March 5, 2014 • 50 mins
Nuns meowing like cats. School girls laughing uncontrollably. People dancing in the streets until they die from exhaustion. Cristen and Caroline dig into the fascinating history of mass hysterias, why some think it's on the rise today and how it seems to affect more girls and women.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never told You from how stupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen, and today we are covering a topic
that personally I thought was a relic of a bygone era,
something that we didn't quite have to worry about anymore,
(00:24):
because it was something that only happened to women in
ancient or old cultures. And that is mass hysteria. And
it is by far not a relic of a bygone era.
Mass hysteria also goes by names such as, wait for it,
mass psychogenic illness, mass sociogenic illness, collective hysteria, and conversion disorder.
(00:46):
And I came across some blogs recently talking about this
topic because in the last decade, not only has it
popped up in the news a lot, but it is
popped up in the news because it is happening it
seems solely to teenage girls at school. Well, let's talk
a little bit about anecdotally what mass hysteria is, because
(01:08):
when you first alerted me to this topic, Caroline, I
had no clue what you were talking about. I received
an email saying, hey, we should do something on mass hysteria.
And I just stared blankly at my scream for a moment.
But once I started reading about it and watching interviews
with these girls affected by these cases of so called
(01:32):
mass hysteria, I was captivated because what it looks like
when interviewers are talking to these girls. There's a segment,
for instance, of girls on Doctor Drew talking about this,
this esteemed show, television show, Doctor Drew. It looks like
these girls have something akin to Tourette's syndrome. Yes, absolutely,
(01:55):
a lot of these girls across across cases. What you know,
wherever this has happened, these girls tend to experience ticks, uh, shouting, shaking,
all of this kind of stuff that, yeah, you would
associate typically with Tourette's. And it ends up. What ends
up happening in a lot of these cases is health professionals,
(02:16):
the media like people flood these towns. You know. Aaron
Brockovich went to one school where this was happening and
wanted to test the soil. She was concerned that a
train derailment several decades before was leading to some strange
health condition. And basically what was found uh in that
(02:36):
particular case in New York and several others is just
that No, this isn't an organic environmental toxin that's causing this.
It seems to be something that is much more in
the brain. Now, this might be ringing bells for people
due to that upstate New York case. This was a
situation what happened at place called Leroy High School where
(02:59):
thirteen girls and one boy started experiencing twitching, clapping, and
shouting ticks. And I remember seeing one of the interviews
with a girl who had a bruise on her face
because her ticks were so violent that her her cheek
was slamming into her shoulder and actually bruising her. And yeah,
(03:22):
and they and they looked high and low for some
kind of toxin, some kind of environmental explanation. And there
was actually a study published in the New England Journal
of Medicine saying we could not find anything. And they
poured a ton of money into looking for reasons why,
Like the state came out and said, hey, we've we've
(03:44):
put six figures into this case. Nothing we got nothing. Yeah,
And so basically mass hysteria or or these other common
terms for it is used to describe the situation in
which several people suffer from similar hysterical symptoms, either from
a fan into illness or an inexplicable event. And actually
it happens way more often than I thought. Dr Mark Hallett,
(04:07):
who's with the National Institutes of Health, said that on
average they get reports of to such cases a week
a week, Yeah, and a lot of In fact, half
of these mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools. And there
is a highly gendered aspect to this, which is why
we're talking about it on the podcast, because it's far
(04:29):
more common among young women than any other demographic group. Yeah,
and I mean yes, there are outliers for for sure.
Usually it'll happen among a group of young women out
of school. But as you know, we'll get into this
thanks to news coverage, social media coverage, other people can
quote unquote catch it if they're kind of keeping up
(04:51):
with this story. But talking specifically about the gender link. Uh.
Robert Bartholomy, who's sort of like the leading name in
the field of mass hysteria. UH. He's a sociologist in
New Zealand who's been studying cases of mass hysteria for
more than twenty years, said that typically masssteria is confined
to a group of girls or young women who share
a common physical space for a majority of the time.
(05:14):
So young women in schools getting this mass hysteria. It
all makes sense according to Bartholomew. And this guy should know.
He has studied more than six hundred cases dating back
to fifteen sixties six and he said, listen, the gender link,
it's undeniable. It's just a question of why. And we'll
dig into possible wise for that later in the podcast. Um,
(05:36):
but one thing that Bartholomew has said is that there
has been a quote sudden upsurge in cases of mass hysteria.
And there was an article in The Atlantic that came
out in September of two talking to Bartholomew and covering
cases including Leroy and one standout individual in that case
because which was this older woman in the community who
(05:58):
was not affiliated with high school at all, who also
developed these ticks. And Bartholomy thinks that it has to
do with the social media influence. Basically, she heard about
this incident going on among these high schoolers via Facebook,
and then all of a sudden she starts experiencing debilitating
(06:20):
ticks as well, to the point that she had to
take medical leave from work, right, exactly. Well, so let's
let's give just a brief rundown of some other episodes
of mass hysteria that have popped up in the news.
In there was an outbreak of illness at a Tennessee school.
More than one seventies students, teachers, and others sought emergency treatment.
But after investigating, you know, investigators found no virus, no toxins,
(06:45):
no actual illnesses, and they dubbed it mass hysteria. Similarly,
in two thousand two, there were ten teenage girls at
a small rural North Carolina high school that had epileptic
like seizures and fainting after the buildings were in expected.
Nothing was found to explain the outbreak. But then if
you look at the mid two thousand's onward, you do
(07:06):
see a distinct uptick in these cases, which Robert Bartholomy
would probably correlate to the rise in social media. Perhaps.
For instance, in two thousand and six alone, there was
a case in Portugal where, um, there were more than
three hundred students at fourteen different schools that reported that
seems kind of odd. They reported feeling symptoms similar to
(07:27):
those experienced by characters on a popular youth soap opera,
and eventually it forced some of those schools to temporarily
closed to try to take care of this problem. And
I'm now thinking of what would have happened if if
we had started just acting like characters on Dawson's Creek
or something. Oh lord, I don't know, we just would
(07:48):
have been really angsty. Yeah, well, I was already there.
I was about to say, yeah, my diary was full. Um. Also,
in two thousand and six, at this really strict boarding
school in Mexico, six grid out of thirty six hundred
girls ages twelve to seventeen showed strange symptoms such as
trouble walking, fever, and nausea. And the following year, at
(08:09):
least eight girls at a Roanoke, Virginia high school developed
strange twitching symptoms and the school district ended up spending
tens of thousands of dollars to investigate, but again no
environmental cause. Tanzania is another place where you hear about
these uh mass hysteria epidemics breaking out a lot. In
two thousand and eight, for instance, again you have a
(08:29):
group of twenty girls at a school who all of
a sudden lose consciousness while others are sobbing, yelling and
running around the school. And I think it's also in
Tanzania where there have been incidences of laughing epidemics. And
there's a YouTube video about this. And even though it's
called an epidemic, it's kind of cute because a lot
(08:51):
of the footage is really just school children, like groups
of Tanzanian school children laughing hysterically. You're like, oh, what's
so bad about that? Yeah, our office could use a
little laughing epidemic, and except it doesn't stop. Yeah, it's true. Uh. Well,
in January, one of the more recent episodes, there were
about two dozen teenagers at a school in Danvers, Massachusetts
(09:15):
who began having mysterious hiccups and vocal ticks. What's interesting
about Danvers. Danvers used to be Salem scene of the
Salem witch trials, which were also considered to be a
form of moral mass hysteria or a moral panic. Yeah,
and today some researchers think that the so called demonic
(09:39):
signs that the girls involved with the Salem witchcraft trials
were exhibiting were maybe the same kinds of psychological issues
that these girls at Essex, agricultural and Technical School in
Danvers today also exhibiting interesting, very interesting. So what is
the it's what is going on? How does this work? Well,
(10:04):
a couple different things can happen, and one of those
is that there can be an actual physical detectable trigger
like a bad smell or a rumor of exposure to
a poison. And so basically, if one person gets sick,
others in the group also start feeling sick. And sure,
the first person to get sick might have actually had
a real illness, they could have had food poisoning. Maybe
(10:25):
they just felt nauseated. But then this power of suggestibility
comes into play where other people are like, oh, well,
I might I feel kind of light headed and nauseated too.
I don't know what's going on. Um. And so yeah,
as you get things like bad smells convincing people that
they actually are possibly being poisoned. Um. It could also
(10:46):
start with conversion disorder. And so conversion disorder and mass
hysteria are not exactly synonymous, but you have conversion disorder
when psychological stress stressors like trauma or anxiety manifest physically.
And when this happens, it's basically a mental health condition
in which a person can experience things like blindness, paralysis,
(11:06):
or other neurologic symptoms that cannot easily be explained away
by a simple, simple medical test. It's not like you
can go get a blood test and they're like, oh, well,
you're experiencing conversion order disorder. Usually a whole slew of
things have to be ruled out before they hit on
conversion disorder, and the symptoms usually begin suddenly after a
(11:26):
stressful experience, and people who are at risk for conversion
disorders UH usually have a mental illness or some other
mental health problem or dissociative disorder in which they are
not able to manage their feelings or their emotions very well.
And when a conversion disorder becomes contagious, that's when you
have the development of what we think of as the
(11:49):
mass psychogenic illness or the mass hysteria. And one term
that pops up a lot too is something called the
no cebo effect. So essentially that's the opposite of the
placebo effect, Like if you take a sugar pill thinking
that it will have positive effects on you, and so
you all of a sudden start to feel better. The
(12:11):
no cebo effect is when, say, you smell something strange,
and you don't know what it is, but you just
assume it's terrible, and all of a sudden, you start
exhibiting all of these horrible symptoms when come to find
out it was maybe just a pickle gone bad in
the fridge or something. Now, I mean, when I started
(12:32):
thinking about it, I mean this Obviously, I've never been
part of mass hysteria myself, Kristen, but I feel like
this has happened to me where someone else is like, oh,
something smells bad. I don't feel good, and I'm like,
oh maybe, Oh no, I'm starting to feel dizzy. The
power of suggestibility, man, it is strong. Oh yeah. I
mean this is one thing too that that started happening
(12:52):
a lot more after the two thousand and eleven Twin
Towers attack and the rise of the anthrax threats. All
of a sudden, you have a lot of people calling
and complaining of symptoms that are similar to anthrax poisoning,
claiming that they had received mail with anthrax in it.
