September 18, 2026 • 42 mins
Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Listen
Watch
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Hey everybody and welcome to the Stuff You Should Know
Gets Weird playlist. This is another one of our quarterly playlists, everyone,
that we compile because we found that people like us
sort of grouping things and bucketing things and cataloging things
into groups of 10 to 12. And I think we
have 11 of them this time out. And we're getting
started this week with the inaugural episode of the Stuff
(00:23):
You Should Know Gets Weird playlist with our episode, What
is Collective Hysteria? So please give a listen and enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me,
as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's over
there to the left. And that makes this Stuff You
Should Know.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Got the A-team in the hizzy.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I call face.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
What?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
I'm face.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Oh, of course you're face. Look at you. I would
be a combination of Murdoch and Mr. T, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, your hair is kind of spiky in the middle today.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah. Jerry, I don't know what she'd be. I guess
she'd be the leader. She'd be Hannibal.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
You know?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
She's smoking a cigar right now.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
And wearing a black glove.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry?
Speaker 4 (01:23):
That's weird.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Very timely.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
I said A-team. I don't want to slag off guest
producer Noel. He's not exactly B-team. No. We'll just call
ourselves the OGs.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Okay. Now that we have that established, we are the OGs.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
We need bowling shirts that say as much on the back.
You feeling good?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
I'm feeling nauseous and dizzy.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Oh, well, Chuck, did you happen to see somebody else
who is nauseous and dizzy?
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Well, Jerry was last week, and then a few more
people in the office, so I just figured we all
had the same thing.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
All right. I'm going to diagnose this.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
It's called collective hysteria, also known, I think... more appropriately,
is mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I think when you add the word hysteria to this,
it takes on certain dimensions that a lot of people
could find very objectionable.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
You know, hysterics, hysteria, it's like.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Dogs and cats living together.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, but I think it has a definite gender-specific connotation
to it from over the years. Like, women were supposedly
very hysterical. So, the idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical
under any circumstances is kind of a tad amount to
patting them on the head.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
Yeah, here, nice lady, you're just a little hysterical. You
just go calm down and bake something. Right.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Stop being crazy. No, mass psychogenic disorder instead is just
kind of like, whoa, your brain just did something pretty neat.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And that is the case for mass psychogenic disorder, if
you ask me. In this article, Chuck, written by Jacob Silverman.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Jeopardy champion.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, he won on Jeopardy. That makes
him a champion, right?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Yeah, I think so. He wasn't, like, the ultimate champion,
but he won a couple of episodes.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Right, which is why they should have a word for,
I guess, like, champion is, like, the one who won
it all.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Ken Jennings.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Yeah, or Watson.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Who's that?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
The IBM computer.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Oh, well, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
So Jeopardy winner Jacob Silverman wrote this article years back,
and he did a pretty great job of citing... a, uh,
contemporary outbreak of mass psychogenic disorder that had been going
on around that time down in Mexico, down Mexico way
in Chalco, Mexico at a boarding school there. Uh, it
(03:48):
apparently was a girl's boarding school and the girls that
went to school, they were ages 12 to 17 and
all of a sudden they started, uh, well, there was
an outbreak, a weird outbreak. There was vomiting, I believe,
trouble walking, um, There was fever. Yeah. That's weird.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Nausea.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And so the people running this boarding school were like,
what's going on? This is not good.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
And they had no idea. The girls went on Christmas
break for 10 days, came back, and the thing just
took off again like wildfire.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Yeah. 600 of the 3,600 girls showed these symptoms and
nobody could figure it out. They did a lot of tests.
They brought in people to like check out the facilities. Yeah.
Because as you'll see, there's a trend there. You know,
here in the West, they start to blame it usually
on like environmental poisoning of some kind.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Right. You know, there's some sort of toxin present that
has poisoned everybody.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
But they didn't find anything there. And eventually they said
this is. what'd you call it? Psychosomatic?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Okay. Mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
But no, that is one of the names. Mass psychogenic disorder,
collective hysteria, mass hysteria, or mass psychosomatic reaction.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Yeah. They're all saying the same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
They are.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Which is you're not, well, I was about to say
you're not really sick, but that is not exactly true
because that's one thing that differentiates this from something that's
just in your head is you actually do manifest physical symptoms.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
There's this article written by a MD named Timothy F.
Jones from the Tennessee Department of Health way back in
the heady days of 2000, the year 2000, the future.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And he writes that if you are experiencing mass psychogenic disorder,
it is not just in your head. that the symptoms
that you have are actually very real. Even though there's
no toxic cause, they couldn't find some sort of environmental
poisoning or anything like that, the symptoms are extremely real.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
It's just psychosomatic. It's just basically the brain has been
tricked into causing this response.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yeah, and this has happened. They've documented about 80 cases
throughout history, and apparently the National Institutes of Health gets
about two cases per week reported.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
But, um, which is, I mean, like that's, that's way
more common than, than you would think.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
You know? Yeah. I would think there'd be more than 80.
Cause I mean, these have happened. If you go back
and look at, I mean, there's all sorts of crazy
lists on the internet about these cases that date back
to like the 14th century.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Medieval dancing mania was one of them.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Yeah. The dancing plague. Yeah. Yeah. That's in there.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Uh, the Salem witchcraft trials.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Or the Salem witchcraft, I guess what led to the
trials was, um, supposedly attributed to this kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Yeah. One weird thing about this condition is more times
than not, it affects females.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
And young females, even more specifically, teenagers or even younger.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Which is, as far as it goes right now, inexplicable.
And it's kind of a prickly issue, you know? Like, again,
you kind of come back to the idea of calling
it hysteria. Yeah. The fact that it does tend to
afflict women or girls more than boys is apparently one
(07:20):
means of diagnosing psychogenic disorder, mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Yeah, that's like one of the first things they'll say
is like all this sickness is happening in this place,
this school, wherever. And the doctor will say, is it
a bunch of girls? Yeah. And then that will clue
them in that, hey, this might be what we're dealing
with here.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
But the problem is no one has any idea why.
And there have been explanations of things like, I guess,
this is girls' culturally acceptable outlet for raging against the patriarchy.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Even if they don't necessarily feel that that's what they're doing,
this is the symptoms of that. That's one.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Yeah. I thought this was a pretty interesting part. What article?
Is that from Slate?
Speaker 3 (08:06):
There was one called Mass hysteria in upstate New York
by Ruth Graham was on slate. That was a good one.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
It was a really good one. We'll get to that
case in a sec. But I thought it was pretty interesting.
In one part it says, and this is a quote
from someone writing about something, it said, inform, if not
in conscious intent, it is to protest the sexual repressiveness,
rigid double standard of female teen culture. But they were
writing about Beatlemania.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Which is interesting because it sort of has a similar
vibe Of young ladies being repressed, not having an outlet.
And so they see the Beatles and they go berserk
and faint and cry and scream collectively. Whereas boys, they're
more prone to just act out if they're not feeling good.
Girls are trained to keep things inward. And they also
(08:55):
point out that ladies and young ladies are more prone
to seek a doctor's help for something. They say that
may account for the bias right there.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Like guys just won't go to the doctor.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Exactly. You have to be careful, though, in just diagnosing
mass psychogenic disorder. You physicians out there who are listening
that encounter a case like this, just by basing it
on the fact that it is affecting more girls than boys,
because there's at least one case in Great Britain where
I think girls were afflicted by more than half, more
(09:28):
than double the number of girls were afflicted by this.
And it turned out that there were tainted cucumbers being
served in the lunchroom.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Yeah. And everyone knows boys hate cucumbers.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
So they didn't eat any. Right. But this is one
of the issues with dealing with mass psychogenic disorder in
that it looks and acts a lot like some sort
of weird epidemic. That basically it looks like either something
like bioterrorism. a rapidly spreading infection, or affection if it's
(10:02):
fetal mania, and then acute toxic exposure. That's what it
looks like. It's like one person gets sick. This is
your index case. And all of a sudden, everyone around
them suddenly has the same symptoms.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Yeah, and it's, like you said, it's super dangerous to
just dismiss that as, oh, it's all in your head,
silly little ladies. You can't do that because what if
it is something for real? But it's also a double-edged sword,
as that doctor pointed out. You start ordering batteries of tests,
and it can go both ways. It can, what the
(10:37):
old saying is, if you order enough tests, you're going
to find something.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
So it can fuel that fire, but you also can't
not run any tests and just dismiss it. So it's
a very fine line that physicians walk when dealing with
stuff like this, for sure.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Indeed. Apparently, study of mass psychogenic disorder has found that
it's more prevalent in isolated communities.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
And in situations where there are highly rigid, formalized, structured rules.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Like a Catholic school in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Or, again, Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
You know, and apparently between 1973 and 1993, half of
all the outbreaks of psychogenic illness took place in schools.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
So that's possibly in part due to kids being susceptible
to it more.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But also because of that rigid formalized structure.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Yeah, and there's also usually a top-down effect, like it'll
start with a teacher or an older student, and then
the younger students follow suit, which, if you're talking influence,
would make sense for sure.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
There was one very famous case. Apparently, there's not very
many actual academic studies on this. Yeah. But there's one
that came out of the New England Journal of Medicine
that described a case in 1998 in Tennessee where a teacher...
noticed some weird gas odor, a gassy odor.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Like the chemical kind.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah, not like the guy on the front row tooted.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And she apparently started suffering symptoms. And all of a sudden,
like 180 students and teachers had to go to the
emergency room. The school was shut down for two weeks.
