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Mass hysteria – causes of mass psychosis

This text complies with the specifications of medical literature, medical guidelines and current studies and has been reviewed by medical doctors and physicians.

In a mass psychosis often show strong physical symptoms that suggest a serious disease picture. (Image: Andreas P / fotolia.com)

“It may be that someone is getting a seizure or a medical symptom, and what it conveys is fear. Other people become anxious because they do not know exactly what it is, and one aspect of fear is that it manifests itself in symptoms. You’re shivering, you’re trembling, you’re getting a dry mouth, you’re getting chest pains. Next you will pass out. “Psychiatrist Simon Wessely writes about psychogenic mass illnesses.

Mass psychoses, also known as mass hysteria, describe in everyday use, above all, very excited crowds, for example, in football game. The are not pathological: But when, for example, teenagers collapse at pop concerts, the excitement turns into a psychiatric phenomenon – the British speak today instead of “mass hysteria” correctly by “mass psychogenic illness” (MPI).

In a mass psychosis often show strong physical symptoms that suggest a serious disease picture. (Image: Andreas P / fotolia.com)

Pathological symptoms spread in a group of people, without an organic cause is recognizable. Affected are usually groups that “sit in a boat”, for example, soldiers, students or nuns; but also in public places such collective psychosis spreads: At railway stations and airports, in the company or the school.

While shrink-wrapped groups are prone to MPI in particular, today’s psychiatric symptoms are also spreading through the mass media, especially the Internet.

Those affected become extremely agitated, such as collapsing or delusional actions – many hyperventilating. The disturbed do not know the psychological cause of their disorder.

Mass psychosis has probably been with us since our biological beginnings – but in Western countries, the fear of mysterious risks has steadily increased for decades. Because people are more anxious, they are also more receptive to psychogenic disorders that have an origin in this anxiety.

Palpitations, dizziness and sweats are just as social as nonverbal – through observation.

symptoms

Massive psychogenic disorders have some similarities today:

  • They often occur after a perceived danger from the environment, so an unknown smell, media reports about toxins, rumors and isolated cases of an ominous disease.
  • Women are usually affected to a much greater extent than men, exceptions are mass hysteria in classic male groups such as the military.
  • Even teenagers and children feel sick.
  • Places where many people live are the center of mass psychosis: barracks, monasteries, blocks of flats or train stations.
  • People who suffer from mental or physical stress are particularly vulnerable; Boredom at work, communication and general anxiety disorders are risk factors.
  • The symptoms spread quickly and usually disappear quickly – but have also lasted for years.
  • Situations that are emotionally charged often trigger the symptoms: a demonstration, a school test, a gathering on a disturbing topic (like Ground Zero).
  • A bad working environment, both socially and in terms of external conditions such as smell and noise, promotes mass hysteria.
  • Symptoms include hyperventilation, fainting and dissociative disorders.
    The symptoms spread in contact with those affected.
  • There are no sequelae at follow-up.
  • The more the media reports, the more the disease spreads.
  • Affected individuals are resistant to advice and do not accept alternative explanations from physicians regarding their condition.
  • Affected believe in a fictitious cause, but the symptoms are real.

Mass psychogenic illness in the modern age

It started with a mouse: on February 15, 1787, a worker brought a mouse to a cotton factory in Lancashire to scare her colleagues, and succeeded. Another worker panicked and suffered a feeble fit that lasted hours.

Such an animal phobia would hardly be worth a message. But the anxiety owner triggered a chain reaction: The next day, three other workers suffered from the same attacks, on the second day “infected” another six. The owners now closed the grounds and a rumor was circulating: an epidemic was supposed to infest the manufactory – triggered by contaminated cotton.

The physician William St. Clare arrived from Preston and found 24 patients. Whether the presence of a physician or St. Clare’s enlightening words alone is unknown is unknown, but in any case the “epidemic” ended after the physician reviewed the events. He concluded, “It was nerve-related, easy to heal and not caused by cotton.” These words describe for the first time a psychogenic mass illness in the modern age in the words of modernity.

Crisis and body

MPI usually starts with an individual. Other people become particularly involved when people are close to them and have a high status in the group.
One of the main triggers is an unknown smell in a place that belongs to the everyday life of a large group with the same structure of life: MPI waves broke out, for example, several times in schools in which malodors broke out of the toilets.

MPI is not always as easy to end as in the cotton factory, where socio-psychological problems obviously did not matter. However, when the stress level in a social group is chronically at its limit – be it in a factory workforce, a small business owner of a neighborhood or a harassed student in an economic crisis – the effects can be explosive and last for years.