(13:14):
And I mean, essentially we're kind of making up a
lot of this stuff in our mind due to fear
and panic. Almost anytime you have an outbreak of mass hysteria,
there's some kind of real world trigger, whether it's economic
upheaval or rigid gender roles to an extreme extent, or
just generally stressful factors like exam time, for instance, Is
(13:37):
a lot is a big time when this breaks out
in schools. Yeah, I mean, I would say, as the
non scientist that I am. I mean, I would say
that stress seems to play a huge role in this.
And you know, I I think it's not uncommon to,
even if it's just on an individual level, feel some
sort of psycho somatic illness when you are feel stressed,
(14:00):
whether it is exams or in the case of Tanzania,
whether it's some like huge cultural rift going on. And
you know, Kristen did mention that there are a lot
of reports of mass hysteria of various forms breaking out
in Tanzania, and one of the first was in nineteen
sixty two. It was a laughing epidemic and it lasted
nearly eighteen months, and locals blamed angry ancestors. But you
(14:23):
have to look at the context. During the nineteen sixties,
there were a lot of Western missionary schools that were opening,
and they were notorious for trying to do away with
these students cultural heritage focusing on Western and Christian religious
and cultural practices. And so these students, these young girls
(14:44):
are experiencing this inner struggle because their families believe one thing,
and they always have believed one thing. But then you
have these people coming in teaching them different religions, different practices,
and so there is this conflict that happens. And so
it's around this time that the first of several laughing
epidemics start taking place in Tanzania. Yeah, and when you
(15:04):
look into different anthropological explanations for mass hysteria, gender does
come up a lot, especially in more developing nations, because
they link the mass hysteria to patriarchal societies. For instance,
um this idea that women are inherently suggestible, and in
cases where something like the Salem witch trials where their
(15:27):
assumptions of demonic possession and witchcraft, which those kinds of
scenarios are still happening around the world today, a lot
of times women in those societies are considered more susceptible
to possession because of their social submissiveness. So it's like they're, um,
you know, they're almost literally more more open to it.
(15:49):
They aren't going to be as resistant to so called
demonic possessions. So you see them exhibiting these signs more often,
but in more of Western context, say in the case
of the Danverse High School, where it's going to get
a lot of media attention. One thing that the American
Family Physician points out in terms of the contagious factor
(16:13):
of mass hysteria is how when it happens, it can
become almost exponentially contagious because all of a sudden, you
have reporters everywhere. You have now again, the social media
effect of people tweeting about it is probably flooding your Facebook.
You're getting emails about it. It's it's almost like you
become surrounded by this hysteria, right, And it's it's not
(16:37):
exactly imagined. While it might not be an actual disease
and actual sickness, it's not just in your brain. And
yet it is in your brain. Um, these people who
are experiencing mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, they do
have headaches, or they do actually feel dizzy or nauseated.
It's just that it's not caused by germs or poison
(16:57):
or anything like that. In the New York Times, bawelve
looking at this topic talked about how the illness might
have something to do with the amygdala, which is where
kind of your startle responses start in your brain. Yeah,
the amygdala has actually been shown to be overactive in
patients with conversion disorder. And The New York Times interviewed
(17:19):
Mark Hallett, who we started earlier. He's the senior investigator
at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and
he says that quote, ordinarily the amygdala might create psychological distress,
but instead, in these cases, it would create an involuntary movement,
talking about those ticks that you see sometimes exhibited in
the high school girls affected by this. But one comparison
(17:42):
to that comes up a lot in explanations of mass
hysteria is it's just like a really exaggerated form of
stage fright, right where all of a sudden, and I've
experienced this to a horrible extent, where yes, your stomach
is in not all of a sudden, you have to
go to the bathroom like twenty five times for no
(18:04):
good reason. Your palms are sweating. I mean, there's a
physical discomfort that comes with that kind of psychological anxiety. Sure. Well,
what's also interesting to look at, and researchers have pointed
this out, is that the things that we are afraid
of or the things that we're concerned about when we
experience mass hysteria have changed with society. This is coming
(18:28):
from a two thousand to British Journal of Psychiatry review
of literature on mass hysteria, and they found that this
mass sociogenic illness mirrors prominent social concerns. So, before nine
we have reports that are dominated by episodes of motor symptoms,
typically dissociation psychomotor agitation in an environment of pre existing tension.
(18:53):
But twentieth century reports feature anxiety symptoms triggered by sudden
exposure to an anxiety generating age like a like a
bad smell, or food poisoning rumors because we're moving into
the era of the bomb things like that. Yeah, and
then from the early eighties to present day we see
that increasing presence of chemical and biological terrorism themes, people
(19:17):
being scared that they are being poisoned by some kind
of terroristic agent. And yeah, as I brought up September
eleventh a few minutes ago, that has definitely triggered a
peak in these kinds of reports. Right, But it's I mean,
it's interesting to see. And when you look at the
history of mass hysteria, you know, when you talk about
(19:40):
women being possessed or nuns being possessed by evil things,
they end up being possessed by things that people are
afraid of at the time, like cats. Like cats. Okay,
let's go ahead and talk about the meowing nuns because
this was one of my favorite aspects of this research
and this might ring a bell to uh, some listeners
(20:02):
who have read about this. There were cases in the
Middle Ages of nunneries having issues with all of the
nuns breaking out into meowing at certain hours of the day. Yes. Uh,
it actually got to a point in France that soldiers
were called to tamp down these meowing nuns. But you know,
(20:27):
cats were believed to be in league with Satan, and
so this that was a fear cats and Satan and
nuns and religion. You've got it all. Yeah, and uh,
this isn't just an isolated incident either. This is sited
in that British journalist Psychiatry Review. There were more than
one hundred books alone on these outbreaks in France, just
(20:50):
in France between sixteen thirty two and sixteen thirty four.
I mean talk about a mass hysteria, right, and I
mean speaking of nuns in the fifteenth century in Germany,
you have biting nuns and these this uh, this issue
of nuns who were biting each other and other people.
It's spread as far as Rome. This is before social
(21:11):
media people. This is in the fifteenth century. Yeah, and
it wasn't just me owing cats. You would also have
nuns who would bark like dogs, bleat like sheep. Apparently
there's a real old McDonald theme going on with these possessions.
But they would also in more extreme cases like rip
off their veils and gesticulate sex acts very un nunly
(21:33):
to make up a word kinds of things. Well, I
mean you have to think about also the context of
this context is very important and a lot of the
women who ended up as nuns, perhaps we're not sent
there willingly, a lot of these women were kind of
forced into it. And so, you know, thinking back to
how kind of cooky and wonky I felt during the
(21:54):
snow apocalypse here in Atlanta, being cooped up in my house,
you know, I can just imagine how it would feel
to be cooped up in a nunnery when you didn't
want to be a nun in the first place. Yeah,
that was like forty eight hours in your house with
with mass media at your I was barking within four hours.
But religion does have a pretty strong tie to these
(22:14):
hysterias as well, because you also see it happening among
groups of Quakers in Britain at certain times, and also
Quakers in America. Methodists in Britain had their own streaks
of mass hysteria. There was a czar cult in Ethiopia.
This this isn't just isolated to one region of the
world or one specific religion, especially during this early history
(22:39):
of mass hysteria. It is kind of breaking out all
over the place. And then again in we have the
Salem witch trials, right, and so this quote unquote, which
mania begins in December when eight girls living around Salem
started showing really strange behavior, including disordered speech, could, vulsive movements,
(23:00):
and bizarre contexts, certainly sounds like the stuff that we
see we've seen a couple of years ago throughout New York, Danvers, etcetera.
And explanations for their fits ranged from fakery to hysteria
to poisoning of the food supply. Soon after this, hundreds
of residents get accused of witchcraft and the trials start.
(23:21):
And this madness ended in May of s when the
governor ordered all suspects released. But we would be remiss
to skip over a huge portion of hysteria history. Do
you like how I just hysteria or just history? With
with two wise perfect dancing mania? Oh, the dancing mania,
(23:44):
I see, you know, a little part of me wishes.
I don't wish I had been alive in the fourteenth century,
But it would be cool to zoom back there for
a second, just to take part in one of these
dancing manias. Because long before we have the meowing nuns
in Salem, which trials way way back in thirteen seventy four,
we have the first reports of dancing mania. It sounds
(24:08):
like a wonderful activity, except that a lot of people died. Yeah,
these should not be confused with like dance marathons of
the twenties and thirties. Now that this was this was
a whole different thing happening in Europe that was thought
to be caused yet again by demonic possession. But I mean,
of course I thought it was demons because they didn't
really have much of much medical know how at the time, right,
(24:30):
And it's worth pointing out that the chronicles of thirteen
seventy four talk about all of these people dancing, but
it was men and women. This was not this was
not just women. Um you know, people were running around screaming,
calling on the mercy of God and the saints. But
there is a stress link. The thirteen seventy four dancing
(24:50):
mania outbreak occurred just after a devastating flood. But the
fascinating thing about this is that when a dancing mania
would stop in one part of the country, it would
spring up in another. It started to leap around different
parts of Europe. But again bringing up that stress factor.