They did all this environmental testing, couldn't find anything.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
And finally- traced it back to a mass psychogenic disorder.
That's what did it.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And then everyone, in most of these cases, we should
point out, everyone starts feeling better.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Like in Mexico and then the school in Tennessee, it's
not like they went on to die or anything.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, so in the school in Mexico, these girls were
at a boarding school.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
They were only allowed to see their parents, I think,
like three times a year.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, they couldn't even call. It's like, it sounds more
like a prison. Right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
No phone calls. They were allowed letters. When they went home,
immediately their symptoms cleared up.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
The problem is that doesn't automatically say, oh, well, it's
obviously mass psychogenic disorder. It could be an environmental toxin
that they were being exposed to still.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
At the school and were removed from, but I think the...
Definite prognosis is mass psychogenic disorder in this case.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
That's right. What we're talking about is a sort of
version of the nocebo effect, which we've talked about before,
and we will get into that right after this break.
So the nocebo effect, we talked about that in what?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
The placebo effect.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Oh, well, that makes sense. Yeah. I was... Trying to
be more clever. Thought we were more clever than that. Nocebo,
I think we said in that other podcast too, is
Latin for I shall harm. And that's basically, whereas you
take a placebo thinking it's going to help you out,
and it does help you out because the mind is powerful.
The nocebo effect is thinking something bad will result. Like
(14:18):
my teacher's getting sick. I think I feel a little
sick too. And then, oh wait, my neighbor's feeling a
little sick. I think I'm feeling a little sick too.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Or this drug trial that I'm on. I was told
that I could, possibly get some sort of gastrointestinal distress. Yeah.
And even though I've been given a sugar pill, I'm
now going, yeah, because of my mind, because of the
nocebo effect.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
There was a famous experiment or case from 1886 where
there was a woman who had a rose allergy and
they showed her an artificial rose and she began to,
I guess it was convincing, and she began to have
her allergic reaction And they said, aha, it's fake. And
you're faking. And she said, oh, well, I think I'm
(15:05):
feeling better now. And supposedly that cured her of her
real allergy to real roses.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I couldn't find a lot to back that up. But
it is a story.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, well, no. I mean, it was in, I can't
remember the journal.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Oh, it really was?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah, it was a real deal thing. And I didn't
get to the bottom of why. They presented this woman
with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely didn't.
This definitely happened. Yeah. And even the author of the
study was saying, like, this woman, she wasn't faking.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
It was like she had real symptoms. Sure.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Hives are hives.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
You can see those.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
I think they call it like a rose cold or
something like that. You can get, you know, stuffy.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Your eyes are watering, your nose is running, that kind
of thing. And what's interesting is some researchers have studied
the nocebo effect, and they basically have isolated this chemical
that gets released when the nocebo effect's going on. And again,
we should say it's not just making your nose runny
(16:15):
or releasing histamines or anything like that. It's pain, too.
You can experience pain even though nothing's there to give
you pain just because of the nocebo effect. What they
found was a, I guess, a hormone, I believe. Are
you ready? I'm going to try this one. Cholecystokinin.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
That sounds great.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Thanks, man.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Cholecystokinin.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Do you see it now?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
That's totally right.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I totally did. So it's a hormone, right? And it
gets released, and it actually helps you experience pain. So
it's a nasty little hormone.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
But they found in testing with the nocebo effect that
if you block this, you can also block the nocebo effect.
So that proves two things.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Does that block pain though? Yes. Like your pain receptors? Yes.
So does that mean if you slam your hand in
a door, you won't feel it?
Speaker 3 (17:11):
If you can block this.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yes. So if you can block cholecystokinin.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yes. It will keep you from hypersensitivity to pain, I believe.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And this guy named Fabrizio Benedetti, who I think was
also in the strokes, back in 1997. There was a Fabrizio, right?
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
He was testing out the nocebo effect and found that
if he told people that he was giving them an injection,
which is a pretty cruel test, but effective. Yeah. These
post-op people who had just come out of surgery were
given an injection and told this injection is going to
increase your pain in 30 minutes. I'm sorry, we have
(17:52):
to give it to you. It's part of the procedure.
He gave some people an injection of saline and they
reported an increase in pain.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
And they all went behind the two-way mirror and laughed. Right.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
They're like, what a chump.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Look at him writhing.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
And then they gave somebody like the other group, the
control group, a chemical, an injection that blocks that pain,
but they were told that it was going to increase
their pain.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
But they were given a chemical that blocks cholecystokinin and
the nocebo effect didn't take place. They didn't report an
increase in pain.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Even though they were told they would. Yes. Wow.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So this guy's saying like the nocebo effect is real.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Like when they say it's not just in your head.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
You're experiencing the same thing as if you were experiencing
somebody stabbing you.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
Well, what it is real, you know, that's when you
have to start asking yourself those deep philosophical questions. Right. Interesting. Um, there's, uh,
another case that's, have you ever seen the movie safe?
The Todd Haynes movie with Julianne Moore?
Speaker 3 (18:58):
No.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
It's from like, uh, the mid nineties. And she played
a lady that, um, started to have environmental sickness, um,
just in the air. And she's got sort of like increasingly, um,
crazy as the movie went on as far as scrubbing
things and locking herself in her house and making her
house a clean environment.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Sounds great.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
It was good. And there's a true story, though, of
a lady in London named Debbie Bird. She's a health
spa manager that says that she's allergic to EMF, electromagnetic fields.
And it's an actual thing now. You know, there's more
than her claiming it's called ES, electromagnetic sensitivity, where she has...
(19:42):
basically transformed her house. She painted it black. She said
she's allergic to computers, cell phones, microwaves. She had her
house rewired to make it basically EMF free. She and
her husband sleep under a silver plated mosquito net to
keep out radio waves and covered all her windows with
protective films. And she said she's feeling a lot better now.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
So I saw that ES, electromagnetic sensitivity, that if you
expose somebody to an electromagnetic field and then just tell
them that you are and don't, they have the same reaction,
which would suggest that it's nocebo.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Well, it's super fascinating because you see cases like this
from that to like gluten sensitivity becoming a big thing now.
And people, some people contend that, well, it's maybe a
collective hysteria going on.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
If you think you're going to be sensitive to gluten,
then you're going to be sensitive to things that contain gluten.
And I'm not saying that, people, because that's a very
hot topic.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Sure it is.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
But some people have claimed that.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Well, we'll talk a little bit more about things that
exacerbate the mass psychogenic disorder and the nocebo effect right
after this. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. So, Chuck,
back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called L-troxin.
(21:12):
It was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's
a hormone replacement drug. And it was the only one
that the government would pay for. So most people who
were on this hormone replacement therapy were using L-troxin. And
it had been that way for, like, decades.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
It was just an established drug. GlaxoSmithKline.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
What was it for, though?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Hormone replacement.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
GlaxoSmithKline.com. I think just those, there's no welcome involved, changed
just the outer, the inner qualities of it, like the
shape of the pill, the color. And I think that's
about it. But the active ingredient was exactly the same
in 2007. And when they released it, all of a sudden,
(21:56):
some reports of bad side effects were starting to trickle in.
And the government was like, wait, what's going on here?
It got a little bit of media attention and more
reports started trickling in.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
And then the media attention grew and the reports grew
and grew. And apparently the reporting of adverse effects of
L-troxin increased 2,000 fold in a year and a half.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Because of the look of the pill.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Because of the look of the pill.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
They went back and studied this and they found that
in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse
effects being reported for L-troxin, the more adverse effects were
being reported in that area. And that kind of reveals
one of the risk factors for mass psychogenic disorder is
the media. It's actually spread through the media most easily.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah, they have a point, though. I mean, I know
in this article, too, it points out that pills that
are blue and green are usually associated with drowsiness. Pills
that are orange or yellow are are not, and I
don't know if that's why they market it that way
or if it's the opposite, is we just see it
that way because of products like NyQuil and DayQuil. But
the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue,
(23:12):
and the one that keeps you awake, or not keep
you awake, but doesn't make you drowsy is orange.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
I thought about it. I think, I mean, what do
you associate with, like, daytime, sunrise, yellow, orange, red?
Speaker 4 (23:22):
It totally makes sense.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
What do you associate with nighttime? Like, something tranquil, like blue.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, scotch amber. Uh, yeah, you, I mean, you think of, uh,
that's what I, I, I think it came from, I
think the pills came after the association rather than the
other way around.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Yeah. I think I even, like when I get a
prescription for something, when I see the pill, I make
a judgment on it before I've even had it just
by saying, wow, look at that thing. It's heavy.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
That's a horse pill or that's a capsule with, uh,
you know, powdery stuff inside that's different than the chalky one.
It's you. I think you just make an association. I
don't think I have any preconceived notions on what a
larger pill will do to me.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Or a capsule will do to me other than a tablet.