In areas where locals live in fear of chemical or biological pollution, such as in the West Bank or near nuclear power plants, or in cultures that believe in the power of witchcraft, a psychogenic mass epidemic can infect hundreds, and even thousands, of humans simultaneously.

Muscle tensions, tremors or dislocations can last for months. In addition, sufferers who fear of witchcraft, radioactivity or terrorist attacks with biochemicals, hardly believe in the explanation that it is their own mental processes.

Physical symptoms that express mental anxiety are rampant in areas where everyday life is dangerous and where people are traumatized. In Europe, for example, waves of mass psychosis fell during and immediately after the Thirty Years’ War. Today we know them from the West Bank (West Bank), Afghanistan, the Congo or South Africa.

Strange “revelations” that the leaders of children‘s crucifixes received, and who also received their followers, spread to the dissociative disorders of the psychogenic disorder, with the difference that those affected did not understand them as a disease but as a divine direction.

People in crisis and war zones more often develop mass psychosis as a result of extreme mental stress. (Image: Benjamin Haas / fotolia.com)

Wrong explanations and fatal consequences

In 2012, students in Takhar province in Afghanistan smelled a bad smell in their school. They felt dizzy, dizzy, and weak. The students were afraid of mass poisoning. Doctors found no organic reason for the complaints of the girls.

The WHO recognized MPI as a disease, and recognized such a psychogenic disorder in girls, as the fourth this year in Afghanistan. The cause of the symptoms was the fear of the girls, who feared being poisoned by the Taliban.

MPI demands psychological sensitivity from doctors, competent authorities, relatives and educators. An incident such as 1789 in Lancashire can, well managed, end harmlessly. However, incorrect handling or misrepresentation by authorities can lead to disaster.

Someone who feels ill with invisible gas and develops the physical symptoms of illness is sick, Wessley said. If sufferers are not convinced that this invisible gas does not exist, they may lose the symptoms, but the fear remains. Failed enlightenment can thus lead to a permanent psychosis, and a fantasy of adolescents forms a full-blown conspiracy delusion.

The waves of witch hunts in early modern Europe and today’s collectively committed murders of supposed “witches” in Papua, the Congo or South Africa, prove too well what happens when physical symptoms produced by the psyche connect with accepted beliefs: the limit from psychogenic mass illness to pogrom is permeable.

It therefore requires an enlightened social environment that is also based on trust in order to tame mass psychoses. Health authorities and school administrators need to examine the cause; there is no way around investigating the building if gas or toxic chemicals are suspected.

Radioactivity, toxic gases, viruses and bacteria are not just a figment of the imagination. They exist, they are “invisible,” and if they really spread, they may kill countless people. In addition, there have been and have been accidents that governments have tried to keep secret, and even attempts by those responsible to accept people’s illnesses and deaths – whether on Bikini Atoll, in the Nevada desert, in the Russian Arctic, in Bhopal or in Seveso.

Global communication via the Internet has great advantages. But it also has a huge disadvantage: In the Middle Ages, the psychogenic symptoms of the “devil-obsessed nuns” remained limited to a few monasteries, the infection was literally about hearsay.

Today mysterious illnesses spread with fictitious causes on Youtube, Twitter and Facebook. Girls in the US who suffered from sudden twitching probably saw these symptoms in Youtube videos before.

The fear in the body

The subconscious background of the MPI is sometimes in a real threat: the mustard gas was a terrible weapon in the First World War. These death clouds, which came with the air, characterized mass psychoses in the decades after 1918.

Since Ground Zero, the media presence of terrorist attacks with the possibility of chemical or biological weapons increases the risk of collective fears becoming mass psychoses.

In contrast to such mass hysteria conspiracy delusion the physical symptoms are in the foreground. Although anxiety is an engine of mass hysteria, as in conspiracy paranoiacs, the main symptom is not the search for “culprits,” but hyperventilation today and, in historical times, the movement disorder.

In 1997, 12,000 children in Japan suffered from uncontrollable twitches, triggered by a cartoon with moving Pokemons.

In 1998, a “mass psychogenic illness” was rife at a High Scholl in McMinnville, Tennessee. A teacher felt a gaseous smell and got a headache, nausea, she suffered from shortness of breath and dizziness. The authorities evacuated the school and took 80 students and 19 teachers to the emergency department of the local hospital. The school was closed for five days, and when it was reopened, another 71 people came to the hospital. The “gas alarm” has led to extensive research. But there was no evidence of real poisoning, there were no medical or environmental explanations for the symptoms, and there were no toxic substances in the school. A survey concluded that the symptoms arose after classmates were sick, or those affected heard of an unusual smell at school.