(25:11):
Dancers were primarily found in the poorest classes of society,
and authorities were terrified seeing all these poor people out dancing,
I mean leaving their jobs. And also women dancing was
a giant panic for the powers to be at the
time too, because hey, who's gonna do the domestic duties
of the housewives are out dancing? Answer nobody, or maybe
(25:35):
babies or something like that. But they were they wanted
to stop these dance manias because they were scared that
it would spread to nobility and then there would be
just anarchy, I suppose. Yeah. Well, flash forward to the
fifteenth century and this stuff is still happening, and the
mania became known as St. Vitus's Dance, based on the
legend that St. Venus had been formally entrusted by God
(25:57):
to protect his followers from being affected. And they didn't
start declining until the sixteenth century. But you have the
Dancing Plague of fifteen eighteen, during which a woman a
woman began to dance fervently in the street in Strasbourg,
and within a week, thirty four others had joined her.
Within a month, the crowd grew to about four hundred.
(26:20):
So it's like the earliest and slowest flash mob, but
a dangerous slash mob at that, because a lot of
the people who participated in this eventually died from heart attack,
stroke or sheer exhaustion. Right again, we have to look
at the stress link here. The inhabitants of Strasbourg were
reeling from severe famine, uh and their morale had already
(26:43):
been chattered by bouts of syphilis, smallpox and the plague,
so they were dealing with quite a bit of scary
health issues. It was pretty strassful in strasbourg Um in Italy.
The to my son familiar to some people who have
heard of the term tarrantis um. And uh, this is
(27:05):
the thought that these dance manias were caused by the
venom from some kind of spider, particularly the tarantula, hence
tarrantis um. But there has been no scientific proof that
spider bites will cause you to form a very slow
moving and dangerous flash mob. Yeah. I was bitten by
(27:26):
a spider like two years ago. I had a really
bad spider bite and I still can't dance, so it
clearly did not instill me with any dancing superpowers like
anti tarrantis um. Yeah, I'm just really like slow and uncoordinated.
Oh well, but you know, the dancing mania became a
thing again in eighteen sixty three and matag Gascar there
(27:48):
was collective dancing in hysteria after the reign of a
particular queen on rumors of her comeback. She was so
awful that an entire group of people just started freaking
out and experiencing mass hysteria. Then hop skip over to
Japan in eighteen sixty seven, you have this period of
chaotic singing and dancing among the Japanese people in response
(28:11):
to a lot of uprisings and economic crises that were
happening at the time. And I think, what's interesting as
you move into in the West, as you move into
the Industrial Revolution, and you have all of these people
sitting in factories all day, factories and mills, you start
to get these outbreaks of mass hysteria because I mean,
these people are cooped up in horrible conditions for a
(28:33):
ridiculous number of hours each day, and so you start
to get reports of things happening in mills and factories.
But also at this time, you you're getting the establishment
of like general hospitals and other institutions in Europe to
basically take care of I don't know, the undesirable element.
And so all of a sudden you have people being
(28:54):
institutionalized for their strange behavior, and then it just breaks
out all over again. It becomes the cycle. Yeah. And
speaking of the Industrial Revolution, it's notable that, as reported
in the book Mass Psychogenic Illness, a Social Psychological Analysis
A real nice bedtime read f y I uh, they
talked about how the very first modern reported outbreak at
(29:18):
a cotton mill happens in seven which took place right
after the invention of the power loom, which revolutionized the
textile industry. It really increased the speed of production. And yeah,
even more you have with all these machines being developed,
that factory work of just menial, repetitive labor happening in
(29:43):
people in confined areas. I mean, it's prime territory for
some kind of macessary to break out. Yeah, but also
so many social changes, women leaving the homes and going
to work, you know, being in mills and stuff. You know,
it's just as the world change is around you. That
can that can induce a lot of stress. Well, speaking
(30:04):
of women, Caroline, we have to dig into this gender
link that always comes up with mass hysteria because there
is a lot to talk about there because I'm not
I'm not entirely buying the fact that this disproportionately affects women,
even though I know I should. So let's get into
that when we come right back from a quick break
(30:26):
and now back to the show. So what about the
women then, because, like we said at the top of
the podcast, a lot of people like Robert Bartholome, you
who's an expert in this, always brings up gender, and
you know, in the dance manias that was a co
ed phenomenon, but today it's often framed as something that
(30:47):
happens almost exclusively to high school girls. And even we
have not pointed out the fact that as some listeners,
some gold Star Sminty listeners might recall that the derivation
of hysteria is directly related to women, right as it
refers to our crazy wandering wombs and they just wander
all over the place. Yeah, because if you don't put
(31:09):
a baby in it, right, then it's going to leave
you and make you do crazy things like I don't know,
I want to have sex or dance in the streets. Apparently. Well,
what you need is, you know how when you buy
a balloon at the grocery store, they give you those
little weights to tie the You need one of those
for your uterus womb weights. Perfect, we're gonna we're gonna
make a million dollars, that's right. Well, so anyway, another
(31:31):
hysteria expert, John Waller, who wrote A Time to Dance,
A Time to Die, The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing
Plague of fifteen eighteen, wrote that women and girls are
nearly always overrepresented among these outbreaks, and it is that
gender a balance that's often to give away that the
epidemic is not organic, that it's not actual food poisoning,
that it's not actual you know, chemical spills or whatever.
(31:54):
And you know, we've been talking about theories, and Waller
points out that in more missaw genistic times this was
put down to us having more fragile nerves or you know,
our wounds floating all over the place. Um, and while
there may be some type of biological component or something
in our brains doing something weird. Some people have put
(32:15):
forward the theory that women are more likely to succumb
because of the frustrations of living in patriarchal cultures, living
in families and societies dominated by men, and going off
of that theory, some even argue that hysteria offers distressed
women a legitimate reason to quote unquote check out for
(32:37):
a while, just dance their troubles away. Yeah, although if
you watch interviews, for instance, with those girls more recently
affected by this, they are not checked out. It seems
incredibly painful and disrupted to the point they had to
leave school for a while. Right, But you know, there
(32:58):
was a huge that was that at Lant piece, and
there was a huge New York Times piece about these
young women who were going through that, and they point
out that almost to the to a woman, these young
girls had experienced something awful in their lives when it
came to their parental situation. A lot of them had
missing her absent fathers. Um. You know, there was one
(33:19):
girl who her father was completely out of her life
until she basically was on the news with this condition
and then he came back. Um. And in the New
York Times piece, you could tell that the writer uh
was was trying to hint at that and her interviews
with these young women, and that they were like no, no,
no, no no no, because more than anything, these young women
or young people in general who were experiencing this want
(33:41):
to think that they're not crazy. They want to think
that there is a better, more logical reason for what
they were going through, the scary, scary thing that they're
going through, other than just suggestibility, right, I mean. Uh.
The issue of psychological trauma too, that might have been
repressed over the years also came up in the case
(34:01):
of the older woman highlighted in the Atlantic piece who
was not a high school or the one we talked
about who you know might have been exposed via Facebook. Um.
She had been raped UM as a girl and never
talked about it at all, and then all of a sudden,
we have this psychogenic illness come up. And that came
(34:25):
out in her therapy for this case, and and she
feels like this was it kind of unleashed all of
that repression, right. And one of the physicians interviewed in
The New York Times talked about how her approach to
these girls was so delicate because you had you couldn't
just write off their health scares, their frustrations. So she
did test for things like the thyroid, all sorts of
(34:48):
different possible health conditions. And then she said, you know what,
but just just to be on the safe side, you
know you're going this is such a stressful thing that
you're going through. Why don't we go ahead and set
you over the counselor a therapy and you can just
include you know, mental health as part of your regiment.
And she explained that the girls who were talking to
someone seeking actual mental health counseling, we're seeing improvements. So
(35:12):
it sounds like over time these symptoms just kind of
fade away. They do tend to like. That was one
of the things that was in those two long form
articles about this this issue is that eventually they do
kind of just disappear there there. They tend to be
kind of self propagating, you know, with social media, with
(35:33):
things like social media, and with that that hyper focus
on something's wrong with me. Oh God, something's going awful
with my health or my brain or something. And it
seems like that focus on mental health was definitely helping. Yeah.
One thing though that left me wanting with all of
these all of this reading on massess area is that
(35:57):
there was still no real are scientific evidence suggesting that
this is something that affects women more, you know what
I mean, because Bartholomew has said that, well, it might
be an issue of observer bias and methodological fault flaws.
Maybe we just hear more about this happening two girls. Um,
(36:17):
it could be more likely that women emote outwardly whereas
men tend to emote inwardly. Um. And also in that
British Journal of Psychiatry Literature review, it mentions that it's
often linked to gender, but then there's no follow up.
It doesn't offer any conclusive proof. I mean, there There
(36:38):
is that theory though about mirror neurons um which essentially
is that mirror neurons are like you and I are
probably are mirror neurons are probably firing a lot right
now because we're sitting across from each other, we're having
this conversation and we are now gesturing, which if people
could see us heard out gesturing in tandem to each other.
And and those are the neurons in our brain, and
(37:00):
very elementary sort of way, it's what helps us interact
with people and sort of pick up on tone, and
a lot of times they tend to be more active
in female brains. And so there's one theory that was
published in the journal aptly called Medical Hypotheses that perhaps
(37:20):
the uh, these kinds of hysterias affect women more be
due to higher activity of our motor cortex and mirror neurons,
or that whole stereotype about women and empathy. Yes, exactly exactly,
and that would offer some kind of neurological explanation. But
again that's still just a hypothesis, right because it's not
(37:44):
like this doesn't happen two men. It does happen to men.