But I think it's interesting, though, how you make these
judgment calls.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But without even thinking about it.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
You know, I mean, like you probably don't sit there
and look at a pill in your hand. You just
take it and just make some sort of almost unconscious judgment.
judgments about it.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yeah, it may remind you of another pill that helped
you that you're not even remembering.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Exactly. So that would be placebo.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
That's great. Nocebo effect poses a lot of problems. For instance,
there was a study, I think, in the 90s that
found that women who believed that they were prone to
heart disease were four times likelier to die of heart
disease than than women who didn't believe they were prone
(24:52):
to it, even though they had all the exact same
risk factors, basically the same risk factors. There was nothing
differentiating these women aside from a belief that they were
going to die from heart disease or a belief that
they weren't. And that led to a four-fold increase in
deaths from that, just basically from a belief is what
(25:13):
it suggests.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Yeah, well, it's sort of like the, I know it's
kind of cheesy, but the PMA, the positive mental attitude,
I think we've all know someone who walks around saying, oh,
so-and-so's sick. Oh, I know I'm going to get it.
I just know I'm going to get sick. Or, you know,
I just know I'm going to get cancer because it
runs in my family. I think that has an effect
on things.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
I have to agree. I know some of our more
skeptical listeners are pulling their hair out right now, but
I totally agree with you. When we did our show
in Toronto, on the way back, Yumi and I flew
out of Buffalo. And I was feeling a little down,
but like at the point where I feel like you
can talk yourself into staying healthy.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Positive mental attitude, I guess is what you call it.
But we were leaving right at about dusk and the
sun was just beaming through the windows and illuminating every
single microbe, visible microbe in the air. I could see
them like just going into my nose and my mouth.
And I'm like, I couldn't stop. Like I couldn't I
(26:15):
was like, I'm not going to get sick. I'm not
going to get sick. And man, did I ever get sick.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
But I noticed that right when we took off and no,
you know what it was? Somebody shut one of their, um, their, uh,
window covers. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
The shade.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Shade. Exactly. Is the word that I was looking for.
Somebody shut their shade and I couldn't see it anymore.
And I immediately started to feel less symptomatic.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Wow. Immediately.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
It was like turning off a light.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
And I still got sick. But I was just drowning
in basically what my brain was interpreting is like being
assaulted by foreign invaders, which I am all the time.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But I normally can't see them.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Yeah. Well, I do that all the time when I
open my the curtains in the bedroom and I'll see
in the morning, I'll see that stuff in the air.
And I just think, oh, man, that's what I'm walking around.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Breathing in. Breathing.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
Dog hair and cat hair and. Emily hair.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
So your lungs are just chock full of it. So
one of the problems this poses, Chuck, for physicians is
that we expect doctors or we want doctors to be transparent,
to not lie to us.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Yeah, we've talked a lot about this lately, I feel like.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah. We've talked a lot about diseases. Some of our
hypochondriac listeners have been like, please stop talking about diseases
because now I've got morgulons. I'm going to have like
some sort of toxic exposure.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Toxoplasmosis.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yep. And then very soon, leprosy.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Spoiler.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
So the problem is, is if you tell somebody that's
going into surgery, hey, by the way, Um, you know, you,
you might have trouble walking.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
You might feel nauseous for the next six months. You
like all this stuff that could be associated with, which
we demand from our doctors.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It's been shown that if you are fearful or in
despair going into surgery, that's associated with longer healing times
and a higher risk of postoperative infection.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Right. So if you have the nocebo effect where doctors
are saying, Okay, if I tell somebody, and it's been
proven time after time that in drug trials, people who
are still are given placebo will drop out of drug
trials because they're experiencing these negative side effects, even though
they're given the sugar pill. So if you're a doctor
(28:39):
and you know that you are telling somebody something that
ultimately may end up harming them, and yet you've sworn
an oath to do no harm, you've got a conundrum
going on right now. And that's what the nocebo effect poses.
It's the problem the nocebo effect poses for modern physicians.
Like how much should they tell you? If you're going
to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for
(29:00):
six months, even though they probably won't, should you tell
them and give them a chance to basically have the
psychosomatic symptom?
Speaker 4 (29:09):
Or tell them they're going to feel great.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Well, that's another one. Somebody says the solution to this
is just frame it differently.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Like, don't say there's a chance you're going to have
nausea for six months. Say half of a percent of
patients who go through the same procedure that you're about
to go through have nausea for six months. 99.5% don't.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
You're giving them the same information. It's just framed more positively.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Yeah. And that one doctor who wrote the article on
collectivist area said what he recommends is not naming the illness.
He said that can help out because as soon as
you give something a name, then... It just instantly, you know,
you have something you can call it and everyone's calling
it that or the media picks up on it. Right.
(29:55):
And it's a thing.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Yeah. And that's actually, again, one of the risk factors
in the spread of mass psychogenic illness is the larger
the response, the emergency medical response to it. Yeah. And
then hence the larger the media response to it, the
larger the outbreak tends to be. It's called line of
sight exposure. Yeah. Just knowing somebody is sick or seeing
(30:17):
somebody sick can give you the same symptoms.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
I'm sure if you see a news story that all
the other news agencies are running that says there's been
some weird chemical leak in the air in Atlanta, people
are going to start walking around and coughing and saying,
I'm not feeling so good. I have a bitter taste
in my mouth.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
There's microbes everywhere.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Well, here's a case from that article you sent that
I think is super fascinating. The one in upstate New York.
Because it is not a rash or a cough or nausea,
it is Tourette syndrome. A 16-year-old young lady named Lori Bronwell,
what year was this? A couple years ago?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yeah, not too long ago. I think 2012.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
In Corinth, New York, was... At her school's homecoming dance
and lost consciousness. This is after she had headbanged at
a concert.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Sorry, man. I thought you were going to leap out
like the best part.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
Yeah, she was headbanging at a concert. I wish I
knew what concert that was so bad. Me too.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I didn't find it anywhere.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
Apparently passed out there and had passing outfits. Involuntary twitching
and clapping started, twisting her hair, fluttering her fingers. Hey, hey, hey.
Starting stuff like that. Yeah. And the doctor said, you
know what? You've got Tourette's syndrome. So Tourette's syndrome is,
we've had a podcast on it.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
It's a real thing.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
It's not psychosomatic. But since that time, 14 other students
along with her, 13 girls and one boy started exhibiting
at Leroy Junior High School. I'm sorry, Junior Senior High
School started coming down with Tourette's.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Right, which is not contagious.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
It is not contagious at all. Erin Brockovich got on
the case, famous environmental activist. And she said, no, I
think this is, got to do with this train derailment
from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town. And
I didn't see where they found any legitimate effects.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Again, that's the confounding thing about mass psychogenic disorder is
that it is still possible that there is some weird
toxin in the environment that is causing this. Like maybe
there was exposure to cyanide that got in these people's
brains and all gave them Tourette. And if you stand
back and look at it, you're like, Tourette syndrome isn't contagious.
(32:38):
That doesn't mean that you can't all come down with
Tourette syndrome from exposure to a toxin. It's just still,
it's this X factor that's out there that you can't
just necessarily rule out with confidence.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Yeah, and I believe in that case too, those 14
students didn't end up with Tourette syndrome.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
That was a good episode, man. Loved Tourette syndrome one.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
Yeah, that's an oldie.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
Oldie but a goodie.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
And it all came from headbanging.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
That's how it started.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
That mess.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
At a Nickelback show.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, because Corinth is near Canada. Canada doesn't let Nickelback
out any longer.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Oh, really? Are they caged in there? Yeah. Nice. There's
another case of the toxic lady. Did you hear this one?
In Riverside, California, a woman named Gloria Ramirez.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
She was dubbed the toxic lady in 1994. She had
cervical cancer and was being treated and all the medical
staff started to get sick that was treating her. This
sounds gross, but they said her body exuded a garlicky,
fruity smell, and her blood had flecks of what looked
like paper, which sounds kind of like Morgulans, actually.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
You like that?
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
And they said that most of the people that got
sick while treating her were women, more women than men,
and they all took a blood test and came back normal,
and the health department said, Mass hysteria.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
So that's funny because I looked, I remembered that story
and I was like, I wonder if that was mass hysteria.
And I looked it up and I found that no,
it was an environmental toxin.
Speaker 4 (34:08):
Oh, it was?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
That's what I found.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
So they called it mass hysteria at the time and
then later found out?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I think like a year or two later, she was
using some sort of salve or something on her skin.
And they think that it interacted with her biochemistry and
really did produce toxic gas.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
She said it may be this fruit garlic salve.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
That's interacting badly with my pancreas.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
Oh, well, this list needs to be updated.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Dude, that is a fascinating case. It is. People got
really sick from that.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
I think I remember hearing about that, too.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Well, I'm glad they found a real cause in that case.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
From what I understand. But that's the point. Right. You
can say, well, obviously, women were more affected than men.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Right? Well, is that because there's more women in the
nursing profession and there were more nurses in the room?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Maybe.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
There's a lot of different things you have to take
into account before you just write it off. Sometimes it
is real, like sick building syndrome.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
That's a tough one because after the OPEC oil embargo,
apparently people started designing buildings to be more airtight. So
your ventilation system was really important.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
And these buildings haven't aged necessarily very well. So the
ventilation system is not doing what it's supposed to any longer.
