 Last August, 16-year-old Lori Brownell
passed out while head-banging at a concert. A month later, she
lost consciousness again at her school’s homecoming dance in
upstate Corinth, N.Y. Brownell says her doctors put her on
Celexa, but she only developed more symptoms, including
involuntary twitching and clapping. In videos she posted to
YouTube, Brownell flutters her fingers, touches her hair, snorts
through her nose and throat, and shouts “Hey, hey, hey,”
seemingly without control. On Christmas Eve, doctors diagnosed
her with Tourette’s Syndrome. Now, however, her symptoms have
another name: conversion disorder, or mass hysteria.
Since Brownell first passed out last summer, 14 other upstate
New York students—13 girls and a boy, most of them students at
LeRoy Junior-Senior High School—have come down with similar
symptoms. The young people and their parents seem baffled. The
state department of health and a separate report commissioned by
the school have found no problematic substances in the building.
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich is launching her own
investigation into the outbreak; she told USA Today that her
prime suspect is a train derailment that dumped cyanide and an
industrial solvent in LeRoy in 1970. On Saturday, Brockovich’s
team was turned away by the school while trying to collect soil
samples on the property.
However, a doctor treating many of the students is confident
that they are suffering not from poisoning, but from mass
hysteria, also called mass psychogenic illness and other
variants. Typically, symptoms—which can include Brownell’s
Tourette’s-like movements, along with nausea, dizziness,
cramping, and more—start with one or two victims and spread when
others see or hear about them. Victims are often accused of
faking it, but more often they are suffering real physical
symptoms that are psychological in origin. The phenomenon has
been observed for centuries, with the blame shifting to whatever
specific anxieties are culturally pervasive at the time. But one
theme has remained consistent: The victims are overwhelmingly
female.
The most famous American incident of mass hysteria remains the
events surrounding the witch trials in Salem, Mass., which began
when several girls began suffering mysterious fits and
outbursts. In non-Western countries, demons and witchcraft are
still sometimes blamed for outbreaks of fainting and fits [PDF].
Pollution, poisoning, chemical weapons, and other environmental
concerns are dominant in the West (a fact that makes Brockovich
something of a mass hysteria machine). Some bloggers are now
claiming that the upstate New York girls fell ill because of the
HPV vaccine or fracking.
As archetypes go, the Salem events hold up quite well, even from
a distance of 320 years. Victims of mass hysteria are so often
female that gender imbalance is one clue doctors use to
differentiate hysteria from poisoning. Symptoms often start with
older girls or women and spread to younger or lower-status
girls. As girlhood guardian Caitlin Flanagan put it in the New
York Times this weekend, “It is the cheerleaders and not the
linebackers who come down with tics and stuttering.” But, as
research has shown, it is also the cheerleaders and not the
math-club girls who are likely to spread hysteria.
In a typical case in 1998, a teacher at a Tennessee high school
noticed a gas-like odor in her classroom. The school was quickly
evacuated, but the teacher’s symptoms spread to more than 180
teachers and students, who exhibited symptoms including
headaches, nausea, and vomiting. By the end of the ordeal, the
school had to be closed for two weeks and almost $100,000 was
spent on emergency medical care. No toxins were ever found. A
later study of the incident in the New England Journal of
Medicine—one of surprisingly few on the phenomenon of mass
hysteria—found that symptoms were “significantly associated with
female sex, seeing another ill person, knowing that a classmate
was ill, and reporting an unusual odor at the school.”
There’s no consensus about why women and girls are more
vulnerable to episodes of mass hysteria. One professor
speculated last year that “Stress, boredom, concern about their
children and other factors among young females” could have
triggered a recent fainting epidemic among female factory
workers in Cambodia. Sociologist Robert Bartholomew noted in a
2001 book on mass hysteria that girls are trained to turn their
anxieties inward, while anxious boys are likelier to act out.
Women are also likelier to seek medical treatment than men.
Some scholars have also argued that hysterical episodes allow
women to take a break from daily drudgeries, or to rage against
patriarchal cultures within the safe bounds of demon possession
or poisoning. If girls can find no outlet for reckless abandon,
in other words, they’ll create one. Barbara Ehrenreich,
Elizabeth Hess, and Gloria Jacobs put it this way in a 1992
essay: “To abandon control—to scream, faint, dash about in
mobs—was, in form if not in conscious intent, to protest the
sexual repressiveness, the rigid double standard of female teen
culture.” They were writing about Beatlemania, as it turns out,
but the description of the wildness that overcomes girls in
adolescence is almost identical to much scholarly musing about
mass hysteria.
There is also, it must be noted, a long history of medical
professionals dismissing women’s health concerns as mere
hysteria. This makes treatment thorny. Sufferers naturally want
to be taken seriously, and are often offended by suggestions
that their symptoms are “all in their heads.” Several of the
upstate New York victims and their families told the Today show
that they’re not satisfied with the new diagnosis. “Obviously
all of us are not accepting that this is just a stress thing,
and our kids didn’t all get sick by coincidence,” one father
said. A few cases diagnosed as mass hysteria at the time have
later proved to be poisoning after all; a 1990 outbreak of
nausea at a British school that affected girls at almost twice
the rate of boys turned out to be largely explained by
pesticides used on cucumbers served at lunch. But almost always,
symptoms disappear on their own over time and no physical causes
are discovered.
Until more is known about mass hysteria, the treatment of a 1789
case in Northern England might point the way to a cure both
effective and enjoyable. The outbreak at a textile factory
started when one woman teased another by putting a mouse in her
dress; the skittish prank victim fell into convulsions. Soon,
however, a rumor spread that an open bag of imported cotton had
somehow caused the reaction, and others quickly began falling
ill. The factory had to temporarily shut down when 24 people (21
women, two young girls, and one man) experienced violent
convulsions so severe they had to be restrained. The plague
ended when authorities convinced the patients that symptoms were
“merely nervous.” To further tamp down anxieties, sufferers were
encouraged to “take a cheerful glass and join in a dance.” The
day after the dance, almost all the victims went back to work,
their convulsions having disappeared for good. |