Wessely also researched the events in Tennessee. He wrote: “A less welcome aspect of the Freudian tradition is the widespread acceptance of the existence of symptoms that – in a destructive sense – exist ‘in the mind alone’. However, psychogenic symptoms are physiological experiences based on identifiable physiological processes that cause pain and suffering. The children at McMinnville High School experienced genuine symptoms. That the cause of these symptoms was more likely to be the fear of toxic exposure than any exposure itself does not relieve it of its reality. “

In 1999, 38 students complained of headaches and sweats after drinking Coca Cola. 80,000,000 cans and brown shower bottles were therefore taken out of the market in Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg and France. The number of “sick” increased to 112. A study of the Coke, the people have drunk, found that it was not poisoned or contaminated. Moreover, about half of the patients had not drunk any cola.

Even traumatization provoked: Only 41% of Vietnam veterans who reported on a post-traumatic stress disorder had, according to their military records, suffered combat situations that could have caused this trauma. Media play a decisive role today. Following the attack on the World Trade Center (WTC) and reports of anthrax as a biological weapon, there were 1,000 false spleen arms in the United States.

Hexenwahn

The Jewish and witch hunts of the Middle Ages and the early modern period showed all signs of mass psychosis. People who thought they had been bewitched showed motor disturbances, especially seizures.

Today, these symptoms can be well explained, especially in the supposed possession of demons: Older nuns introduced young girls to the monasteries and subjected them there to a murderous discipline – the girls lived in dire poverty and had to torture themselves for their “sins”, They fasted until they almost starved and sometimes prayed the entire day.

The smallest “mistake” was followed by draconian punishments, the girls were flogged or thrown into damp dungeon holes. The more brutal the oppression, the more often the girls became “obsessed with the devil”. Foreign voices spoke out of them, hysterically bursting into crying or roaring about, and they rolled on the floor in ecstatic dislocations.

Today we know such symptoms of torture victims. The cruelly suppressed sexuality of the young girls broke free, the “hysterical seizures” were an unconscious attempt to resist the terror regime. It is not by chance that most cases of “obsession” occurred where coercion was the strongest, mental torture was the hardest.

In some cases it was not mass psychosis, but open rebellion. Nuns threw themselves around in obscene terms, showing their genitals and masturbating in public; They also accused monks of rape.

In one convent a nun mewed like a cat, and the others soon mewed as well, elsewhere the “holy sisters” bit each other, and the “delirium” also spread in other monasteries.

For example, mass psychoses with physical symptoms have been found more frequently among nuns in monasteries. (Image: alfonstr / fotolia.com)

An example of such mass psychosis triggered by repressed sexuality is Salem’s witch trials in New England in 1692. They began near the city of Salem and led to the execution of 20 defendants. The allegations infected all surrounding communities (Andover, Amesbury, Salisbury, Haverhill, Topsfield, Ipswich, Rowley, Gloucester, Manchester, Malden, Charlestown, Billerica, Beverley, Reading, Woburn, Lynn, Marblehead and Boston). The persecution of alleged witches began after young girls from Salem felt strange pains and suffered from convulsive twitching.

The nunnery Maria Renata Singer of Mossau was one of the last women in Europe suspected to be a witch. The villagers in the area made them responsible for any cattle disease and any crop failure. In 1744, a young sister in the monastery suffered from “obsession” (epilepsy?). After that, six other sisters said they were also obsessed.

Freud explained such “obsessions” through the suppression of sexuality. Unconsciously and against their conscious will sufferers show their conflict between sexual drive and control – namely, by paralysis, convulsions and amnesia.

The dance psychosis

Since the end of the 14th century crowds of people gathered in various regions of Europe and danced until they collapsed. The phenomenon was called in Germany St. Johannestanz, because John the Baptist was considered a patron saint against epilepsy and was supposed to cure the uncontrolled convulsions.

The dance movement arose out of fear of the rampant plague; originally the dancers wanted to repent with their dances and hoped that God would spare them from the plague. In Italy, the dance was called “tarantula” because the “obsessed” wandered about as if they had bitten a tarantula. In Strasbourg, the center of the movement, only a few people danced at first; However, at the end of the summer of 1518, hundreds performed the wildest leaps, rolling on the ground, and could not stop, even though they were completely exhausted. Dozens died of cardiac arrest or stroke. Hunger, the fear of epidemics and mental stress were probably the cause of this psychogenic mass hysteria.

The American historian Waller says: “Trance can be highly contagious in groups that threaten to succumb to serious economic and social hardships.” This is also supported by today’s cases of mass hysteria in the crisis-ridden and war-torn countries of the world.