And I was wondering as I was going through all
this stuff, I was wondering, Okay, so I I get it, Okay,
women are overrepresented and all this stuff that's been proven whatever,
But does it ever happen just to men? And oh
boy does it? And it's called cora. Uh. It's a
(38:06):
phenomenon experienced by men, typically in Asia. Uh. Thousands of
men in Southeast Asia and China in times of economic uncertainty,
have been known to believe that their penises are shrinking
into their bodies and that death will ensue if they
become fully retracted. Yeah, and um, the last time coro
seemed to flare up in China was in so it's
(38:28):
been a little while, but there was this widespread fear
that a fox spirit that roams the land was in
search of male victims. And there's a similar kind of
penis shrinking panic that has also broken out among men
in Sub Saharan Africa. So similar to these you know,
dance manias that spread around different cultures, this is also
(38:52):
seems to be some kind of cross cultural phenomenon. And
if you want to a Western context for this, there
was a report in nine teen eight of this happening
among just male military recruits at a California Army barrack
um after there was some people were experiencing breathing problems
(39:12):
from some strange odor that was spreading, and so panic
and sues. All these guys are laid out with all
sorts of horrifying symptoms of mass hysteria like event happening.
And it turns out that the strange odor was simply
a brush fire, but it was the same kind of
power of suggestion, no cebo effect susceptibility. Guys are vulnerable
(39:38):
to it too, clearly because if you already have a
pre existing fear or concern, if it gets into your
head that's something awful and poisonous or you know, something
that's risking your health is happening, it's easy to believe
like oh oh no, oh yeah, do you ever does
this ever happen to you? Where if you smell gas
in your house is seven? To me? A couple of
times I immediately start like mentally symptom checking of like
(40:00):
am I breathing? Okay? Am I sleepy? Am I I
need to get out right? Yeah? Absolutely well. When I
worked at a newspaper um the printing the giant printing
press was in the same building, and so knowing that
that his tanny particles of ink were traveling through the
air towards me in the news room, I mean, I
you know, I would start to feel really congested, although
that probably I probably really was congested because ink was
(40:21):
in my nose? Were you? Were you that person wearing
the face mask at all times? I still do all
the time. I actually try to wear like a scuba
mask at all time. I finally banned the face mask
for the podcast studio because it was just that that
dude creepy. That's too bad. Um. But one thing, you know,
we haven't um mentioned like the types of girls that
(40:42):
this tends to happen to when it does affect solely
girls at high schools. One uh, one piece of information
when tidbit that was pointed out in the New York
Times is that cheerleaders frequently come up in these case
histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because these outbreaks,
(41:02):
these particular types of outbreaks tend to start with someone
of high social status. And so in reading that New
York Times article, you know they're the writer is interviewing
these two girls at the same time. In one of
the girl's rooms and talking about how she even noticed
that they as they were talking, they were mirroring each
other's behavior, and one set our stomach hurt, and then
(41:24):
ten minutes later the other set or stomach hurt. And
so there's this whole idea of like the issue of popularity,
of admiring someone above you on the social you know,
hierarchy or whatever, and then kind of falling prey to
what they say they're experiencing. Absolutely. And then there, of course,
are all these questions of, well, are these young women
(41:44):
simply faking it so that they can also get on
the Today Show or whatever media outlet it might be.
And so then with all these reports of young women
being affected and that it seems to just be like
a popularity thing and all these girls maybe faking it
or maybe they're not, then you have some theories about
out girls adolescence in particular being pathologized. Yeah. So, Caitlin Flanagan,
(42:07):
as she often does, who is more of a conservative
commentator about especially girls and also women, She wrote an
op at piece in The New York Times in response
to all of these reports of hysteria breaking out and
essentially said in a rather flip kind of way. Hey, everybody, look,
(42:28):
this is simply good old fashioned Freudian hysteria breaking out
because in a nutshell, teenage female adolescence is a time
of emotional upheaval and panic, and girls tend to, like
I said earlier, emote outward, and so stop trying to
explain it away, and can we just say that this
(42:48):
is this is just girls being girls? Yeah, exactly. She
almost seemed frustrated that people were trying to come up
with reasons for it or even show that it can
happen to boys and men too, you know. She was like, oh, sorry, guys,
I know it's not empowering for you, but you just
have to deal with it. Yeah. And her her solution
for these kinds of instances was that girls simply need
(43:11):
more protection, right, And she wrote a book along those
lines too, that we need to keep our girls safe
and during this turbulent time of adolescence, we need to,
you know, make sure they have quiet, safe spaces at
the home in which to be basically crazy. Banshees is
the word she is. Yeah, And here's the thing, I
don't doubt the issue of susceptibility. And I mean there
(43:34):
was there was one article ever get which one it was,
but talked about how some neurologists were watching one of
these reports from the bbc UH and it was showing
a teenage girl who was affected, who had a physical
tick that magically seemed to stop when she started to
put on eyeliner and it just switched to the other hand,
(43:55):
and the doctor's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That doesn't that
does not happen, That would not happen normally in your brain.
This really can't be what's going on. Or in the
case of one girl had a tick, if a doctor
squeezed the tremoring hand, the tremor would then suddenly moved
to the other side of her body, and they're like,
that's really not the way these kinds of things usually work.
(44:17):
So sure there is you can't deny the power of
suggestion with this, but uh, I, personally, to editorialize myself,
did not really appreciate Flannagan's assumptions about how this is
just every girl's you know, basically, that every young girl
(44:38):
is crazy and that yeah, it's like, yeah, she's I
think she's falling back on some very dated stereotypes about
you know, women needing to be quiet and be in
the home and recover from all of the stress that
is life. Yeah, and and of course there are plenty
of rebuttals, such as Isha Panda over a feminist NG
(44:59):
who was like whoa woa woa quick pathologizing young girls.
You know, stop painting us as fragile things that need
to just be hidden away during our teen years, because
didn't we learn anything from the me owing nuns? If
you send if you send girls away to a convent,
you might have some problems there too. Nothing I'm joking completely,
(45:22):
I'm nothing against nuns at all, but you know what
I mean, like the uh trying to repress. A lot
of this tends to result out of repression and is
often relieved by expression. But I will be curious to
see if Bartholemy's prediction of these being these incidents as
(45:42):
being on the rise via social media really plays out,
because I mean, he says that there's been a massive
up surge, but we still hear about them happening kind
of few and far between. Um. But I'm wondering in
the next like twenty years, are we going to have
(46:02):
more cases of this breaking out or are we simply
going to grow more skeptical. I I don't know. That
was a good questions. Yeah, and those are questions for
our listeners. What what do you think about this? Have
you heard of these mass hysterias? Are you from Danvers?
Are you has this ever happened to you? Um, let
us know your thoughts about this. Mom Stuff at discovery
(46:23):
dot com is where you can send us an email.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
send us a message over on Facebook. And this was
a little bit of a different kind of topic for
us to cover, but such a rich history to dig into.
And yeah, dancing mania, Caroline, if you could go back
in time to a fourteenth century dancing mania, would you
(46:44):
do it? I have no rhythm and I love sitting,
so I might dance for a little while, uh, in
a herky jerky fashion, and then you know, I don't know,
go eat some some gruel. That sounds awful. Yeah, well,
so to the fourteenth century. Well send us your thoughts,
moms A. Discovery dot com is our email address, and
(47:07):
we have a couple of letters to share with you
right now. We've got a couple of letters here about
our episode Fictional Attraction, all about shipping, and one true
pairing and paras social relationships. And this one is coming
from Eliza, who's in the subject line is my dear
(47:29):
friends from the Office. She writes, The American Office immediately
comes to mind when I think about strong fictional relationships
in my life. I started watching the show in high
school in formed many of my closest friendships in college
because of it. I even had an Office themed birthday
party the first two weeks away from home freshman year.
Side note, I dressed up like paying them. Like most fans,
(47:49):
I fell in love with Jim and Pan's relationship instantly
and often looked to their connection as a model for
what I wanted in a partner. But it wasn't just
their love story that I fell for. It was the
entire cast. I started to feel like they were another
group of friends that I could visit any time I
wanted on Netflix or Hulu. There were two occasions that
The Office broke my heart. The first was when Michael
(48:10):
Scott played by Steve Carrell left the show, and the
second was a series finale. I really don't mean to
sound crazy, because I'm an emotionally sound person, but I
was pretty much a wreck when it ended. It marked
the end of a life chapter. I realized I grew
into an adult over nine seasons. When it was over,
I reflected on what the show had given me. After
the serious finale aired, I wrote the cast a letter,
(48:31):
and I was never planning on sending it. It was
really just for myself, but I deeply wish that somehow
I could tell Jim, Michael, Dwight, Pam and the rest
of my office friends a genuine thank you and goodbye.
I think that's kind of sweet. Well, I have a
letter here from Elizabeth about one True Pairings as a
coping strategy. Uh. She says, a few months ago, I
(48:54):
would have been in your situation of not knowing the
terms O T P and shipping. I love the TV
show Sherlock, done by the BBC. The only problem with
Sherlock is that it's a two year gap between seasons,
and each season is only three episodes long. Therefore, fans
have to find a way to stay interested, yet saying
during this long hiatus. Fan fiction is a huge portion
(49:14):
of this coping strategy. A lot of fan fic focuses
on a relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, usually
shortened to John Lock. I read John Lock fiction quite
a bit, and it keeps me interested in the show
and the characters, while allowing me to explore situations they're
not in the actual show. I love it. It has
also had the benefit of making me calm down a
little about sexual situations. I was sexually abused for several
(49:36):
years and still have panic attacks if such situations come
up again. Reading fan fic about sexual relationships that are
healthy has helped me heal a little bit, for which
I am extremely grateful, So thank you very much, Elizabeth.
And yeah, speaking of Sherlock, I have a feeling a
lot of listeners have para social relationships with Benedict Cumberbatch.
Even though, oh my god, I'm gonna get so much
(49:58):
hate mail for this. I think he is so weird looking.
He looks like an order. Yeah. I never seen utters
who look like Benedict Cumberbatch. It's like the best tumbler.
When I heard that he was going to be on
Sesame Street, I was like, that's appropriate. He looks like
a muppet. Well, I'm sure that has sparked plenty of
listener thoughts, So send us your letters. Mom stub Discovery
dot com is our email address, or if you'd like
(50:20):
to connect to us elsewhere on social or find old podcast,
blog posts and all of our videos, there's one place
to go. It's your one stop sminty shop. Stuff Mom
Never Told You dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics, Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never told You from how stupports
dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Caroline
and I'm Kristen, and today we are covering a topic
that personally I thought was a relic of a bygone era,
something that we didn't quite have to worry about anymore,
(00:24):
because it was something that only happened to women in
ancient or old cultures. And that is mass hysteria. And
it is by far not a relic of a bygone era.