And so they think possibly that's leading to what we
know as sick building syndrome, which is malaise.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
It's when you don't feel good when you go to work.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Which is everybody.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
But some studies have found like, no, that is the
better predictor of sick building syndrome.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Is job stress or job dissatisfaction. Yeah. If you have
a building full of people who don't like their jobs,
you're going to have a building full of people with
sick building syndrome. But if you go on to say
like a local government's website or whatever, and you look at,
Sick building syndrome. It's treated as a real thing.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Yeah. Well, it definitely affects your gastrointestinal like stress does.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Also, apparently it can set off bouts of asthma.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Which is another reason why they think it might have
something to do with like volatile organic compounds in the
ventilation system. Or new carpeting, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yeah. Off-gassing, man. You smell that stuff when you open
up a new product, right?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
There's also the dancing plague, which we mentioned briefly.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Frowtrophia. July 14th, 1518, went out on the streets of Strasbourg, France,
and started dancing, even though there was no music, and
dancing like a maniac for three straight days. And all
these people started dancing with her, saying this is a
good time. It said within a month, 100 people were
dancing with her and couldn't stop. And hyperventilating, hallucinating, some
(36:44):
dropped dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion. And
the authorities said, let's just hire a band. And let
them dance it out.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Because they've got the hot blood is what they called it.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
All right.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
And so they did. And a lot of people died
as a result. It said 400 people in the end
were struck. I don't think they died, but were dancers.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Right.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
And then it just stopped. And that's when they blame,
a lot of people blame on ergot poisoning, which we've
mentioned before.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
I always go with ergot poisoning.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
Yeah, back then.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Those people were clearly tripping on something.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
They got the hot blood.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
But what it sounds like you just described is basically
how Tom Hanks invented jogging in the 70s.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
Yogging?
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
He just started running and people started following him.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
I wish that part had been cut out of that movie. Oh, really? Yeah,
I thought that it was a weird thing that should
have been on the editing room floor. It really kind
of derailed things for a while for me. Yeah. I
don't think that movie's aged well, though.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I haven't seen it in forever.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
Other people say, though, that it was Sydenham's chorea. a
disorder linked to strep throat and rheumatic fever that causes
dance-like twitches. And then, of course, modern medical historians say
it was mass psychosis.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
I would go with that one.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Yeah, but back then it made more sense, though, when
during the Salem witch trials and before they knew anything
about medicine and you could just say you got the
hot blood or you're having the fits.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Or the devil's possessed you.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
Yeah, exactly. These modern cases are the ones that really
freak me out because so much is explainable now.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Here's the thing, though, Chuck. We've always explained it with
something that comes easily to mind. So back in the
day before science and medicine, it was the devil possessing you.
And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they
thought that the devil was there in town possessing people
in the same way that you're freaked out by the
idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a train
(38:41):
derailment from 1970.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Or beetle mania.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Exactly. Which is the deadliest of all the manias. But
it's just as real.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
To the experiencer. And it all comes down to people
just basically being sick of the establishment and letting loose
for a while.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
Don't want to go to work. Nice. So I'll dance.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
No, sir.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
If you want to know more about collective hysteria, which
is the name of this article, type those words in
the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring it up.
And I said search bar, which means it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
I'm going to call this episode on grief. We got
a lot of great feedback and they continue to roll in.
Hey guys, just stumbled upon your podcast through my tune
in radio app. Uh, I guess that's a mini plug.
We're available there now. Um, I've devoured almost all of
the 600 plus shows. I may be a new listener,
(39:38):
but I'm already a lifelong fan. So why I'm writing
in guys is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. Uh,
it was a rough time because as a fraternal twin,
me being the boy, uh, I looked at her not
only as a sister, but as a mother and friend, too.
Long story short, I wanted to comment on the Grief
show some time ago. I've dealt with my grief through
my artwork. I'm a small-town artist from Johnson City, Tennessee,
(40:02):
and I rarely can get noticed or any attention with
my art. I wanted to share my new piece I've
just finished after listening to how comic books work. I'm
a huge fan of Marvel Comics, and I hope you
both enjoy this. And he sent this really cool... I
think it was like every member of the Marvel Universe
had to be in this picture that he did.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
I didn't see that one.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
It's really, really neat. Just jam-packed full of Marvel comic
heroes and villains. So Josh and Chuck, thanks for the
inspiration laughs and getting through every day at the office. P.S.
My twin Jessica passed away from epilepsy, actually. A condition
called SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death of Epilepsy. My mother is
trying to raise awareness because November is Epilepsy Awareness Month.
(40:42):
So if you guys wouldn't mind mentioning this on the show,
she would be so happy for that. Also, an epilepsy
show would be cool, too. Not a lot is discussed
about it. And that is Jason Flack. And Jason, I
wrote you back. That is heartbreaking about your twin sister.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Very sorry to hear that. And we will definitely do
a show on epilepsy. And since this is November, though,
people should go out and find out what they can
during National Epilepsy Month.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
We'll follow up with the show. I don't know if
it'll be in November, but we'll get to that one
for sure.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
And thanks for that piece of art. And if anyone's
interested in a great comic book artist from Johnson City, Tennessee,
I could do a lot worse than Jason Flack.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
Jason, thank you very much for sharing that with everybody.
That means a lot to us. If you want to
share with us and all of our listeners out there,
you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook.com slash SubYouShouldKnow. You can send us
an email with attached artwork to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And
(41:43):
as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
Hey everybody and welcome to the Stuff You Should Know
Gets Weird playlist. This is another one of our quarterly playlists, everyone,
that we compile because we found that people like us
sort of grouping things and bucketing things and cataloging things
into groups of 10 to 12. And I think we
have 11 of them this time out. And we're getting
started this week with the inaugural episode of the Stuff
(00:23):
You Should Know Gets Weird playlist with our episode, What
is Collective Hysteria? So please give a listen and enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me,
as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's over
there to the left. And that makes this Stuff You
Should Know.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
Got the A-team in the hizzy.
Speaker 3 (00:58):
I call face.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
What?
Speaker 3 (01:01):
I'm face.
Speaker 4 (01:02):
Oh, of course you're face. Look at you. I would
be a combination of Murdoch and Mr. T, I think. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
Well, your hair is kind of spiky in the middle today.
Speaker 4 (01:11):
Yeah. Jerry, I don't know what she'd be. I guess
she'd be the leader. She'd be Hannibal.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
You know?
Speaker 3 (01:18):
She's smoking a cigar right now.
Speaker 4 (01:20):
And wearing a black glove.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry?
Speaker 4 (01:23):
That's weird.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
Very timely.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
I said A-team. I don't want to slag off guest
producer Noel. He's not exactly B-team. No. We'll just call
ourselves the OGs.
Speaker 3 (01:34):
Okay. Now that we have that established, we are the OGs.
Speaker 4 (01:38):
That's right.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
We need bowling shirts that say as much on the back.
You feeling good?
Speaker 4 (01:43):
I'm feeling nauseous and dizzy.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
Oh, well, Chuck, did you happen to see somebody else
who is nauseous and dizzy?
Speaker 4 (01:51):
Well, Jerry was last week, and then a few more
people in the office, so I just figured we all
had the same thing.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
All right. I'm going to diagnose this.
Speaker 4 (01:58):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
It's called collective hysteria, also known, I think... more appropriately,
is mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (02:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:07):
I think when you add the word hysteria to this,
it takes on certain dimensions that a lot of people
could find very objectionable.
Speaker 4 (02:15):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
You know, hysterics, hysteria, it's like.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
Dogs and cats living together.
Speaker 3 (02:21):
Yeah, but I think it has a definite gender-specific connotation
to it from over the years. Like, women were supposedly
very hysterical. So, the idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical
under any circumstances is kind of a tad amount to
patting them on the head.
Speaker 4 (02:42):
Yeah, here, nice lady, you're just a little hysterical. You
just go calm down and bake something. Right.
Speaker 3 (02:47):
Stop being crazy. No, mass psychogenic disorder instead is just
kind of like, whoa, your brain just did something pretty neat.
Speaker 4 (02:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
And that is the case for mass psychogenic disorder, if
you ask me. In this article, Chuck, written by Jacob Silverman.
Speaker 4 (03:04):
Jeopardy champion.
Speaker 3 (03:05):
Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, he won on Jeopardy. That makes
him a champion, right?
Speaker 4 (03:08):
Yeah, I think so. He wasn't, like, the ultimate champion,
but he won a couple of episodes.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
Right, which is why they should have a word for,
I guess, like, champion is, like, the one who won
it all.
Speaker 4 (03:19):
Ken Jennings.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Yeah, or Watson.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
Who's that?
Speaker 3 (03:24):
The IBM computer.
Speaker 4 (03:25):
Oh, well, yeah, sure.
Speaker 3 (03:27):
So Jeopardy winner Jacob Silverman wrote this article years back,
and he did a pretty great job of citing... a, uh,
contemporary outbreak of mass psychogenic disorder that had been going
on around that time down in Mexico, down Mexico way
in Chalco, Mexico at a boarding school there. Uh, it
(03:48):
apparently was a girl's boarding school and the girls that
went to school, they were ages 12 to 17 and
all of a sudden they started, uh, well, there was
an outbreak, a weird outbreak. There was vomiting, I believe,
trouble walking, um, There was fever. Yeah. That's weird.