The madmen of Pont-Saint-Esprit

The inhabitants of the French village of Pont-Saint-Esprit suffered a strange epidemic in August 1951. Hundreds of people suffered from fits of madness and hallucinations. A man tried to drown himself and believed his belly was filled with mud. An 11-year-old boy tried to strangle his grandmother; another man jumped out of the window and yelled, “I’m a plane.” He broke both his legs. A man believed that his heart was leaving his body through his legs. Others saw flowers growing out of their breasts or meaning, their heads turned into molten lead. Fifty residents of the village ended up in psychiatry, and five died.

The American journalist Albarelli researched to LSD experiments of the US Army, other suspected ergot, a hallucinogenic fungus that attacks crops as the cause. If either is true, it was not an MPI; However, it is also possible that the villagers suffered from a psychogenic delusion like the death dancers of Strasbourg centuries before.

Dark magic in Louisiana

In 1961, after chanting a Methodist church in the small town of Welsh, Louisiana, an African-American girl lost consciousness. A friend of hers also fainted at school the next day and stayed home for four weeks after the seizures recurred daily. Six weeks later, 22 female pupils suffered from the symptoms: anxiety, shortness of breath, headache and abdominal pain, dizziness and tremors.

The doctors were at a loss; they suspected an infectious disease, but found no pathogen. They were looking for drug abuse – in vain. The girls said they were “victims of a nasty spell.” The team of Professor James A. Knight of Tulane University, New Orleans, included neurologists and psychiatrists in the investigation. They measured the brainwaves of the students, examined their spinal cord, but above all they systematically questioned them in psychoassays – and they finally clarified the riddle. The girls suffered from an epidemic of sexual distress, according to Knight. A girl and a boy had left school two years earlier, the girl because she was pregnant and the boy because he had made her pregnant. At the beginning of the year, the strange seizures told the girls that all girls had to undergo a pregnancy test because two of them also had a child in their womb.

The rumor went around and scared the girls. There was a reason for this: a commission sniffed the sexual relationships of the students, and the result was: one student had sex with three dozen boys, another was pregnant. The school administration sent four students to an education center.

The young people, like the nuns of the Middle Ages, did not tolerate the tension between their sexual impulses on the one hand and the punishments of the teachers and reacted with a psychogenic illness. None of the girls simulated, because the symptoms were real.

At the same time they rebelled with their attacks against the authoritarian school system: namely, the seizures rose rapidly, as soon as the doctors came to the school and examined the young people. The mass psychosis disappeared logically, as an enlightened headmaster took over the school.

The riddle of Le Roy

Le Roy is an unknown small town in the state of New York. But it made headlines worldwide as girls showed seizures at the local high school as in Tourette syndrome. At first, a girl’s muscles twitched uncontrollably, then her face involuntarily distorted, and then the attacks spread to seventeen other students.

The parents of the girls sounded the alarm. Above all, Le Roy’s economy is made up of a pudding factory, and parents were convinced that the waste from pudding production had poisoned the soil on which the school was standing. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich arrived to see if the site was contaminated. Brockovich is beyond suspicion to cover up environmental damage, and she found nothing.

The social conditions explain a lot. Le Roy was once an industrial city with a high employment rate and a semi-saturated layer of skilled workers. Today it is a mini-Detroit in the northeast. Unemployment is high and the wages of those who work are in free fall. The affected girls all came from families exposed to the social crisis.

A doctor who examined the girls suspected that those affected by the seizures were inspired by the Internet. However, as with other cases of MPI, they did not simulate, but the twitches were probably a reaction to the children’s social anxiety.

Parents’ suspicions that the pudding industry was responsible for the events may give a key, because this production was both a symbol of past economic security and of decline. The anger and fears of employees who were formerly employed, when capital puts them on the street, are widespread, the accusation is analogous: “They have made their profit and now let us sit here with their garbage.” Such allegations not only have a true core but it accurately describes a global practice in unleashed capitalism that turns entire regions into ecological hazard zones.

In Le Roy, the fear was well founded. However, the girls could not put that fear into words, saying, “I’m scared that the land here is chemically contaminated and my parents have the right to get a decent job.” But they probably took the mood and unconsciously turned them into physical symptoms that infected them with each other.

Unbearable living conditions

Mass hysteria in the Middle Ages can be explained by the unbearable living conditions, and the conditions led to similar psychoses among workers in industrialization. Common to such contagious hysteria is the common belief in an external cause as in Le Roy’s belief that the soil is contaminated. The hallucinated danger leads to increased stress, and the stress creates new “evidence” for the “threat”; the belief in this “danger” spreads among colleagues, in the factory and in the village, and soon show more and more similar symptoms.