Mass hysteria also goes by names such as, wait for it,
mass psychogenic illness, mass sociogenic illness, collective hysteria, and conversion disorder.
(00:46):
And I came across some blogs recently talking about this
topic because in the last decade, not only has it
popped up in the news a lot, but it is
popped up in the news because it is happening it
seems solely to teenage girls at school. Well, let's talk
a little bit about anecdotally what mass hysteria is, because
(01:08):
when you first alerted me to this topic, Caroline, I
had no clue what you were talking about. I received
an email saying, hey, we should do something on mass hysteria.
And I just stared blankly at my scream for a moment.
But once I started reading about it and watching interviews
with these girls affected by these cases of so called
(01:32):
mass hysteria, I was captivated because what it looks like
when interviewers are talking to these girls. There's a segment,
for instance, of girls on Doctor Drew talking about this,
this esteemed show, television show, Doctor Drew. It looks like
these girls have something akin to Tourette's syndrome. Yes, absolutely,
(01:55):
a lot of these girls across across cases. What you know,
wherever this has happened, these girls tend to experience ticks, uh, shouting, shaking,
all of this kind of stuff that, yeah, you would
associate typically with Tourette's. And it ends up. What ends
up happening in a lot of these cases is health professionals,
(02:16):
the media like people flood these towns. You know. Aaron
Brockovich went to one school where this was happening and
wanted to test the soil. She was concerned that a
train derailment several decades before was leading to some strange
health condition. And basically what was found uh in that
(02:36):
particular case in New York and several others is just
that No, this isn't an organic environmental toxin that's causing this.
It seems to be something that is much more in
the brain. Now, this might be ringing bells for people
due to that upstate New York case. This was a
situation what happened at place called Leroy High School where
(02:59):
thirteen girls and one boy started experiencing twitching, clapping, and
shouting ticks. And I remember seeing one of the interviews
with a girl who had a bruise on her face
because her ticks were so violent that her her cheek
was slamming into her shoulder and actually bruising her. And yeah,
(03:22):
and they and they looked high and low for some
kind of toxin, some kind of environmental explanation. And there
was actually a study published in the New England Journal
of Medicine saying we could not find anything. And they
poured a ton of money into looking for reasons why,
Like the state came out and said, hey, we've we've
(03:44):
put six figures into this case. Nothing we got nothing. Yeah,
And so basically mass hysteria or or these other common
terms for it is used to describe the situation in
which several people suffer from similar hysterical symptoms, either from
a fan into illness or an inexplicable event. And actually
it happens way more often than I thought. Dr Mark Hallett,
(04:07):
who's with the National Institutes of Health, said that on
average they get reports of to such cases a week
a week, Yeah, and a lot of In fact, half
of these mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools. And there
is a highly gendered aspect to this, which is why
we're talking about it on the podcast, because it's far
(04:29):
more common among young women than any other demographic group. Yeah,
and I mean yes, there are outliers for for sure.
Usually it'll happen among a group of young women out
of school. But as you know, we'll get into this
thanks to news coverage, social media coverage, other people can
quote unquote catch it if they're kind of keeping up
(04:51):
with this story. But talking specifically about the gender link. Uh.
Robert Bartholomy, who's sort of like the leading name in
the field of mass hysteria. UH. He's a sociologist in
New Zealand who's been studying cases of mass hysteria for
more than twenty years, said that typically masssteria is confined
to a group of girls or young women who share
a common physical space for a majority of the time.
(05:14):
So young women in schools getting this mass hysteria. It
all makes sense according to Bartholomew. And this guy should know.
He has studied more than six hundred cases dating back
to fifteen sixties six and he said, listen, the gender link,
it's undeniable. It's just a question of why. And we'll
dig into possible wise for that later in the podcast. Um,
(05:36):
but one thing that Bartholomew has said is that there
has been a quote sudden upsurge in cases of mass hysteria.
And there was an article in The Atlantic that came
out in September of two talking to Bartholomew and covering
cases including Leroy and one standout individual in that case
because which was this older woman in the community who
(05:58):
was not affiliated with high school at all, who also
developed these ticks. And Bartholomy thinks that it has to
do with the social media influence. Basically, she heard about
this incident going on among these high schoolers via Facebook,
and then all of a sudden she starts experiencing debilitating
(06:20):
ticks as well, to the point that she had to
take medical leave from work, right, exactly. Well, so let's
let's give just a brief rundown of some other episodes
of mass hysteria that have popped up in the news.
In there was an outbreak of illness at a Tennessee school.
More than one seventies students, teachers, and others sought emergency treatment.
But after investigating, you know, investigators found no virus, no toxins,
(06:45):
no actual illnesses, and they dubbed it mass hysteria. Similarly,
in two thousand two, there were ten teenage girls at
a small rural North Carolina high school that had epileptic
like seizures and fainting after the buildings were in expected.
Nothing was found to explain the outbreak. But then if
you look at the mid two thousand's onward, you do
(07:06):
see a distinct uptick in these cases, which Robert Bartholomy
would probably correlate to the rise in social media. Perhaps.
For instance, in two thousand and six alone, there was
a case in Portugal where, um, there were more than
three hundred students at fourteen different schools that reported that
seems kind of odd. They reported feeling symptoms similar to
(07:27):
those experienced by characters on a popular youth soap opera,
and eventually it forced some of those schools to temporarily
closed to try to take care of this problem. And
I'm now thinking of what would have happened if if
we had started just acting like characters on Dawson's Creek
or something. Oh lord, I don't know, we just would
(07:48):
have been really angsty. Yeah, well, I was already there.
I was about to say, yeah, my diary was full. Um. Also,
in two thousand and six, at this really strict boarding
school in Mexico, six grid out of thirty six hundred
girls ages twelve to seventeen showed strange symptoms such as
trouble walking, fever, and nausea. And the following year, at
(08:09):
least eight girls at a Roanoke, Virginia high school developed
strange twitching symptoms and the school district ended up spending
tens of thousands of dollars to investigate, but again no
environmental cause. Tanzania is another place where you hear about
these uh mass hysteria epidemics breaking out a lot. In
two thousand and eight, for instance, again you have a
(08:29):
group of twenty girls at a school who all of
a sudden lose consciousness while others are sobbing, yelling and
running around the school. And I think it's also in
Tanzania where there have been incidences of laughing epidemics. And
there's a YouTube video about this. And even though it's
called an epidemic, it's kind of cute because a lot
(08:51):
of the footage is really just school children, like groups
of Tanzanian school children laughing hysterically. You're like, oh, what's
so bad about that? Yeah, our office could use a
little laughing epidemic, and except it doesn't stop. Yeah, it's true. Uh. Well,
in January, one of the more recent episodes, there were
about two dozen teenagers at a school in Danvers, Massachusetts
(09:15):
who began having mysterious hiccups and vocal ticks. What's interesting
about Danvers. Danvers used to be Salem scene of the
Salem witch trials, which were also considered to be a
form of moral mass hysteria or a moral panic. Yeah,
and today some researchers think that the so called demonic
(09:39):
signs that the girls involved with the Salem witchcraft trials
were exhibiting were maybe the same kinds of psychological issues
that these girls at Essex, agricultural and Technical School in
Danvers today also exhibiting interesting, very interesting. So what is
the it's what is going on? How does this work? Well,
(10:04):
a couple different things can happen, and one of those
is that there can be an actual physical detectable trigger
like a bad smell or a rumor of exposure to
a poison. And so basically, if one person gets sick,
others in the group also start feeling sick. And sure,
the first person to get sick might have actually had
a real illness, they could have had food poisoning. Maybe
(10:25):
they just felt nauseated. But then this power of suggestibility
comes into play where other people are like, oh, well,
I might I feel kind of light headed and nauseated too.
I don't know what's going on. Um. And so yeah,
as you get things like bad smells convincing people that
they actually are possibly being poisoned. Um. It could also
(10:46):
start with conversion disorder. And so conversion disorder and mass
hysteria are not exactly synonymous, but you have conversion disorder
when psychological stress stressors like trauma or anxiety manifest physically.
And when this happens, it's basically a mental health condition
in which a person can experience things like blindness, paralysis,
(11:06):
or other neurologic symptoms that cannot easily be explained away
by a simple, simple medical test. It's not like you
can go get a blood test and they're like, oh, well,
you're experiencing conversion order disorder. Usually a whole slew of
things have to be ruled out before they hit on
conversion disorder, and the symptoms usually begin suddenly after a
(11:26):
stressful experience, and people who are at risk for conversion
disorders UH usually have a mental illness or some other
mental health problem or dissociative disorder in which they are
not able to manage their feelings or their emotions very well.
And when a conversion disorder becomes contagious, that's when you
have the development of what we think of as the
(11:49):
mass psychogenic illness or the mass hysteria. And one term
that pops up a lot too is something called the
no cebo effect. So essentially that's the opposite of the
placebo effect, Like if you take a sugar pill thinking
that it will have positive effects on you, and so
you all of a sudden start to feel better. The
(12:11):
no cebo effect is when, say, you smell something strange,
and you don't know what it is, but you just
assume it's terrible, and all of a sudden, you start
exhibiting all of these horrible symptoms when come to find
out it was maybe just a pickle gone bad in
the fridge or something. Now, I mean, when I started
(12:32):
thinking about it, I mean this Obviously, I've never been
part of mass hysteria myself, Kristen, but I feel like
this has happened to me where someone else is like, oh,
something smells bad. I don't feel good, and I'm like,
oh maybe, Oh no, I'm starting to feel dizzy. The
power of suggestibility, man, it is strong. Oh yeah. I
mean this is one thing too that that started happening
(12:52):
a lot more after the two thousand and eleven Twin
Towers attack and the rise of the anthrax threats. All
of a sudden, you have a lot of people calling
and complaining of symptoms that are similar to anthrax poisoning,
claiming that they had received mail with anthrax in it.
