narrowernervous exhaustionneurasthenia

Questions about nervous breakdown

What does nervous breakdown mean?

nervous breakdown means "a severe or incapacitating emotional disorder".

Is nervous breakdown a common word?

nervous breakdown is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.