Speaker 4 (04:07):
Nausea.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
And so the people running this boarding school were like,
what's going on? This is not good.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (04:15):
And they had no idea. The girls went on Christmas
break for 10 days, came back, and the thing just
took off again like wildfire.
Speaker 4 (04:23):
Yeah. 600 of the 3,600 girls showed these symptoms and
nobody could figure it out. They did a lot of tests.
They brought in people to like check out the facilities. Yeah.
Because as you'll see, there's a trend there. You know,
here in the West, they start to blame it usually
on like environmental poisoning of some kind.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
Right. You know, there's some sort of toxin present that
has poisoned everybody.
Speaker 4 (04:49):
But they didn't find anything there. And eventually they said
this is. what'd you call it? Psychosomatic?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
Mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (04:59):
Okay. Mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
But no, that is one of the names. Mass psychogenic disorder,
collective hysteria, mass hysteria, or mass psychosomatic reaction.
Speaker 4 (05:09):
Yeah. They're all saying the same thing.
Speaker 3 (05:11):
They are.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
Which is you're not, well, I was about to say
you're not really sick, but that is not exactly true
because that's one thing that differentiates this from something that's
just in your head is you actually do manifest physical symptoms.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Right.
Speaker 4 (05:23):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:23):
There's this article written by a MD named Timothy F.
Jones from the Tennessee Department of Health way back in
the heady days of 2000, the year 2000, the future.
Speaker 4 (05:33):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
And he writes that if you are experiencing mass psychogenic disorder,
it is not just in your head. that the symptoms
that you have are actually very real. Even though there's
no toxic cause, they couldn't find some sort of environmental
poisoning or anything like that, the symptoms are extremely real.
Speaker 4 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
It's just psychosomatic. It's just basically the brain has been
tricked into causing this response.
Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yeah, and this has happened. They've documented about 80 cases
throughout history, and apparently the National Institutes of Health gets
about two cases per week reported.
Speaker 3 (06:12):
But, um, which is, I mean, like that's, that's way
more common than, than you would think.
Speaker 4 (06:18):
You know? Yeah. I would think there'd be more than 80.
Cause I mean, these have happened. If you go back
and look at, I mean, there's all sorts of crazy
lists on the internet about these cases that date back
to like the 14th century.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Medieval dancing mania was one of them.
Speaker 4 (06:31):
Yeah. The dancing plague. Yeah. Yeah. That's in there.
Speaker 3 (06:35):
Uh, the Salem witchcraft trials.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Or the Salem witchcraft, I guess what led to the
trials was, um, supposedly attributed to this kind of thing.
Speaker 4 (06:45):
Yeah. One weird thing about this condition is more times
than not, it affects females.
Speaker 3 (06:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (06:55):
And young females, even more specifically, teenagers or even younger.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Which is, as far as it goes right now, inexplicable.
And it's kind of a prickly issue, you know? Like, again,
you kind of come back to the idea of calling
it hysteria. Yeah. The fact that it does tend to
afflict women or girls more than boys is apparently one
(07:20):
means of diagnosing psychogenic disorder, mass psychogenic disorder.
Speaker 4 (07:23):
Yeah, that's like one of the first things they'll say
is like all this sickness is happening in this place,
this school, wherever. And the doctor will say, is it
a bunch of girls? Yeah. And then that will clue
them in that, hey, this might be what we're dealing
with here.
Speaker 3 (07:37):
But the problem is no one has any idea why.
And there have been explanations of things like, I guess,
this is girls' culturally acceptable outlet for raging against the patriarchy.
Speaker 4 (07:53):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (07:54):
Even if they don't necessarily feel that that's what they're doing,
this is the symptoms of that. That's one.
Speaker 4 (08:02):
Yeah. I thought this was a pretty interesting part. What article?
Is that from Slate?
Speaker 3 (08:06):
There was one called Mass hysteria in upstate New York
by Ruth Graham was on slate. That was a good one.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
It was a really good one. We'll get to that
case in a sec. But I thought it was pretty interesting.
In one part it says, and this is a quote
from someone writing about something, it said, inform, if not
in conscious intent, it is to protest the sexual repressiveness,
rigid double standard of female teen culture. But they were
writing about Beatlemania.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (08:33):
Which is interesting because it sort of has a similar
vibe Of young ladies being repressed, not having an outlet.
And so they see the Beatles and they go berserk
and faint and cry and scream collectively. Whereas boys, they're
more prone to just act out if they're not feeling good.
Girls are trained to keep things inward. And they also
(08:55):
point out that ladies and young ladies are more prone
to seek a doctor's help for something. They say that
may account for the bias right there.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Right.
Speaker 4 (09:04):
Like guys just won't go to the doctor.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Exactly. You have to be careful, though, in just diagnosing
mass psychogenic disorder. You physicians out there who are listening
that encounter a case like this, just by basing it
on the fact that it is affecting more girls than boys,
because there's at least one case in Great Britain where
I think girls were afflicted by more than half, more
(09:28):
than double the number of girls were afflicted by this.
And it turned out that there were tainted cucumbers being
served in the lunchroom.
Speaker 4 (09:35):
Yeah. And everyone knows boys hate cucumbers.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
So they didn't eat any. Right. But this is one
of the issues with dealing with mass psychogenic disorder in
that it looks and acts a lot like some sort
of weird epidemic. That basically it looks like either something
like bioterrorism. a rapidly spreading infection, or affection if it's
(10:02):
fetal mania, and then acute toxic exposure. That's what it
looks like. It's like one person gets sick. This is
your index case. And all of a sudden, everyone around
them suddenly has the same symptoms.
Speaker 4 (10:15):
Yeah, and it's, like you said, it's super dangerous to
just dismiss that as, oh, it's all in your head,
silly little ladies. You can't do that because what if
it is something for real? But it's also a double-edged sword,
as that doctor pointed out. You start ordering batteries of tests,
and it can go both ways. It can, what the
(10:37):
old saying is, if you order enough tests, you're going
to find something.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
Right.
Speaker 4 (10:40):
So it can fuel that fire, but you also can't
not run any tests and just dismiss it. So it's
a very fine line that physicians walk when dealing with
stuff like this, for sure.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Indeed. Apparently, study of mass psychogenic disorder has found that
it's more prevalent in isolated communities.
Speaker 4 (11:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
And in situations where there are highly rigid, formalized, structured rules.
Speaker 4 (11:08):
Like a Catholic school in Mexico.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (11:11):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:11):
Or, again, Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:15):
You know, and apparently between 1973 and 1993, half of
all the outbreaks of psychogenic illness took place in schools.
Speaker 4 (11:28):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (11:29):
So that's possibly in part due to kids being susceptible
to it more.
Speaker 4 (11:38):
Right.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But also because of that rigid formalized structure.
Speaker 4 (11:43):
Yeah, and there's also usually a top-down effect, like it'll
start with a teacher or an older student, and then
the younger students follow suit, which, if you're talking influence,
would make sense for sure.
Speaker 3 (11:56):
There was one very famous case. Apparently, there's not very
many actual academic studies on this. Yeah. But there's one
that came out of the New England Journal of Medicine
that described a case in 1998 in Tennessee where a teacher...
noticed some weird gas odor, a gassy odor.
Speaker 4 (12:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Like the chemical kind.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
Yeah, not like the guy on the front row tooted.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (12:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:25):
And she apparently started suffering symptoms. And all of a sudden,
like 180 students and teachers had to go to the
emergency room. The school was shut down for two weeks.
They did all this environmental testing, couldn't find anything.
Speaker 4 (12:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:41):
And finally- traced it back to a mass psychogenic disorder.
That's what did it.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
And then everyone, in most of these cases, we should
point out, everyone starts feeling better.
Speaker 3 (12:55):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (12:55):
Like in Mexico and then the school in Tennessee, it's
not like they went on to die or anything.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
Yeah, so in the school in Mexico, these girls were
at a boarding school.
Speaker 4 (13:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
They were only allowed to see their parents, I think,
like three times a year.
Speaker 4 (13:10):
Yeah, they couldn't even call. It's like, it sounds more
like a prison. Right.
Speaker 3 (13:13):
No phone calls. They were allowed letters. When they went home,
immediately their symptoms cleared up.
Speaker 4 (13:18):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (13:19):
The problem is that doesn't automatically say, oh, well, it's
obviously mass psychogenic disorder. It could be an environmental toxin
that they were being exposed to still.
Speaker 1 (13:27):
Right.
Speaker 3 (13:28):
At the school and were removed from, but I think the...
Definite prognosis is mass psychogenic disorder in this case.
Speaker 4 (13:38):
That's right. What we're talking about is a sort of
version of the nocebo effect, which we've talked about before,
and we will get into that right after this break.
So the nocebo effect, we talked about that in what?
Speaker 3 (13:55):
The placebo effect.
Speaker 4 (13:56):
Oh, well, that makes sense. Yeah. I was... Trying to
be more clever. Thought we were more clever than that. Nocebo,
I think we said in that other podcast too, is
Latin for I shall harm. And that's basically, whereas you
take a placebo thinking it's going to help you out,
and it does help you out because the mind is powerful.
