Stuff You Should Know - What is Collective Hysteria?

Episode Date: November 20, 2014

Throughout the history of the world, there have been many cases of what is known as collective hysteria - groups of people, usually young women, who all exhibit the same physical symptoms of non-existent conditions. Is it psychosomatic? Is it group think? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me, as always, is Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry's over there

to the left, and that makes this stuff you should know. Got the A-team in the hissy. I call face. What? Oh, I'm face. Well, of course you're face, look at you. I would be a combination of Murdock and Mr. T, I think. Yeah.

Well, your hair is kinda spiky in the middle today. Yeah, Jerry, I don't know what she'd be. I guess she'd be the leader, she'd be Hannibal. Oh yeah, you know? She's smoking a cigar right now. And wearing a black glove. When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry? That's weird.

Very timely. I said A-team, I don't wanna slag off, guess producer, no, he's not exactly B-team. No. We'll just call herself the OGs. Okay. Now that we have that established, we are the OGs.

That's right. We need bowling shirts that say as much on the bat. You feeling good? I'm feeling nauseous and dizzy. Oh, well, Chuck, did you happen to see somebody else who is nauseous and dizzy? Well, Jerry was last week, and then a few more people in the office,

so I just figured we all had the same thing. All right, I'm gonna diagnose this. Okay. It's called collective hysteria. Also known, I think more appropriately, is mass psychogenic disorder. Yeah. I think when you add the word hysteria to this,

it takes on certain dimensions that a lot of people could find very objectionable. Sure. You know, hysterics, hysteria, it's like... Dogs and cats living together. Yeah, but I think it has a definite gender-specific connotation to it from over the years. Like women were supposedly very hysterical,

so the idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical under any circumstances is kind of, it's had amount to panning them on the head. Yeah, here, nice lady. You're just a little hysterical. You just go calm down and bake something. Right, yeah. Stop being crazy.

Yeah. You know, mass psychogenic disorder instead is just kind of like, whoa, your brain just did something pretty neat. Yeah. And that is the case for mass psychogenic disorder, if you ask me. In this article, Chuck, written by Jacob Silverman.

Jeopardy champion. Yeah, well, yeah. Yeah, you won on Jeopardy. That makes him a champion, right? Yeah, I think so. He wasn't like the ultimate champion, but he won a couple of episodes. Right, which is why they should have a word for,

I guess like champion is like the one who won it all. Ken Jennings. Yeah, or Watson. Who's that? The IBM computer. Oh, yeah. Sure. So Jeopardy winner, Jacob Silverman,

wrote this article years back and he did a pretty great job of citing a contemporary outbreak of mass psychogenic disorder that had been going on around that time down in Mexico, down Mexico, way in Chaco, Mexico at a boarding school there. It apparently was a girls boarding school. And the girls that went to school, they were ages 12 to 17.

And all of a sudden, they started, well, there was an outbreak, a weird outbreak. There was vomiting, I believe, trouble walking. There was fever. Yeah. That's weird. Nausea. And so the people running this boarding school

were like, what's going on? This is not good. Yeah. And they had no idea. The girls went on Christmas break for 10 days, came back and the thing just took off again like wildfire. Yeah, 600 of the 3,600 girls showed these symptoms and nobody could figure it out.

They did a lot of tests. They brought in people to like check out the facilities and because as you'll see, there's a trend there. You know, here in the West, they start to blame it usually on like environmental poisoning of some kind. Right. You know, there's some sort of toxin present

that has poisoned everybody. But they didn't find anything there. And eventually, they said this is, what'd you call it, psychosomatic? Mass psychogenic disorder. Okay, mass psychogenic disorder. But no, that is one of the names. Mass psychogenic disorder, collective hysteria,

mass hysteria, or mass psychosomatic reaction. Yeah. They're all saying the same thing. They are. Which is you're not. Well, I'm about to say you're not really sick, but that is not exactly true because that's one thing that differentiates this

from something that's just in your head is you actually do manifest physical symptoms. Right, yeah. There's this article written by a MD named Timothy F. Jones from the Tennessee Department of Health, way back in the heady days of 2000, the year 2000, the future. Wow.