(13:14):
And I mean, essentially we're kind of making up a
lot of this stuff in our mind due to fear
and panic. Almost anytime you have an outbreak of mass hysteria,
there's some kind of real world trigger, whether it's economic
upheaval or rigid gender roles to an extreme extent, or
just generally stressful factors like exam time, for instance, Is
(13:37):
a lot is a big time when this breaks out
in schools. Yeah, I mean, I would say, as the
non scientist that I am. I mean, I would say
that stress seems to play a huge role in this.
And you know, I I think it's not uncommon to,
even if it's just on an individual level, feel some
sort of psycho somatic illness when you are feel stressed,
(14:00):
whether it is exams or in the case of Tanzania,
whether it's some like huge cultural rift going on. And
you know, Kristen did mention that there are a lot
of reports of mass hysteria of various forms breaking out
in Tanzania, and one of the first was in nineteen
sixty two. It was a laughing epidemic and it lasted
nearly eighteen months, and locals blamed angry ancestors. But you
(14:23):
have to look at the context. During the nineteen sixties,
there were a lot of Western missionary schools that were opening,
and they were notorious for trying to do away with
these students cultural heritage focusing on Western and Christian religious
and cultural practices. And so these students, these young girls
(14:44):
are experiencing this inner struggle because their families believe one thing,
and they always have believed one thing. But then you
have these people coming in teaching them different religions, different practices,
and so there is this conflict that happens. And so
it's around this time that the first of several laughing
epidemics start taking place in Tanzania. Yeah, and when you
(15:04):
look into different anthropological explanations for mass hysteria, gender does
come up a lot, especially in more developing nations, because
they link the mass hysteria to patriarchal societies. For instance,
um this idea that women are inherently suggestible, and in
cases where something like the Salem witch trials where their
(15:27):
assumptions of demonic possession and witchcraft, which those kinds of
scenarios are still happening around the world today, a lot
of times women in those societies are considered more susceptible
to possession because of their social submissiveness. So it's like they're, um,
you know, they're almost literally more more open to it.
(15:49):
They aren't going to be as resistant to so called
demonic possessions. So you see them exhibiting these signs more often,
but in more of Western context, say in the case
of the Danverse High School, where it's going to get
a lot of media attention. One thing that the American
Family Physician points out in terms of the contagious factor
(16:13):
of mass hysteria is how when it happens, it can
become almost exponentially contagious because all of a sudden, you
have reporters everywhere. You have now again, the social media
effect of people tweeting about it is probably flooding your Facebook.
You're getting emails about it. It's it's almost like you
become surrounded by this hysteria, right, And it's it's not
(16:37):
exactly imagined. While it might not be an actual disease
and actual sickness, it's not just in your brain. And
yet it is in your brain. Um, these people who
are experiencing mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, they do
have headaches, or they do actually feel dizzy or nauseated.
It's just that it's not caused by germs or poison
(16:57):
or anything like that. In the New York Times, bawelve
looking at this topic talked about how the illness might
have something to do with the amygdala, which is where
kind of your startle responses start in your brain. Yeah,
the amygdala has actually been shown to be overactive in
patients with conversion disorder. And The New York Times interviewed
(17:19):
Mark Hallett, who we started earlier. He's the senior investigator
at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke and
he says that quote, ordinarily the amygdala might create psychological distress,
but instead, in these cases, it would create an involuntary movement,
talking about those ticks that you see sometimes exhibited in
the high school girls affected by this. But one comparison
(17:42):
to that comes up a lot in explanations of mass
hysteria is it's just like a really exaggerated form of
stage fright, right where all of a sudden, and I've
experienced this to a horrible extent, where yes, your stomach
is in not all of a sudden, you have to
go to the bathroom like twenty five times for no
(18:04):
good reason. Your palms are sweating. I mean, there's a
physical discomfort that comes with that kind of psychological anxiety. Sure. Well,
what's also interesting to look at, and researchers have pointed
this out, is that the things that we are afraid
of or the things that we're concerned about when we
experience mass hysteria have changed with society. This is coming
(18:28):
from a two thousand to British Journal of Psychiatry review
of literature on mass hysteria, and they found that this
mass sociogenic illness mirrors prominent social concerns. So, before nine
we have reports that are dominated by episodes of motor symptoms,
typically dissociation psychomotor agitation in an environment of pre existing tension.
(18:53):
But twentieth century reports feature anxiety symptoms triggered by sudden
exposure to an anxiety generating age like a like a
bad smell, or food poisoning rumors because we're moving into
the era of the bomb things like that. Yeah, and
then from the early eighties to present day we see
that increasing presence of chemical and biological terrorism themes, people
(19:17):
being scared that they are being poisoned by some kind
of terroristic agent. And yeah, as I brought up September
eleventh a few minutes ago, that has definitely triggered a
peak in these kinds of reports. Right, But it's I mean,
it's interesting to see. And when you look at the
history of mass hysteria, you know, when you talk about
(19:40):
women being possessed or nuns being possessed by evil things,
they end up being possessed by things that people are
afraid of at the time, like cats. Like cats. Okay,
let's go ahead and talk about the meowing nuns because
this was one of my favorite aspects of this research
and this might ring a bell to uh, some listeners
(20:02):
who have read about this. There were cases in the
Middle Ages of nunneries having issues with all of the
nuns breaking out into meowing at certain hours of the day. Yes. Uh,
it actually got to a point in France that soldiers
were called to tamp down these meowing nuns. But you know,
(20:27):
cats were believed to be in league with Satan, and
so this that was a fear cats and Satan and
nuns and religion. You've got it all. Yeah, and uh,
this isn't just an isolated incident either. This is sited
in that British journalist Psychiatry Review. There were more than
one hundred books alone on these outbreaks in France, just
(20:50):
in France between sixteen thirty two and sixteen thirty four.
I mean talk about a mass hysteria, right, and I
mean speaking of nuns in the fifteenth century in Germany,
you have biting nuns and these this uh, this issue
of nuns who were biting each other and other people.
It's spread as far as Rome. This is before social
(21:11):
media people. This is in the fifteenth century. Yeah, and
it wasn't just me owing cats. You would also have
nuns who would bark like dogs, bleat like sheep. Apparently
there's a real old McDonald theme going on with these possessions.
But they would also in more extreme cases like rip
off their veils and gesticulate sex acts very un nunly
(21:33):
to make up a word kinds of things. Well, I
mean you have to think about also the context of
this context is very important and a lot of the
women who ended up as nuns, perhaps we're not sent
there willingly, a lot of these women were kind of
forced into it. And so, you know, thinking back to
how kind of cooky and wonky I felt during the
(21:54):
snow apocalypse here in Atlanta, being cooped up in my house,
you know, I can just imagine how it would feel
to be cooped up in a nunnery when you didn't
want to be a nun in the first place. Yeah,
that was like forty eight hours in your house with
with mass media at your I was barking within four hours.
But religion does have a pretty strong tie to these
(22:14):
hysterias as well, because you also see it happening among
groups of Quakers in Britain at certain times, and also
Quakers in America. Methodists in Britain had their own streaks
of mass hysteria. There was a czar cult in Ethiopia.
This this isn't just isolated to one region of the
world or one specific religion, especially during this early history
(22:39):
of mass hysteria. It is kind of breaking out all
over the place. And then again in we have the
Salem witch trials, right, and so this quote unquote, which
mania begins in December when eight girls living around Salem
started showing really strange behavior, including disordered speech, could, vulsive movements,
(23:00):
and bizarre contexts, certainly sounds like the stuff that we
see we've seen a couple of years ago throughout New York, Danvers, etcetera.
And explanations for their fits ranged from fakery to hysteria
to poisoning of the food supply. Soon after this, hundreds
of residents get accused of witchcraft and the trials start.
(23:21):
And this madness ended in May of s when the
governor ordered all suspects released. But we would be remiss
to skip over a huge portion of hysteria history. Do
you like how I just hysteria or just history? With
with two wise perfect dancing mania? Oh, the dancing mania,
(23:44):
I see, you know, a little part of me wishes.
I don't wish I had been alive in the fourteenth century,
But it would be cool to zoom back there for
a second, just to take part in one of these
dancing manias. Because long before we have the meowing nuns
in Salem, which trials way way back in thirteen seventy four,
we have the first reports of dancing mania. It sounds
(24:08):
like a wonderful activity, except that a lot of people died. Yeah,
these should not be confused with like dance marathons of
the twenties and thirties. Now that this was this was
a whole different thing happening in Europe that was thought
to be caused yet again by demonic possession. But I mean,
of course I thought it was demons because they didn't
really have much of much medical know how at the time, right,
(24:30):
And it's worth pointing out that the chronicles of thirteen
seventy four talk about all of these people dancing, but
it was men and women. This was not this was
not just women. Um you know, people were running around screaming,
calling on the mercy of God and the saints. But
there is a stress link. The thirteen seventy four dancing
(24:50):
mania outbreak occurred just after a devastating flood. But the
fascinating thing about this is that when a dancing mania
would stop in one part of the country, it would
spring up in another. It started to leap around different
parts of Europe. But again bringing up that stress factor.
(25:11):
Dancers were primarily found in the poorest classes of society,
and authorities were terrified seeing all these poor people out dancing,
I mean leaving their jobs. And also women dancing was
a giant panic for the powers to be at the
time too, because hey, who's gonna do the domestic duties
of the housewives are out dancing? Answer nobody, or maybe
(25:35):
babies or something like that. But they were they wanted
to stop these dance manias because they were scared that
it would spread to nobility and then there would be
just anarchy, I suppose. Yeah. Well, flash forward to the
fifteenth century and this stuff is still happening, and the
mania became known as St. Vitus's Dance, based on the
legend that St. Venus had been formally entrusted by God
(25:57):
to protect his followers from being affected. And they didn't
start declining until the sixteenth century. But you have the
Dancing Plague of fifteen eighteen, during which a woman a
woman began to dance fervently in the street in Strasbourg,
and within a week, thirty four others had joined her.