The nocebo effect is thinking something bad will result. Like
(14:18):
my teacher's getting sick. I think I feel a little
sick too. And then, oh wait, my neighbor's feeling a
little sick. I think I'm feeling a little sick too.
Speaker 3 (14:25):
Or this drug trial that I'm on. I was told
that I could, possibly get some sort of gastrointestinal distress. Yeah.
And even though I've been given a sugar pill, I'm
now going, yeah, because of my mind, because of the
nocebo effect.
Speaker 4 (14:43):
There was a famous experiment or case from 1886 where
there was a woman who had a rose allergy and
they showed her an artificial rose and she began to,
I guess it was convincing, and she began to have
her allergic reaction And they said, aha, it's fake. And
you're faking. And she said, oh, well, I think I'm
(15:05):
feeling better now. And supposedly that cured her of her
real allergy to real roses.
Speaker 3 (15:12):
Right.
Speaker 4 (15:13):
I couldn't find a lot to back that up. But
it is a story.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
Yeah, well, no. I mean, it was in, I can't
remember the journal.
Speaker 4 (15:20):
Oh, it really was?
Speaker 3 (15:21):
Yeah, it was a real deal thing. And I didn't
get to the bottom of why. They presented this woman
with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely didn't.
This definitely happened. Yeah. And even the author of the
study was saying, like, this woman, she wasn't faking.
Speaker 4 (15:41):
Right.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
It was like she had real symptoms. Sure.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Hives are hives.
Speaker 3 (15:45):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (15:46):
You can see those.
Speaker 3 (15:47):
I think they call it like a rose cold or
something like that. You can get, you know, stuffy.
Speaker 4 (15:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:53):
Your eyes are watering, your nose is running, that kind
of thing. And what's interesting is some researchers have studied
the nocebo effect, and they basically have isolated this chemical
that gets released when the nocebo effect's going on. And again,
we should say it's not just making your nose runny
(16:15):
or releasing histamines or anything like that. It's pain, too.
You can experience pain even though nothing's there to give
you pain just because of the nocebo effect. What they
found was a, I guess, a hormone, I believe. Are
you ready? I'm going to try this one. Cholecystokinin.
Speaker 4 (16:38):
That sounds great.
Speaker 3 (16:39):
Thanks, man.
Speaker 4 (16:39):
I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Cholecystokinin.
Speaker 4 (16:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:45):
Do you see it now?
Speaker 1 (16:45):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4 (16:46):
That's totally right.
Speaker 3 (16:47):
I totally did. So it's a hormone, right? And it
gets released, and it actually helps you experience pain. So
it's a nasty little hormone.
Speaker 4 (16:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (16:57):
But they found in testing with the nocebo effect that
if you block this, you can also block the nocebo effect.
So that proves two things.
Speaker 4 (17:05):
Does that block pain though? Yes. Like your pain receptors? Yes.
So does that mean if you slam your hand in
a door, you won't feel it?
Speaker 3 (17:11):
If you can block this.
Speaker 4 (17:12):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (17:12):
Yes. So if you can block cholecystokinin.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
Right.
Speaker 3 (17:18):
Yes. It will keep you from hypersensitivity to pain, I believe.
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And this guy named Fabrizio Benedetti, who I think was
also in the strokes, back in 1997. There was a Fabrizio, right?
Speaker 4 (17:30):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
He was testing out the nocebo effect and found that
if he told people that he was giving them an injection,
which is a pretty cruel test, but effective. Yeah. These
post-op people who had just come out of surgery were
given an injection and told this injection is going to
increase your pain in 30 minutes. I'm sorry, we have
(17:52):
to give it to you. It's part of the procedure.
He gave some people an injection of saline and they
reported an increase in pain.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
And they all went behind the two-way mirror and laughed. Right.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
They're like, what a chump.
Speaker 4 (18:04):
Look at him writhing.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
And then they gave somebody like the other group, the
control group, a chemical, an injection that blocks that pain,
but they were told that it was going to increase
their pain.
Speaker 4 (18:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
But they were given a chemical that blocks cholecystokinin and
the nocebo effect didn't take place. They didn't report an
increase in pain.
Speaker 4 (18:26):
Even though they were told they would. Yes. Wow.
Speaker 3 (18:29):
So this guy's saying like the nocebo effect is real.
Speaker 4 (18:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Like when they say it's not just in your head.
Speaker 4 (18:36):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (18:37):
You're experiencing the same thing as if you were experiencing
somebody stabbing you.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
Well, what it is real, you know, that's when you
have to start asking yourself those deep philosophical questions. Right. Interesting. Um, there's, uh,
another case that's, have you ever seen the movie safe?
The Todd Haynes movie with Julianne Moore?
Speaker 3 (18:58):
No.
Speaker 4 (18:59):
It's from like, uh, the mid nineties. And she played
a lady that, um, started to have environmental sickness, um,
just in the air. And she's got sort of like increasingly, um,
crazy as the movie went on as far as scrubbing
things and locking herself in her house and making her
house a clean environment.
Speaker 3 (19:17):
Sounds great.
Speaker 4 (19:19):
It was good. And there's a true story, though, of
a lady in London named Debbie Bird. She's a health
spa manager that says that she's allergic to EMF, electromagnetic fields.
And it's an actual thing now. You know, there's more
than her claiming it's called ES, electromagnetic sensitivity, where she has...
(19:42):
basically transformed her house. She painted it black. She said
she's allergic to computers, cell phones, microwaves. She had her
house rewired to make it basically EMF free. She and
her husband sleep under a silver plated mosquito net to
keep out radio waves and covered all her windows with
protective films. And she said she's feeling a lot better now.
Speaker 3 (20:05):
So I saw that ES, electromagnetic sensitivity, that if you
expose somebody to an electromagnetic field and then just tell
them that you are and don't, they have the same reaction,
which would suggest that it's nocebo.
Speaker 4 (20:22):
Well, it's super fascinating because you see cases like this
from that to like gluten sensitivity becoming a big thing now.
And people, some people contend that, well, it's maybe a
collective hysteria going on.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (20:35):
If you think you're going to be sensitive to gluten,
then you're going to be sensitive to things that contain gluten.
And I'm not saying that, people, because that's a very
hot topic.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Sure it is.
Speaker 4 (20:43):
But some people have claimed that.
Speaker 3 (20:47):
Well, we'll talk a little bit more about things that
exacerbate the mass psychogenic disorder and the nocebo effect right
after this. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. So, Chuck,
back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called L-troxin.
(21:12):
It was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's
a hormone replacement drug. And it was the only one
that the government would pay for. So most people who
were on this hormone replacement therapy were using L-troxin. And
it had been that way for, like, decades.
Speaker 4 (21:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:26):
It was just an established drug. GlaxoSmithKline.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
What was it for, though?
Speaker 3 (21:30):
Hormone replacement.
Speaker 4 (21:31):
Oh, okay.
Speaker 3 (21:32):
GlaxoSmithKline.com. I think just those, there's no welcome involved, changed
just the outer, the inner qualities of it, like the
shape of the pill, the color. And I think that's
about it. But the active ingredient was exactly the same
in 2007. And when they released it, all of a sudden,
(21:56):
some reports of bad side effects were starting to trickle in.
And the government was like, wait, what's going on here?
It got a little bit of media attention and more
reports started trickling in.
Speaker 4 (22:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
And then the media attention grew and the reports grew
and grew. And apparently the reporting of adverse effects of
L-troxin increased 2,000 fold in a year and a half.
Speaker 4 (22:23):
Because of the look of the pill.
Speaker 3 (22:24):
Because of the look of the pill.
Speaker 4 (22:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (22:26):
They went back and studied this and they found that
in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse
effects being reported for L-troxin, the more adverse effects were
being reported in that area. And that kind of reveals
one of the risk factors for mass psychogenic disorder is
the media. It's actually spread through the media most easily.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
Yeah, they have a point, though. I mean, I know
in this article, too, it points out that pills that
are blue and green are usually associated with drowsiness. Pills
that are orange or yellow are are not, and I
don't know if that's why they market it that way
or if it's the opposite, is we just see it
that way because of products like NyQuil and DayQuil. But
the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue,
(23:12):
and the one that keeps you awake, or not keep
you awake, but doesn't make you drowsy is orange.
Speaker 3 (23:16):
I thought about it. I think, I mean, what do
you associate with, like, daytime, sunrise, yellow, orange, red?
Speaker 4 (23:22):
It totally makes sense.
Speaker 3 (23:23):
What do you associate with nighttime? Like, something tranquil, like blue.
Speaker 4 (23:27):
Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3 (23:28):
Yeah, scotch amber. Uh, yeah, you, I mean, you think of, uh,
that's what I, I, I think it came from, I
think the pills came after the association rather than the
other way around.
Speaker 4 (23:39):
Yeah. I think I even, like when I get a
prescription for something, when I see the pill, I make
a judgment on it before I've even had it just
by saying, wow, look at that thing. It's heavy.
Speaker 3 (23:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (23:51):
That's a horse pill or that's a capsule with, uh,
you know, powdery stuff inside that's different than the chalky one.
It's you. I think you just make an association. I
don't think I have any preconceived notions on what a
larger pill will do to me.
Speaker 3 (24:05):
Right.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Or a capsule will do to me other than a tablet.