And he writes that if you are experiencing mass psychogenic disorder, it is not just in your head that the symptoms that you have are actually very real. Even though there's no toxic cause, they couldn't find some sort of environmental poisoning or anything like that. The symptoms are extremely real. Yeah.

It's just psychosomatic. It's just basically the brain has been tricked into causing this response. Yeah, and this has happened, they've documented about 80 cases throughout history and apparently the National Institutes of Health gets about two cases per week reported. But...

Which is, I mean, that's way more common than you would think, you know? Yeah, I would think there'd be more than 80 because I mean, these have happened, if you go back and look at, I mean, there's all sorts of crazy lists on the internet about these cases that date back to like the 14th century. Medieval dancing mania was one of them?

Yeah, the dancing plague? Yeah. Yeah, that's in there. The Salem witchcraft trials? Sure. Or the Salem witchcraft, I guess, what led to the trials was supposedly attributed to this kind of thing.

Yeah, one weird thing about this condition is more times than not, it affects females. Yeah. And young females, even more specifically, teenagers or even younger. Which is, as far as it goes right now, inexplicable. And it's kind of a prickly issue, you know? Like, again, you kind of come back

to the idea of calling it hysteria. Yeah. You know, the fact that it does tend to afflict women or girls more than boys is apparently one means of diagnosing psychogenic disorder, mass psychogenic disorder. Yeah, that's like one of the first things we'll say is like all this sickness is happening in this place,

the school, wherever, and the doctor will say, is it a bunch of girls? Yeah. And then that will clue them in that, hey, this might be what we're dealing with here. And, but the problem is, is no one has any idea why. And there have been explanations of things like, I guess girls, this is girls' culturally acceptable outlet

for raging against the patriarchy. Sure. Even if they don't necessarily feel that that's what they're doing, this is their, this is the symptoms of that. That's one. Yeah, I thought this was a pretty interesting part. What article, was that from Slate?

There was, yeah, one called mass hysteria in upstate New York by Ruth Graham was on Slate. That was a good one. It was a really good one, and we'll get to that case in a sec, but I thought it was pretty interesting. In one part it says, and this is a quote from someone writing about something,

and said, in form, if not in conscious intent, it is to protest the sexual repressiveness rigid double standard of female teen culture. But they were writing about betel mania, which is interesting, because it sort of has a similar vibe of young ladies being repressed, not having an outlet,

and so they see the Beatles and they go berserk and faint and cry and scream collectively. Whereas boys, they're more prone to just act out if they're not feeling good. Girls are trained to keep things inward. And they also point out that ladies and young ladies are more prone to seek a doctor's help for something. They say that may account for the bias right there.

Like guys just won't go to the doctor. Exactly. You have to be careful though in just diagnosing mass psychogenic disorder. You physicians out there who are listening that encounter a case like this, just by basing it on the fact that it is affecting more girls than boys,

because there's at least one case in Great Britain where I think girls were afflicted by more than half, more than double the number of girls were afflicted by this. And it turned out that they were tainted cucumbers being served in the lunch room. Yeah, and everyone knows boys hate cucumbers. And so I mean- So they didn't eat anything.

Right, but this is one of the issues with dealing with mass psychogenic disorder, in that it looks and acts a lot like some sort of weird epidemic. That basically it looks like either something like bioterrorism, a rapidly spreading infection, or affection if it's fetal mania,

and then acute toxic exposure. That's what it looks like. It's like one person gets sick. This is your index case. And all of a sudden, everyone around them suddenly has the same symptoms. Yeah, and it's like you said, it's super dangerous to just dismiss that as,

oh, it's all in your head, silly little ladies. You can't do that, because what if it is something for real? But it's also a double-edged sword, as that doctor pointed out. You start ordering batteries of tests, and it can go both ways. It can, what the old saying is,

if you order enough tests, you're gonna find something. So it can fuel that fire, but you also can't not run any tests and just dismiss it. So it's a very fine line that physicians walk when dealing with stuff like this, for sure. Indeed. Apparently, study of mass psychogenic disorder has found that it's more prevalent in isolated communities

