By John Waller The Guardian, London
Two weeks ago a schoolroom in central Tanzania descended into chaos after female pupils began to faint.
Slumping over their exam papers or collapsing to the floor, 20 girls rapidly lost consciousness. Others sobbed, yelled and ran around the school.
Such events, said the local education officer, are “very common here.”
In all likelihood, no organic cause will be found and the episode will be chalked up as yet another case of mass hysteria.
Similar outbreaks have recently been reported in locations from Kuala Lumpur to Mexico City and rural Bangladesh.
Nor is the West immune. Schools in Europe and the US have also been struck by contagions of vomiting, itching, dizziness and seizures.
Mass hysteria seems to be part of the human condition. And it has a rich, bizarre, and often tragic history.
Epidemics of hysteria such as those in Tanzania rely on the power of suggestion, but they are nourished by fear, sadness and anxiety.
Victims tend to be subject to severe psychological strain over the preceding weeks or months. One or more then develop a psychosomatic symptom, and those made suggestible by pent-up anxiety quickly follow suit. Before long, dozens are vomiting, fainting and screaming.
The strain of exams is a common trigger. Reports suggest that in many Central African schools pupils are placed under such extreme pressure that mass hysteria has become virtually endemic.
Severe discipline and emotional neglect also seem to have caused the dramatic scenes in a convent school in Mexico City last year when dozens of young girls temporarily lost the ability to walk.
Sometimes the reaction of the authorities makes things worse.
At a school in Blackburn, England, in 1965, several girls fainted during morning assembly. Concerned that they might hurt themselves, the teachers asked them to lie down on the floor along a main corridor.
This made the situation seem far more serious than it was, and other children became convinced that they too were sick. By midday, 141 pupils were experiencing dizziness, nausea, spasms and shortness of breath. Ambulances took 85 children to hospital.
It took more than a week to establish that there was no underlying physical condition.
GENDER IMBALANCE
Women and girls are nearly always over represented among the victims of these outbreaks. In fact a gender imbalance is often a giveaway that the epidemic is not organic.
In more misogynistic times, this was put down to women having more fragile nerves, or wombs with a tendency to rise out of the pelvis and compress other organs.
But while there may be a biological component, most experts now think that in many parts of the world, girls and women are more likely to succumb due to the frustrations of living in families and societies dominated by men.
Others argue that hysteria offers distressed women a legitimate reason to “check out” for a while from the drudgery and indignities of daily life.
The manner of psychological breakdowns also varies dramatically from place to place.
Take the epidemic of laughing and crying that struck villages west of Lake Victoria in 1962. It began at a mission school when 95 out of 159 girls succumbed to the same painful compulsion to laugh and sob by turns. The authorities sent the children back to their villages, which spread the psychic contagion to the adult population. Victims laughed for about a week on average — hundreds of people were affected before the epidemic receded the following year.
A medical team visited the region to study blood, water and food under the microscope. Drawing a blank, they concluded that the sufferers were victims of heightened suggestibility. The schoolchildren had been preparing for important exams and, in those fraught post-independence years, many of their parents were anxious about their region’s future.
To the doctors who studied the laughter epidemic the events were reminiscent of a far stranger and darker phenomenon: the dancing plague.
DANCING PLAGUES
Perhaps the most bizarre of all mass hysterias, dancing plagues illustrate how the expression of mass hysteria can be shaped by the experiences and beliefs of its victims.
On about half a dozen occasions between 1017 and 1518, bouts of uncontrollable dancing struck parts of Germany, Switzerland, France and the Low Countries (today’s Netherlands). Hundreds were consumed by an irresistible urge to dance, hop and leap into the air.
Chronicles of 1374 tell of large numbers of men and women dancing, while screeching with pain, leaping into the air, running wildly from place to place, and calling on the mercy of God and the saints.
In the year 1518, about 400 citizens of Strasbourg danced for days or weeks in succession. This time the authorities intensified the epidemic by encouraging the afflicted to keep dancing in the misguided belief that doing so would cure them.
They had the dancers taken to a specially constructed stage where musicians played pipes and drums and hired dancers held them tight to prevent them from flagging. Soon people were dying of exhaustion.
As is typical of episodes of mass hysteria, those afflicted were suffering acute physical and mental distress.
The 1374 outbreak occurred just after a devastating flood. During another outbreak in 1518, the inhabitants of Strasbourg were reeling from severe famine, their morale already shattered by syphilis, smallpox and plague.
They danced in their misery because people living along the Rhine and Moselle rivers had a longstanding fear of devils and saints who inflicted a terrible, compulsive dance. Having fallen into a trance state, they acted in accordance with these beliefs, dancing wildly for days on end.
Supernaturalism has fueled most flamboyant cases of mass hysteria.
Nuns living in austere convents between the 1500s and 1700s were especially prone. Convinced that they had been possessed by demons, unhappy nuns would enter a trance, and proceed to writhe, convulse, laugh, speak in strange tongues, smash crucifixes, thrust out their hips, and make other lewd gestures and propositions.
The sociologist Robert Bartholomew tells of a time in which several nuns, who presumably saw cats as Satanic familiars, “meowed together every day at a certain time for several hours together.”
In 1749, a contagion of squirming, screaming and trance spread through a German convent; locals inferred the work of a witch, seized a nun as a likely candidate and beheaded her in the marketplace.
In modern Singapore and Malaysia, factory workers are often rural migrants who share traditional beliefs about spirits and possession. When a worker, unable to cope with the factory regime, plunges into an altered state, others perceive the action of evil spirits and, in consequence, reproduce the symptoms. Such outbreaks are often brought to an end with the ritual sacrificing of a goat.
FEAR OF SHRINKAGE
Epidemics of odd behavior can also afflict the fully conscious. A striking example is koro. Thousands of men in Southeast Asia and China, in times of economic uncertainty, can come to believe that their penises are shrinking into their bodies and that death will ensue if they become fully retracted. The victims of penis panics arrive at medical clinics clutching their genitals, or use pegs, clamps, even needles, to prevent further shrinkage.
In China, where koro last appeared in 1985, there is a widespread fear of a fox spirit that roams the land in search of male victims.
It takes only the right kind of fear, suggestion and false belief to trigger epidemic hysteria or mass delusions. So as our fears change, so do expressions of mass hysteria.
Following the use of poison gas in World War I, residents of rural Virginia began to report unpleasant physical reactions to noxious gases said to have been released into their homes by a “mad gasser.” It turned out that anxious locals had fallen sick after misconstruing the smells caused by backed-up flues and even flatulence.
A similar wave of nausea and dizziness occurred in a Rhode Island elementary school during the first Gulf War in response to media speculation about possible chemical weapon attacks on Israel.
Outbreaks of hysteria closely track real threats and involve credible sets of symptoms. Experts such as Bartholomew and Simon Wessley have shown how escalating fears of terrorist attacks have led to an upsurge in physical reactions to harmless powders in envelopes and innocuous odors in subways.
But a dose of caution is required. If dozens of schoolchildren begin complaining of faintness, nausea and headaches it is not always time to call in a psychiatrist.
When several children fell ill in a London primary school in 1990 it looked just like a case of mass hysteria. There were even more girls than boys on the sick list. But on examination of their school lunch it turned out that they had been poisoned by pesticides used on cucumbers.
It seems the girls were just better at eating their greens.
John Waller is the author of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518.
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