Mass Hysteria

Day 297 / 365

A lot of the time our illness can be linked to stress. If you think a lot that something is wrong with you, chances are that it will actually manifest itself. Mass Hysteria is an extreme form of this phenomenon, where a large group of people can develop serious symptoms based on just hoaxes and false threats.

2011 Outbreak in Le Roy, New York

In August 2011, 14 students of a school in New York strangely began showing symptoms like verbal outbursts, seizure-like activity, etc. The state health department diagnosed this as a conversion disorder. This implied that the illness was caused due to psychological reasons, and was not linked to any environmental causes.

Some of the parents were not happy with these answers and spoke out publicly about this. Some of the girls appeared on media and exaggerated their symptoms when talking about them. As this news spread, 20 more individuals came down with the same illness

The doctors had to tell the patients to stay away from the media. With time as this story died down, many patients showed improvement.

Eventually, only one of the original 14 students was found to have Tourette syndrome. This was most probably the source of the mass hysteria that followed. No environmental causes were ever discovered that could provide an alternate explanation.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — Serotonin — What makes you happy