and in situations where there are highly rigid, formalized, structured rules. Like a Catholic school in Mexico. Exactly. Or again, Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century. Yeah. And apparently between 1973 and 1993, half of all the outbreaks of psychogenic illness

took place in schools. Oh yeah. So that's possibly in part due to kids being susceptible to it more. Right. But also because of that rigid, formalized structure. Yeah, and there's also usually a top-down effect. Like it'll start with a teacher or an older student

and then the younger students follow suit, which if you're talking influence, would make sense for sure. There was one very famous case. Apparently there's not very many actual academic studies on this, but there's one that came out of the New England Journal of Medicine

that described a case in 1998 in Tennessee where a teacher noticed some weird gas odor, a gassy odor, like the chemical kind. Yeah, not like the guy on the front row, Tudor. Right, exactly. And she apparently started suffering symptoms. And all of a sudden, like 180 students and teachers had to go to the emergency room.

The school was shut down for two weeks. They did all this environmental testing. Couldn't find anything. And finally traced it back to a mass psychogenic disorder, but that's what did it. And then everyone, in most of these cases, we should point out everyone starts feeling better. Yes.

Like in Mexico and then the school in Tennessee, it's not like they went on to die or anything. Yeah, so in the school in Mexico, these girls were at a boarding school. They were only allowed to see their parents, I think, like three times a year. Yeah, they couldn't even call. It sounds more like a prison.

Right, no phone calls. They were allowed letters. When they went home, immediately, their symptoms cleared up. The problem is that doesn't automatically say, oh, well, it's obviously mass psychogenic disorder. It could be an environmental toxin that they're being exposed to still at the school

and were removed from. But I think the definite prognosis is mass psychogenic disorder in this case. That's right. What we're talking about is a sort of version of the nocebo effect, which we've talked about before, and we will get into that right after this break. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called

David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikulur, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born,

it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're gonna get second-hand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars,

if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down.

Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are gonna change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the no-cebo effect, we talked about that in what?

The placebo effect? Well, that makes sense. I was trying to be more clever, but I thought we were more clever than that. No. No-cebo, I think we said in that other podcast, it was Latin for I Shall Harm. And that's basically, whereas you take a placebo,

thinking it's gonna help you out, and it does help you out, because the mind is powerful. The no-cebo effect is thinking something bad will result. Like, my teacher's getting sick, I think I feel a little sick, too. And then, oh, wait, my neighbor's feeling a little sick, I think I'm feeling a little sick, too. Or this drug trial that I'm on,

I was told that I could possibly get some sort of gastrointestinal distress. Yeah, and even though I've been given a sugar pill, I'm now going, yeah, because of my mind, because of the no-cebo effect. There was a famous experiment or case from 1886 where there was a woman who had a rose allergy, and they showed her an artificial rose,

and she began to, I guess it was convincing, and she began to have her allergic reaction, and they said, aha, it's fake, and you're faking. And she said, oh, well, I think I'm feeling better now. And supposedly, that cured her of her real allergy to real roses. Right. I couldn't find a lot to back that up,

but it is a story. Yeah, well, no, it was in, I can't remember the journal, but it was a real deal thing. And I didn't get to the bottom of why they presented this woman with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely did, and this definitely happened. And even the author of the study was saying, like, this woman, she wasn't faking.

Right. It was like she had real symptoms. Sure, hives are hives. Exactly. You can see those. I think they call it a rose cold or something like that. You can get stuffy, your eyes are watering, your nose is running, that kind of thing.

And what's interesting is some researchers have studied the nocebo effect, and they basically have isolated this chemical that gets released when the nocebo effect's going on. And again, we should say it's not just making your nose runny or releasing histamines or anything like that, it's pain too. Like you can experience pain even though nothing's

there to give you pain just because of the nocebo effect. What they found was a, I guess a hormone, I believe. Are you ready? I'm gonna try this one. Colicistokinin. That sounds great. Thanks, man. I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right.

Colicistokinin. Yeah. Do you see it now? Oh yeah, that's totally right. I totally did. It's a hormone, right? And it gets released and it actually, it helps you experience pain.