Some factors promote such mass hysteria in the workplace: bad leadership of the bosses, insufficient social support of the employees, a “poisoned” communication of the employees, time pressure, boredom and futility. Added to this is an environment that has not learned critical thinking, and readily believes in the “symptoms” along with their fictitious “causes.”.

An inhuman school system breeds mass hysteria as well as the monasteries of the Middle Ages: in 1893, for example, in a girls’ school in Basel, convulsions and epileptic shaking spread. Affected were students who did not manage their written assignments at school. After school, the symptoms disappeared and returned the next day at school. In 1904 the “illness” was repeated at the same school.

In Chemnitz in 1906 two elementary students shook their fingers when they were supposed to write. Altogether the “illness” infected 21 pupils and lasted four weeks – but only when writing, the same students had no problems with sports.

The modern media and communication possibilities often play a decisive role in the occurrence of mass psychosis. (Image: M.Gove / fotolia.com)

The role of the media

Today, dubious media promote mass psychosis. They “tell” about mysterious diseases and their supposed cause according to the motto “sodium chloride in saline discovered” to increase the circulation – but it turns out in an MTI that it was psychogenic diseases, that is at most a paragraph on the worth a third page.

Today’s mass hysteria is often environmental fears, for example to Seveso or Chernobyl. On the one hand, there was a real incident, a reactor accident or a catastrophe in a chemical plant with many victims, who died or suffered for decades.

On the other hand, more frequent than such real consequences of an environmental inferno is the fear of being affected by such an event, which then manifests itself in the physical symptoms.

For example, in 1982, 413 students in Hong Kong believed that they were victims of a toxic gas cloud after allegedly poisoning other students at another school.

In 1983, 949 people believed in the West Bank that they were victims of a gas attack, a terrorist attack in the Middle East conflict and developed symptoms. An important role was played by newspapers warning of such attacks, Arab and Israeli doctors who were willing to accept the theory of gas attack, and Djenin Hospital, which was equally convinced of a gas attack. The trigger for the hysteria in the school was – a stinking toilet.

In 1985, more and more students at a North Carolina primary school felt dizzy, abdominal pain, and nausea after installing a new heater. The teachers suspected an infection, but there were no organic causes.

At one school in the US, 17 fourth graders and four teachers said during the first Iraq war that they were poisoned by gas. The story dragged on because one of the teachers actually had a high concentration of carbon monoxide in their blood. The infection was in all cases via observation. After some students trembled, felt bad, or thought they were “gassed,” the symptoms also began to affect other students who had seen these symptoms. At the same time they had recorded reports of a day’s events that indirectly affected them: the Middle East conflict, poison gas warnings and the Iraq war.

Rumors about vermin and venereal disease also lead to MPI. Entire blocks of flats then feel the itching and scratching of hallucinated mites and fleas or pain on the genitals as a sign of a fictional tripper. Scratching makes the skin red and inflamed, providing new evidence of the danger.

Media hypes fuel the fear of invisible risks, which are also invisible insofar as they know most people who are afraid of these risks only from the media. How big the risk really is, they can not judge, and the “dangers” are arbitrarily manipulated by the media – whether journalists downplay, dramatize or enlighten is difficult for the consumer to see through.

Reports of an attack on the WTC, bovine epidemic BSE or avian flu spread fears that sometimes caused psychogenic symptoms. For example, several studies have shown that excessive consumption of Ground Zero reports triggered post-traumatic stress syndromes.

Today, it is classic for a mass hysteria that someone feels unsettled by reports on the Internet about a new danger; then he sees a person with symptoms of an unknown illness, an ominous fever, shaking attacks, etc. and recognizes evidence of the danger. Next, he feels ill himself, develops the symptoms and infects his environment.

A susceptible brain

The mass psychoses show how closely our psyche and our body work together. So they are not a simulation, but a psychosomatic illness, so a psychogenic syndrome, but which expresses itself physically.

Ultimately, our empathy and our sophisticated brain cause such psychophysical infections; Biologically, it makes sense to articulate the same symptoms as members of our group in case of dangers. Whether the cause is fictitious or real does not matter to our organism.

We feel what other people feel, especially when we are connected to them. Just as we unconsciously take over the rituals and beliefs of our peer group (group equal), so we also share their feelings.

Our brain is not only the most advanced, but for that very reason the most unstable of all mammals, and mass hysteria shows how sensitively it translates psychic impressions into physical responses. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)

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