What Caused the Laughter Epidemic of 1962?

At a girls' boarding school in what's now Tanzania, a fit of giggles expanded into a months-long epidemic of stressed-out laughter affecting hundreds of people. Learn what we know (and still don't know) about this mass psychogenic illness in today's episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://health.howstuffworks.com/mental-health/human-nature/behavior/1962-tanganyika-laughter-epidemic.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio, Hey Brainstuff Lauren Vogelbaum. Here,
a laughter can be contagious, which can lead to some
happy good times. As social animals, we humans laugh a
lot more heartily when others are laughing too. But laughter

(00:22):
isn't always a gleeful response. Like other more negative coded
symptoms like crying, fainting, and shortness of breath, it can
be a sign that someone is feeling really distressed. In
January of nineteen sixty two, in a small British run
boarding school in a remote town on the coast of
Lake Victoria in what's now Tanzania, three girls began laughing,

(00:46):
possibly in response to a joke, and couldn't stop. Soon,
the fit of giggles spread to their classmates until nearly
sixty percent of the students. We're experiencing a rare collection
of symptoms. The students were restless, alternating between uncontrollable bouts
of laughter and sobbing that lasted from a few minutes

(01:08):
to a few hours at a time. Some of the
girls experienced other symptoms like physical pain, respiratory problems, fainting,
and rashes. Psychologists, doctors and other scientists were called in,
all of them at a loss for an explanation for
what was happening. No toxins or other environmental factors seemed

(01:29):
to be causing the laughter epidemic, and all of the
girl's lab tests came back normal. By March, the school
officials gave up and requested that parents take their daughters home.
But as the girls fanned out into their respective communities
around the country, their families and people and their villages
started laughing too. Other schools became affected, and fourteen shut

(01:53):
down temporarily. In all, hundreds of people were infected by
laughter over the course of eighteen ten months, mostly young
people and primarily girls, but people of all demographics came
down with the laughing sickness. Luckily, there were no fatalities.
Experts who have assessed this bizarre and singular epidemic, both

(02:16):
at the time and more recently, say that it was
a mass psychogenic illness or MPI, what might colloquially be
termed as mass hysteria. This can involve fast spreading physiological
symptoms that happen as a result of a stressful situation
experienced by a group of people. Symptoms don't usually involve laughter,

(02:38):
but often include some of the other symptoms seen here,
like fainting, chest pressure, trouble breathing, facial ticks, and crying.
The powerful collective trauma that seems to have occurred at
the Tanzanian boarding school might have resulted from the students
feeling trapped in a strict environment run by British foreigners

(02:58):
and from being away from their families. However, that wouldn't
explain the hundreds of other people up and down the
coast of Lake Victoria coming down with the same symptoms.
The most plausible hypothesis for hundreds of people in rural
communities coming down with a mass sociogenic illness has to
do with what happened in the country in the months

(03:21):
leading up to it. In late nineteen sixty one, the
territory that would become Tanzania, then called Tenganyika, gained independence.
It had been a colony of Germany and then the
United Kingdom since the eighteen eighties. Although this sounds like
a positive step, it through the country into cultural chaos.

(03:41):
About a month before the laughter epidemic began. What became
Tanzania was suddenly a socialist state, and the new government
was eager to make changes. Local clans were broken up
and land changed hands almost overnight. There was a huge
amount of pressure to adopt Christianity and new s systems
of government, replacing the belief systems and social structures that

(04:03):
had endured in various measures for hundreds or even thousands
of years. People were even offered money to choose one
church over another. Life there became very different all at once,
and it's easy to imagine how stressful that must have
been for everyone. Humans looked to each other to know

(04:24):
how to behave, and it's possible that the first girls
who couldn't stop laughing had just had enough, maybe of
boarding school, maybe of the new order or disorder of things.
Their schoolmates might have seen their uncontrollable laughter and thought,
maybe subconsciously, I feel like that too. Over the next

(04:45):
eighteen months, people all over the country expressed their fear, anxiety, grief, confusion,
and sense of overwhelming stress through laughter. Sometimes a good
laugh can make you feel better, but experts are doubtful
that this laughter improved anybody's existential crisis. A wave after

(05:05):
wave of the laughing epidemic shivered through Tanzania until it
eventually stopped altogether. It's the only one of its kind
to have ever been recorded, and researchers are still trying
to detangle the stigma around such quote unquote hysterical behavior,
to figure out how to report it, how to treat
it when it does crop up, and ultimately how to

(05:28):
help populations recognize and dissipate these levels of stress before
they become no laughing matter. Today's episode is based on
the article not So Funny the mysterious nineteen sixty two
Tanganika laughter Epidemic on how stuffworks dot Com, written by Jeslynshields.

(05:49):
Brain Stuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how
stuffworks dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four
more podcasts from my heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

(06:12):
M