But I think it's interesting, though, how you make these
judgment calls.
Speaker 3 (24:13):
But without even thinking about it.
Speaker 4 (24:14):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (24:14):
You know, I mean, like you probably don't sit there
and look at a pill in your hand. You just
take it and just make some sort of almost unconscious judgment.
judgments about it.
Speaker 4 (24:26):
Yeah, it may remind you of another pill that helped
you that you're not even remembering.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Exactly. So that would be placebo.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
That's great. Nocebo effect poses a lot of problems. For instance,
there was a study, I think, in the 90s that
found that women who believed that they were prone to
heart disease were four times likelier to die of heart
disease than than women who didn't believe they were prone
(24:52):
to it, even though they had all the exact same
risk factors, basically the same risk factors. There was nothing
differentiating these women aside from a belief that they were
going to die from heart disease or a belief that
they weren't. And that led to a four-fold increase in
deaths from that, just basically from a belief is what
(25:13):
it suggests.
Speaker 4 (25:14):
Yeah, well, it's sort of like the, I know it's
kind of cheesy, but the PMA, the positive mental attitude,
I think we've all know someone who walks around saying, oh,
so-and-so's sick. Oh, I know I'm going to get it.
I just know I'm going to get sick. Or, you know,
I just know I'm going to get cancer because it
runs in my family. I think that has an effect
on things.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
I have to agree. I know some of our more
skeptical listeners are pulling their hair out right now, but
I totally agree with you. When we did our show
in Toronto, on the way back, Yumi and I flew
out of Buffalo. And I was feeling a little down,
but like at the point where I feel like you
can talk yourself into staying healthy.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (25:54):
Positive mental attitude, I guess is what you call it.
But we were leaving right at about dusk and the
sun was just beaming through the windows and illuminating every
single microbe, visible microbe in the air. I could see
them like just going into my nose and my mouth.
And I'm like, I couldn't stop. Like I couldn't I
(26:15):
was like, I'm not going to get sick. I'm not
going to get sick. And man, did I ever get sick.
Speaker 4 (26:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
But I noticed that right when we took off and no,
you know what it was? Somebody shut one of their, um, their, uh,
window covers. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (26:29):
The shade.
Speaker 3 (26:30):
Shade. Exactly. Is the word that I was looking for.
Somebody shut their shade and I couldn't see it anymore.
And I immediately started to feel less symptomatic.
Speaker 4 (26:39):
Wow. Immediately.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
It was like turning off a light.
Speaker 4 (26:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (26:41):
And I still got sick. But I was just drowning
in basically what my brain was interpreting is like being
assaulted by foreign invaders, which I am all the time.
Speaker 4 (26:51):
Sure.
Speaker 3 (26:51):
But I normally can't see them.
Speaker 4 (26:52):
Yeah. Well, I do that all the time when I
open my the curtains in the bedroom and I'll see
in the morning, I'll see that stuff in the air.
And I just think, oh, man, that's what I'm walking around.
Speaker 3 (27:02):
Right.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Breathing in. Breathing.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:04):
Dog hair and cat hair and. Emily hair.
Speaker 3 (27:08):
So your lungs are just chock full of it. So
one of the problems this poses, Chuck, for physicians is
that we expect doctors or we want doctors to be transparent,
to not lie to us.
Speaker 4 (27:23):
Yeah, we've talked a lot about this lately, I feel like.
Speaker 3 (27:25):
Yeah. We've talked a lot about diseases. Some of our
hypochondriac listeners have been like, please stop talking about diseases
because now I've got morgulons. I'm going to have like
some sort of toxic exposure.
Speaker 4 (27:39):
Toxoplasmosis.
Speaker 3 (27:40):
Yep. And then very soon, leprosy.
Speaker 4 (27:45):
Spoiler.
Speaker 3 (27:46):
So the problem is, is if you tell somebody that's
going into surgery, hey, by the way, Um, you know, you,
you might have trouble walking.
Speaker 4 (27:58):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:58):
You might feel nauseous for the next six months. You
like all this stuff that could be associated with, which
we demand from our doctors.
Speaker 4 (28:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:06):
It's been shown that if you are fearful or in
despair going into surgery, that's associated with longer healing times
and a higher risk of postoperative infection.
Speaker 4 (28:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (28:16):
Right. So if you have the nocebo effect where doctors
are saying, Okay, if I tell somebody, and it's been
proven time after time that in drug trials, people who
are still are given placebo will drop out of drug
trials because they're experiencing these negative side effects, even though
they're given the sugar pill. So if you're a doctor
(28:39):
and you know that you are telling somebody something that
ultimately may end up harming them, and yet you've sworn
an oath to do no harm, you've got a conundrum
going on right now. And that's what the nocebo effect poses.
It's the problem the nocebo effect poses for modern physicians.
Like how much should they tell you? If you're going
to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for
(29:00):
six months, even though they probably won't, should you tell
them and give them a chance to basically have the
psychosomatic symptom?
Speaker 4 (29:09):
Or tell them they're going to feel great.
Speaker 3 (29:11):
Well, that's another one. Somebody says the solution to this
is just frame it differently.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
Like, don't say there's a chance you're going to have
nausea for six months. Say half of a percent of
patients who go through the same procedure that you're about
to go through have nausea for six months. 99.5% don't.
Speaker 4 (29:31):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:31):
You're giving them the same information. It's just framed more positively.
Speaker 4 (29:35):
Yeah. And that one doctor who wrote the article on
collectivist area said what he recommends is not naming the illness.
He said that can help out because as soon as
you give something a name, then... It just instantly, you know,
you have something you can call it and everyone's calling
it that or the media picks up on it. Right.
(29:55):
And it's a thing.
Speaker 3 (29:56):
Yeah. And that's actually, again, one of the risk factors
in the spread of mass psychogenic illness is the larger
the response, the emergency medical response to it. Yeah. And
then hence the larger the media response to it, the
larger the outbreak tends to be. It's called line of
sight exposure. Yeah. Just knowing somebody is sick or seeing
(30:17):
somebody sick can give you the same symptoms.
Speaker 4 (30:20):
I'm sure if you see a news story that all
the other news agencies are running that says there's been
some weird chemical leak in the air in Atlanta, people
are going to start walking around and coughing and saying,
I'm not feeling so good. I have a bitter taste
in my mouth.
Speaker 3 (30:36):
There's microbes everywhere.
Speaker 4 (30:38):
Well, here's a case from that article you sent that
I think is super fascinating. The one in upstate New York.
Because it is not a rash or a cough or nausea,
it is Tourette syndrome. A 16-year-old young lady named Lori Bronwell,
what year was this? A couple years ago?
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Yeah, not too long ago. I think 2012.
Speaker 4 (31:00):
In Corinth, New York, was... At her school's homecoming dance
and lost consciousness. This is after she had headbanged at
a concert.
Speaker 3 (31:10):
Sorry, man. I thought you were going to leap out
like the best part.
Speaker 4 (31:12):
Yeah, she was headbanging at a concert. I wish I
knew what concert that was so bad. Me too.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
I didn't find it anywhere.
Speaker 4 (31:17):
Apparently passed out there and had passing outfits. Involuntary twitching
and clapping started, twisting her hair, fluttering her fingers. Hey, hey, hey.
Starting stuff like that. Yeah. And the doctor said, you
know what? You've got Tourette's syndrome. So Tourette's syndrome is,
we've had a podcast on it.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
It's a real thing.
Speaker 4 (31:36):
It's not psychosomatic. But since that time, 14 other students
along with her, 13 girls and one boy started exhibiting
at Leroy Junior High School. I'm sorry, Junior Senior High
School started coming down with Tourette's.
Speaker 3 (31:51):
Right, which is not contagious.
Speaker 4 (31:53):
It is not contagious at all. Erin Brockovich got on
the case, famous environmental activist. And she said, no, I
think this is, got to do with this train derailment
from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town. And
I didn't see where they found any legitimate effects.
Speaker 2 (32:14):
Right.
Speaker 3 (32:14):
Again, that's the confounding thing about mass psychogenic disorder is
that it is still possible that there is some weird
toxin in the environment that is causing this. Like maybe
there was exposure to cyanide that got in these people's
brains and all gave them Tourette. And if you stand
back and look at it, you're like, Tourette syndrome isn't contagious.
(32:38):
That doesn't mean that you can't all come down with
Tourette syndrome from exposure to a toxin. It's just still,
it's this X factor that's out there that you can't
just necessarily rule out with confidence.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
Yeah, and I believe in that case too, those 14
students didn't end up with Tourette syndrome.
Speaker 3 (32:54):
That was a good episode, man. Loved Tourette syndrome one.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
Yeah, that's an oldie.
Speaker 3 (32:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (32:59):
Oldie but a goodie.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
And it all came from headbanging.
Speaker 4 (33:04):
That's how it started.
Speaker 3 (33:04):
That mess.
Speaker 4 (33:05):
At a Nickelback show.
Speaker 3 (33:08):
Yeah, because Corinth is near Canada. Canada doesn't let Nickelback
out any longer.
Speaker 4 (33:13):
Oh, really? Are they caged in there? Yeah. Nice. There's
another case of the toxic lady. Did you hear this one?