Within a month, the crowd grew to about four hundred.
(26:20):
So it's like the earliest and slowest flash mob, but
a dangerous slash mob at that, because a lot of
the people who participated in this eventually died from heart attack,
stroke or sheer exhaustion. Right again, we have to look
at the stress link here. The inhabitants of Strasbourg were
reeling from severe famine, uh and their morale had already
(26:43):
been chattered by bouts of syphilis, smallpox and the plague,
so they were dealing with quite a bit of scary
health issues. It was pretty strassful in strasbourg Um in Italy.
The to my son familiar to some people who have
heard of the term tarrantis um. And uh, this is
(27:05):
the thought that these dance manias were caused by the
venom from some kind of spider, particularly the tarantula, hence
tarrantis um. But there has been no scientific proof that
spider bites will cause you to form a very slow
moving and dangerous flash mob. Yeah. I was bitten by
(27:26):
a spider like two years ago. I had a really
bad spider bite and I still can't dance, so it
clearly did not instill me with any dancing superpowers like
anti tarrantis um. Yeah, I'm just really like slow and uncoordinated.
Oh well, but you know, the dancing mania became a
thing again in eighteen sixty three and matag Gascar there
(27:48):
was collective dancing in hysteria after the reign of a
particular queen on rumors of her comeback. She was so
awful that an entire group of people just started freaking
out and experiencing mass hysteria. Then hop skip over to
Japan in eighteen sixty seven, you have this period of
chaotic singing and dancing among the Japanese people in response
(28:11):
to a lot of uprisings and economic crises that were
happening at the time. And I think, what's interesting as
you move into in the West, as you move into
the Industrial Revolution, and you have all of these people
sitting in factories all day, factories and mills, you start
to get these outbreaks of mass hysteria because I mean,
these people are cooped up in horrible conditions for a
(28:33):
ridiculous number of hours each day, and so you start
to get reports of things happening in mills and factories.
But also at this time, you you're getting the establishment
of like general hospitals and other institutions in Europe to
basically take care of I don't know, the undesirable element.
And so all of a sudden you have people being
(28:54):
institutionalized for their strange behavior, and then it just breaks
out all over again. It becomes the cycle. Yeah. And
speaking of the Industrial Revolution, it's notable that, as reported
in the book Mass Psychogenic Illness, a Social Psychological Analysis
A real nice bedtime read f y I uh, they
talked about how the very first modern reported outbreak at
(29:18):
a cotton mill happens in seven which took place right
after the invention of the power loom, which revolutionized the
textile industry. It really increased the speed of production. And yeah,
even more you have with all these machines being developed,
that factory work of just menial, repetitive labor happening in
(29:43):
people in confined areas. I mean, it's prime territory for
some kind of macessary to break out. Yeah, but also
so many social changes, women leaving the homes and going
to work, you know, being in mills and stuff. You know,
it's just as the world change is around you. That
can that can induce a lot of stress. Well, speaking
(30:04):
of women, Caroline, we have to dig into this gender
link that always comes up with mass hysteria because there
is a lot to talk about there because I'm not
I'm not entirely buying the fact that this disproportionately affects women,
even though I know I should. So let's get into
that when we come right back from a quick break
(30:26):
and now back to the show. So what about the
women then, because, like we said at the top of
the podcast, a lot of people like Robert Bartholome, you
who's an expert in this, always brings up gender, and
you know, in the dance manias that was a co
ed phenomenon, but today it's often framed as something that
(30:47):
happens almost exclusively to high school girls. And even we
have not pointed out the fact that as some listeners,
some gold Star Sminty listeners might recall that the derivation
of hysteria is directly related to women, right as it
refers to our crazy wandering wombs and they just wander
all over the place. Yeah, because if you don't put
(31:09):
a baby in it, right, then it's going to leave
you and make you do crazy things like I don't know,
I want to have sex or dance in the streets. Apparently. Well,
what you need is, you know how when you buy
a balloon at the grocery store, they give you those
little weights to tie the You need one of those
for your uterus womb weights. Perfect, we're gonna we're gonna
make a million dollars, that's right. Well, so anyway, another
(31:31):
hysteria expert, John Waller, who wrote A Time to Dance,
A Time to Die, The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing
Plague of fifteen eighteen, wrote that women and girls are
nearly always overrepresented among these outbreaks, and it is that
gender a balance that's often to give away that the
epidemic is not organic, that it's not actual food poisoning,
that it's not actual you know, chemical spills or whatever.
(31:54):
And you know, we've been talking about theories, and Waller
points out that in more missaw genistic times this was
put down to us having more fragile nerves or you know,
our wounds floating all over the place. Um, and while
there may be some type of biological component or something
in our brains doing something weird. Some people have put
(32:15):
forward the theory that women are more likely to succumb
because of the frustrations of living in patriarchal cultures, living
in families and societies dominated by men, and going off
of that theory, some even argue that hysteria offers distressed
women a legitimate reason to quote unquote check out for
(32:37):
a while, just dance their troubles away. Yeah, although if
you watch interviews, for instance, with those girls more recently
affected by this, they are not checked out. It seems
incredibly painful and disrupted to the point they had to
leave school for a while. Right, But you know, there
(32:58):
was a huge that was that at Lant piece, and
there was a huge New York Times piece about these
young women who were going through that, and they point
out that almost to the to a woman, these young
girls had experienced something awful in their lives when it
came to their parental situation. A lot of them had
missing her absent fathers. Um. You know, there was one
(33:19):
girl who her father was completely out of her life
until she basically was on the news with this condition
and then he came back. Um. And in the New
York Times piece, you could tell that the writer uh
was was trying to hint at that and her interviews
with these young women, and that they were like no, no,
no, no no no, because more than anything, these young women
or young people in general who were experiencing this want
(33:41):
to think that they're not crazy. They want to think
that there is a better, more logical reason for what
they were going through, the scary, scary thing that they're
going through, other than just suggestibility, right, I mean. Uh.
The issue of psychological trauma too, that might have been
repressed over the years also came up in the case
(34:01):
of the older woman highlighted in the Atlantic piece who
was not a high school or the one we talked
about who you know might have been exposed via Facebook. Um.
She had been raped UM as a girl and never
talked about it at all, and then all of a sudden,
we have this psychogenic illness come up. And that came
(34:25):
out in her therapy for this case, and and she
feels like this was it kind of unleashed all of
that repression, right. And one of the physicians interviewed in
The New York Times talked about how her approach to
these girls was so delicate because you had you couldn't
just write off their health scares, their frustrations. So she
did test for things like the thyroid, all sorts of
(34:48):
different possible health conditions. And then she said, you know what,
but just just to be on the safe side, you
know you're going this is such a stressful thing that
you're going through. Why don't we go ahead and set
you over the counselor a therapy and you can just
include you know, mental health as part of your regiment.
And she explained that the girls who were talking to
someone seeking actual mental health counseling, we're seeing improvements. So
(35:12):
it sounds like over time these symptoms just kind of
fade away. They do tend to like. That was one
of the things that was in those two long form
articles about this this issue is that eventually they do
kind of just disappear there there. They tend to be
kind of self propagating, you know, with social media, with
(35:33):
things like social media, and with that that hyper focus
on something's wrong with me. Oh God, something's going awful
with my health or my brain or something. And it
seems like that focus on mental health was definitely helping. Yeah.
One thing though that left me wanting with all of
these all of this reading on massess area is that
(35:57):
there was still no real are scientific evidence suggesting that
this is something that affects women more, you know what
I mean, because Bartholomew has said that, well, it might
be an issue of observer bias and methodological fault flaws.
Maybe we just hear more about this happening two girls. Um,
(36:17):
it could be more likely that women emote outwardly whereas
men tend to emote inwardly. Um. And also in that
British Journal of Psychiatry Literature review, it mentions that it's
often linked to gender, but then there's no follow up.
It doesn't offer any conclusive proof. I mean, there There
(36:38):
is that theory though about mirror neurons um which essentially
is that mirror neurons are like you and I are
probably are mirror neurons are probably firing a lot right
now because we're sitting across from each other, we're having
this conversation and we are now gesturing, which if people
could see us heard out gesturing in tandem to each other.
And and those are the neurons in our brain, and
(37:00):
very elementary sort of way, it's what helps us interact
with people and sort of pick up on tone, and
a lot of times they tend to be more active
in female brains. And so there's one theory that was
published in the journal aptly called Medical Hypotheses that perhaps
(37:20):
the uh, these kinds of hysterias affect women more be
due to higher activity of our motor cortex and mirror neurons,
or that whole stereotype about women and empathy. Yes, exactly exactly,
and that would offer some kind of neurological explanation. But
again that's still just a hypothesis, right because it's not
(37:44):
like this doesn't happen two men. It does happen to men.
And I was wondering as I was going through all
this stuff, I was wondering, Okay, so I I get it, Okay,
women are overrepresented and all this stuff that's been proven whatever,
But does it ever happen just to men? And oh
boy does it? And it's called cora. Uh. It's a
(38:06):
phenomenon experienced by men, typically in Asia. Uh. Thousands of
men in Southeast Asia and China in times of economic uncertainty,
have been known to believe that their penises are shrinking
into their bodies and that death will ensue if they
become fully retracted. Yeah, and um, the last time coro
seemed to flare up in China was in so it's
(38:28):
been a little while, but there was this widespread fear
that a fox spirit that roams the land was in
search of male victims. And there's a similar kind of
penis shrinking panic that has also broken out among men
in Sub Saharan Africa. So similar to these you know,
dance manias that spread around different cultures, this is also
(38:52):
seems to be some kind of cross cultural phenomenon. And
if you want to a Western context for this, there
was a report in nine teen eight of this happening
among just male military recruits at a California Army barrack
um after there was some people were experiencing breathing problems
(39:12):
from some strange odor that was spreading, and so panic
and sues. All these guys are laid out with all
sorts of horrifying symptoms of mass hysteria like event happening.