In Riverside, California, a woman named Gloria Ramirez.
Speaker 3 (33:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:24):
She was dubbed the toxic lady in 1994. She had
cervical cancer and was being treated and all the medical
staff started to get sick that was treating her. This
sounds gross, but they said her body exuded a garlicky,
fruity smell, and her blood had flecks of what looked
like paper, which sounds kind of like Morgulans, actually.
Speaker 1 (33:44):
Nice.
Speaker 4 (33:45):
You like that?
Speaker 3 (33:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (33:47):
And they said that most of the people that got
sick while treating her were women, more women than men,
and they all took a blood test and came back normal,
and the health department said, Mass hysteria.
Speaker 3 (33:59):
So that's funny because I looked, I remembered that story
and I was like, I wonder if that was mass hysteria.
And I looked it up and I found that no,
it was an environmental toxin.
Speaker 4 (34:08):
Oh, it was?
Speaker 3 (34:08):
That's what I found.
Speaker 4 (34:09):
So they called it mass hysteria at the time and
then later found out?
Speaker 3 (34:12):
I think like a year or two later, she was
using some sort of salve or something on her skin.
And they think that it interacted with her biochemistry and
really did produce toxic gas.
Speaker 4 (34:24):
She said it may be this fruit garlic salve.
Speaker 3 (34:26):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (34:27):
That's interacting badly with my pancreas.
Speaker 4 (34:30):
Oh, well, this list needs to be updated.
Speaker 3 (34:33):
Dude, that is a fascinating case. It is. People got
really sick from that.
Speaker 4 (34:38):
I think I remember hearing about that, too.
Speaker 1 (34:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (34:40):
Well, I'm glad they found a real cause in that case.
Speaker 3 (34:42):
From what I understand. But that's the point. Right. You
can say, well, obviously, women were more affected than men.
Speaker 4 (34:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:49):
Right? Well, is that because there's more women in the
nursing profession and there were more nurses in the room?
Speaker 4 (34:55):
Yeah, maybe.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
Maybe.
Speaker 3 (34:55):
There's a lot of different things you have to take
into account before you just write it off. Sometimes it
is real, like sick building syndrome.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
That's a tough one because after the OPEC oil embargo,
apparently people started designing buildings to be more airtight. So
your ventilation system was really important.
Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:17):
And these buildings haven't aged necessarily very well. So the
ventilation system is not doing what it's supposed to any longer.
And so they think possibly that's leading to what we
know as sick building syndrome, which is malaise.
Speaker 4 (35:29):
It's when you don't feel good when you go to work.
Speaker 3 (35:30):
Exactly.
Speaker 4 (35:31):
Which is everybody.
Speaker 3 (35:32):
But some studies have found like, no, that is the
better predictor of sick building syndrome.
Speaker 1 (35:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (35:37):
Is job stress or job dissatisfaction. Yeah. If you have
a building full of people who don't like their jobs,
you're going to have a building full of people with
sick building syndrome. But if you go on to say
like a local government's website or whatever, and you look at,
Sick building syndrome. It's treated as a real thing.
Speaker 4 (35:55):
Yeah. Well, it definitely affects your gastrointestinal like stress does.
Speaker 3 (35:59):
Also, apparently it can set off bouts of asthma.
Speaker 4 (36:02):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (36:03):
Which is another reason why they think it might have
something to do with like volatile organic compounds in the
ventilation system. Or new carpeting, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 4 (36:10):
Yeah. Off-gassing, man. You smell that stuff when you open
up a new product, right?
Speaker 3 (36:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:15):
There's also the dancing plague, which we mentioned briefly.
Speaker 3 (36:18):
Tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Frowtrophia. July 14th, 1518, went out on the streets of Strasbourg, France,
and started dancing, even though there was no music, and
dancing like a maniac for three straight days. And all
these people started dancing with her, saying this is a
good time. It said within a month, 100 people were
dancing with her and couldn't stop. And hyperventilating, hallucinating, some
(36:44):
dropped dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion. And
the authorities said, let's just hire a band. And let
them dance it out.
Speaker 3 (36:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (36:52):
Because they've got the hot blood is what they called it.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
All right.
Speaker 4 (36:56):
And so they did. And a lot of people died
as a result. It said 400 people in the end
were struck. I don't think they died, but were dancers.
Speaker 3 (37:07):
Right.
Speaker 4 (37:07):
And then it just stopped. And that's when they blame,
a lot of people blame on ergot poisoning, which we've
mentioned before.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
I always go with ergot poisoning.
Speaker 4 (37:15):
Yeah, back then.
Speaker 3 (37:15):
Those people were clearly tripping on something.
Speaker 4 (37:17):
They got the hot blood.
Speaker 3 (37:18):
But what it sounds like you just described is basically
how Tom Hanks invented jogging in the 70s.
Speaker 4 (37:24):
Yogging?
Speaker 3 (37:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (37:25):
Oh, yeah?
Speaker 3 (37:26):
He just started running and people started following him.
Speaker 4 (37:29):
I wish that part had been cut out of that movie. Oh, really? Yeah,
I thought that it was a weird thing that should
have been on the editing room floor. It really kind
of derailed things for a while for me. Yeah. I
don't think that movie's aged well, though.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
I haven't seen it in forever.
Speaker 4 (37:43):
Other people say, though, that it was Sydenham's chorea. a
disorder linked to strep throat and rheumatic fever that causes
dance-like twitches. And then, of course, modern medical historians say
it was mass psychosis.
Speaker 3 (37:58):
I would go with that one.
Speaker 4 (37:59):
Yeah, but back then it made more sense, though, when
during the Salem witch trials and before they knew anything
about medicine and you could just say you got the
hot blood or you're having the fits.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Or the devil's possessed you.
Speaker 4 (38:13):
Yeah, exactly. These modern cases are the ones that really
freak me out because so much is explainable now.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
Here's the thing, though, Chuck. We've always explained it with
something that comes easily to mind. So back in the
day before science and medicine, it was the devil possessing you.
And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they
thought that the devil was there in town possessing people
in the same way that you're freaked out by the
idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a train
(38:41):
derailment from 1970.
Speaker 4 (38:41):
Or beetle mania.
Speaker 3 (38:43):
Exactly. Which is the deadliest of all the manias. But
it's just as real.
Speaker 4 (38:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:50):
To the experiencer. And it all comes down to people
just basically being sick of the establishment and letting loose
for a while.
Speaker 4 (38:57):
Don't want to go to work. Nice. So I'll dance.
Speaker 3 (39:01):
You got anything else?
Speaker 1 (39:03):
No, sir.
Speaker 3 (39:04):
If you want to know more about collective hysteria, which
is the name of this article, type those words in
the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring it up.
And I said search bar, which means it's time for
listener mail.
Speaker 4 (39:18):
I'm going to call this episode on grief. We got
a lot of great feedback and they continue to roll in.
Hey guys, just stumbled upon your podcast through my tune
in radio app. Uh, I guess that's a mini plug.
We're available there now. Um, I've devoured almost all of
the 600 plus shows. I may be a new listener,
(39:38):
but I'm already a lifelong fan. So why I'm writing
in guys is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. Uh,
it was a rough time because as a fraternal twin,
me being the boy, uh, I looked at her not
only as a sister, but as a mother and friend, too.
Long story short, I wanted to comment on the Grief
show some time ago. I've dealt with my grief through
my artwork. I'm a small-town artist from Johnson City, Tennessee,
(40:02):
and I rarely can get noticed or any attention with
my art. I wanted to share my new piece I've
just finished after listening to how comic books work. I'm
a huge fan of Marvel Comics, and I hope you
both enjoy this. And he sent this really cool... I
think it was like every member of the Marvel Universe
had to be in this picture that he did.
Speaker 3 (40:19):
I didn't see that one.
Speaker 4 (40:19):
It's really, really neat. Just jam-packed full of Marvel comic
heroes and villains. So Josh and Chuck, thanks for the
inspiration laughs and getting through every day at the office. P.S.
My twin Jessica passed away from epilepsy, actually. A condition
called SUDEP, Sudden Unexplained Death of Epilepsy. My mother is
trying to raise awareness because November is Epilepsy Awareness Month.
(40:42):
So if you guys wouldn't mind mentioning this on the show,
she would be so happy for that. Also, an epilepsy
show would be cool, too. Not a lot is discussed
about it. And that is Jason Flack. And Jason, I
wrote you back. That is heartbreaking about your twin sister.
Speaker 3 (40:56):
Yeah, it is.
Speaker 4 (40:57):
Very sorry to hear that. And we will definitely do
a show on epilepsy. And since this is November, though,
people should go out and find out what they can
during National Epilepsy Month.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:08):
We'll follow up with the show. I don't know if
it'll be in November, but we'll get to that one
for sure.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (41:13):
And thanks for that piece of art. And if anyone's
interested in a great comic book artist from Johnson City, Tennessee,
I could do a lot worse than Jason Flack.
Speaker 3 (41:21):
Jason, thank you very much for sharing that with everybody.
That means a lot to us. If you want to
share with us and all of our listeners out there,
you can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can
join us on Facebook.com slash SubYouShouldKnow. You can send us
an email with attached artwork to StuffPodcast at HowStuffWorks.com. And
(41:43):
as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.