And it turns out that the strange odor was simply
a brush fire, but it was the same kind of
power of suggestion, no cebo effect susceptibility. Guys are vulnerable
(39:38):
to it too, clearly because if you already have a
pre existing fear or concern, if it gets into your
head that's something awful and poisonous or you know, something
that's risking your health is happening, it's easy to believe
like oh oh no, oh yeah, do you ever does
this ever happen to you? Where if you smell gas
in your house is seven? To me? A couple of
times I immediately start like mentally symptom checking of like
(40:00):
am I breathing? Okay? Am I sleepy? Am I I
need to get out right? Yeah? Absolutely well. When I
worked at a newspaper um the printing the giant printing
press was in the same building, and so knowing that
that his tanny particles of ink were traveling through the
air towards me in the news room, I mean, I
you know, I would start to feel really congested, although
that probably I probably really was congested because ink was
(40:21):
in my nose? Were you? Were you that person wearing
the face mask at all times? I still do all
the time. I actually try to wear like a scuba
mask at all time. I finally banned the face mask
for the podcast studio because it was just that that
dude creepy. That's too bad. Um. But one thing, you know,
we haven't um mentioned like the types of girls that
(40:42):
this tends to happen to when it does affect solely
girls at high schools. One uh, one piece of information
when tidbit that was pointed out in the New York
Times is that cheerleaders frequently come up in these case
histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because these outbreaks,
(41:02):
these particular types of outbreaks tend to start with someone
of high social status. And so in reading that New
York Times article, you know they're the writer is interviewing
these two girls at the same time. In one of
the girl's rooms and talking about how she even noticed
that they as they were talking, they were mirroring each
other's behavior, and one set our stomach hurt, and then
(41:24):
ten minutes later the other set or stomach hurt. And
so there's this whole idea of like the issue of popularity,
of admiring someone above you on the social you know,
hierarchy or whatever, and then kind of falling prey to
what they say they're experiencing. Absolutely. And then there, of course,
are all these questions of, well, are these young women
(41:44):
simply faking it so that they can also get on
the Today Show or whatever media outlet it might be.
And so then with all these reports of young women
being affected and that it seems to just be like
a popularity thing and all these girls maybe faking it
or maybe they're not, then you have some theories about
out girls adolescence in particular being pathologized. Yeah. So, Caitlin Flanagan,
(42:07):
as she often does, who is more of a conservative
commentator about especially girls and also women, She wrote an
op at piece in The New York Times in response
to all of these reports of hysteria breaking out and
essentially said in a rather flip kind of way. Hey, everybody, look,
(42:28):
this is simply good old fashioned Freudian hysteria breaking out
because in a nutshell, teenage female adolescence is a time
of emotional upheaval and panic, and girls tend to, like
I said earlier, emote outward, and so stop trying to
explain it away, and can we just say that this
(42:48):
is this is just girls being girls? Yeah, exactly. She
almost seemed frustrated that people were trying to come up
with reasons for it or even show that it can
happen to boys and men too, you know. She was like, oh, sorry, guys,
I know it's not empowering for you, but you just
have to deal with it. Yeah. And her her solution
for these kinds of instances was that girls simply need
(43:11):
more protection, right, And she wrote a book along those
lines too, that we need to keep our girls safe
and during this turbulent time of adolescence, we need to,
you know, make sure they have quiet, safe spaces at
the home in which to be basically crazy. Banshees is
the word she is. Yeah, And here's the thing, I
don't doubt the issue of susceptibility. And I mean there
(43:34):
was there was one article ever get which one it was,
but talked about how some neurologists were watching one of
these reports from the bbc UH and it was showing
a teenage girl who was affected, who had a physical
tick that magically seemed to stop when she started to
put on eyeliner and it just switched to the other hand,
(43:55):
and the doctor's like, whoa, whoa, whoa. That doesn't that
does not happen, That would not happen normally in your brain.
This really can't be what's going on. Or in the
case of one girl had a tick, if a doctor
squeezed the tremoring hand, the tremor would then suddenly moved
to the other side of her body, and they're like,
that's really not the way these kinds of things usually work.
(44:17):
So sure there is you can't deny the power of
suggestion with this, but uh, I, personally, to editorialize myself,
did not really appreciate Flannagan's assumptions about how this is
just every girl's you know, basically, that every young girl
(44:38):
is crazy and that yeah, it's like, yeah, she's I
think she's falling back on some very dated stereotypes about
you know, women needing to be quiet and be in
the home and recover from all of the stress that
is life. Yeah, and and of course there are plenty
of rebuttals, such as Isha Panda over a feminist NG
(44:59):
who was like whoa woa woa quick pathologizing young girls.
You know, stop painting us as fragile things that need
to just be hidden away during our teen years, because
didn't we learn anything from the me owing nuns? If
you send if you send girls away to a convent,
you might have some problems there too. Nothing I'm joking completely,
(45:22):
I'm nothing against nuns at all, but you know what
I mean, like the uh trying to repress. A lot
of this tends to result out of repression and is
often relieved by expression. But I will be curious to
see if Bartholemy's prediction of these being these incidents as
(45:42):
being on the rise via social media really plays out,
because I mean, he says that there's been a massive
up surge, but we still hear about them happening kind
of few and far between. Um. But I'm wondering in
the next like twenty years, are we going to have
(46:02):
more cases of this breaking out or are we simply
going to grow more skeptical. I I don't know. That
was a good questions. Yeah, and those are questions for
our listeners. What what do you think about this? Have
you heard of these mass hysterias? Are you from Danvers?
Are you has this ever happened to you? Um, let
us know your thoughts about this. Mom Stuff at discovery
(46:23):
dot com is where you can send us an email.
You can also tweet us at mom Stuff podcast or
send us a message over on Facebook. And this was
a little bit of a different kind of topic for
us to cover, but such a rich history to dig into.
And yeah, dancing mania, Caroline, if you could go back
in time to a fourteenth century dancing mania, would you
(46:44):
do it? I have no rhythm and I love sitting,
so I might dance for a little while, uh, in
a herky jerky fashion, and then you know, I don't know,
go eat some some gruel. That sounds awful. Yeah, well,
so to the fourteenth century. Well send us your thoughts,
moms A. Discovery dot com is our email address, and
(47:07):
we have a couple of letters to share with you
right now. We've got a couple of letters here about
our episode Fictional Attraction, all about shipping, and one true
pairing and paras social relationships. And this one is coming
from Eliza, who's in the subject line is my dear
(47:29):
friends from the Office. She writes, The American Office immediately
comes to mind when I think about strong fictional relationships
in my life. I started watching the show in high
school in formed many of my closest friendships in college
because of it. I even had an Office themed birthday
party the first two weeks away from home freshman year.
Side note, I dressed up like paying them. Like most fans,
(47:49):
I fell in love with Jim and Pan's relationship instantly
and often looked to their connection as a model for
what I wanted in a partner. But it wasn't just
their love story that I fell for. It was the
entire cast. I started to feel like they were another
group of friends that I could visit any time I
wanted on Netflix or Hulu. There were two occasions that
The Office broke my heart. The first was when Michael
(48:10):
Scott played by Steve Carrell left the show, and the
second was a series finale. I really don't mean to
sound crazy, because I'm an emotionally sound person, but I
was pretty much a wreck when it ended. It marked
the end of a life chapter. I realized I grew
into an adult over nine seasons. When it was over,
I reflected on what the show had given me. After
the serious finale aired, I wrote the cast a letter,
(48:31):
and I was never planning on sending it. It was
really just for myself, but I deeply wish that somehow
I could tell Jim, Michael, Dwight, Pam and the rest
of my office friends a genuine thank you and goodbye.
I think that's kind of sweet. Well, I have a
letter here from Elizabeth about one True Pairings as a
coping strategy. Uh. She says, a few months ago, I
(48:54):
would have been in your situation of not knowing the
terms O T P and shipping. I love the TV
show Sherlock, done by the BBC. The only problem with
Sherlock is that it's a two year gap between seasons,
and each season is only three episodes long. Therefore, fans
have to find a way to stay interested, yet saying
during this long hiatus. Fan fiction is a huge portion
(49:14):
of this coping strategy. A lot of fan fic focuses
on a relationship between Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, usually
shortened to John Lock. I read John Lock fiction quite
a bit, and it keeps me interested in the show
and the characters, while allowing me to explore situations they're
not in the actual show. I love it. It has
also had the benefit of making me calm down a
little about sexual situations. I was sexually abused for several
(49:36):
years and still have panic attacks if such situations come
up again. Reading fan fic about sexual relationships that are
healthy has helped me heal a little bit, for which
I am extremely grateful, So thank you very much, Elizabeth.
And yeah, speaking of Sherlock, I have a feeling a
lot of listeners have para social relationships with Benedict Cumberbatch.
Even though, oh my god, I'm gonna get so much
(49:58):
hate mail for this. I think he is so weird looking.
He looks like an order. Yeah. I never seen utters
who look like Benedict Cumberbatch. It's like the best tumbler.
When I heard that he was going to be on
Sesame Street, I was like, that's appropriate. He looks like
a muppet. Well, I'm sure that has sparked plenty of
listener thoughts, So send us your letters. Mom stub Discovery
dot com is our email address, or if you'd like
(50:20):
to connect to us elsewhere on social or find old podcast,
blog posts and all of our videos, there's one place
to go. It's your one stop sminty shop. Stuff Mom
Never Told You dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics, Is it how Stuff Works dot
com
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