So it's a nasty little hormone. But they found in testing with the nocebo effect that if you block this, you can also block the nocebo effect. So that proves two things. Does that block pain though? Yes. Like your pain receptors?

Yes. So does that mean if you slam your hand in the door, you won't feel it? If you can block this. Wow. Yes. So if you can block Colicistokinin. Right.

Yes, it will keep you from hypersensitivity to pain, I believe. And this guy named Fabrizio Benedetti, who I think was also in the strokes, back in 1997. There was a Fabrizio, right? Yeah. He was testing out the nocebo effect

and found that if he told people that he was giving them an injection, which is a pretty cruel test, but effective. These post-op people who had just come out of surgery were given an injection and told, this injection is gonna increase your pain in 30 minutes. I'm sorry, we have to give it to you, it's part of the procedure.

Right. He gave some people an injection of saline and they reported an increase in pain. And they all went behind the two-way mirror and laughed? Right. They're like, what a chump. Quite, what? 30 minutes.

And then they gave somebody like the other group, the control group, a chemical injection that blocks that pain. But they were told that it was going to increase their pain. Right. But they were given a chemical that blocks colisistokinin and the nocebo effect didn't take place. They didn't report an increase in pain.

Even though they were told they would. Yes. Wow. So this guy's saying like, the nocebo effect is real. Yeah. Like when they say it's not just in your head, it's you're experiencing the same thing as if you're experiencing somebody stabbing you.

Well, what is real? I mean, exactly. That's when you have to start asking yourself those deep philosophical questions. Right. Interesting. There's another case that's, have you ever seen the movie Safe, the Todd Haynes movie with Julianne Moore?

No. It's from like the mid-90s. And she played a lady that started to have environmental sickness just in the air. And she's got sort of like increasingly crazy as the movie went on as far as scrubbing things and locking herself in her house and making her house a clean environment.

Sounds great. It was good. And there's a true story, though, of a lady in London named Debbie Bird. She's a health spa manager that says that she's allergic to EMF, electromagnetic fields. And it's an actual thing now. There's more than her claiming it's called ES,

electromagnetic sensitivity, where she has basically transformed her house. She painted it black. She said she's allergic to computers, cell phones, microwaves. She had her house rewired to make it basically EMF-free. She and her husband sleep under a silver-plated mosquito net to keep out radio waves and covered all our windows

with protective films. And she said she's feeling a lot better now. So I saw that ES, electromagnetic sensitivity, that if you expose somebody to an electromagnetic field and then just tell them that you are and don't, they have the same reaction, which we'd suggest that it's nocebo. Well, it's super fascinating because you

see cases like this from that to like gluten sensitivity becoming a big thing now. And some people contend that, well, it's maybe a collective hysteria going on. And if you think you're going to be sensitive to gluten, then you're going to be sensitive to things that contain gluten. And I'm not saying that, people, because that's a very hot topic.

Sure it is. But some people have claimed that. Well, we'll talk a little bit more about things that exacerbate the mass psychogenic disorder and the nocebo effect right after this. On the podcast, Paydude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the co-classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends,

and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio

app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology. But from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has

been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, major league baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious

show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So Chuck, back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called L-Troxen. It was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's a hormone replacement drug. And it was the only one that the government would pay for. So most people who were on this hormone replacement therapy were using L-Troxen. And it had been that way for decades.

It was just an established drug. GlaxoSmithKline. What was it for, though? Hormone replacement. GlaxoSmithKline, I think just those. There's no welcome involved. Changed just the outer, the inert qualities of it, like the shape of the pill, the color.

And I think that's about it. But the active ingredient was exactly the same in 2007. And when they released it, all of a sudden, some reports of bad side effects were starting to trickle in. And the government was like, wait, what's going on here? It got a little bit of media attention. And more reports started trickling in. And then the media attention grew.

And the reports grew and grew. And apparently, the reporting of adverse effects of L-Troxen increased 2,000-fold in a year and a half. Because of the look of the pill? Because of the look of the pill. They went back and studied this. And they found that in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse effects being

reported for L-Troxen, the more adverse effects were being reported in that area. And that kind of reveals one of the risk factors for mass psychogenic disorder is the media. It's actually spread through the media most easily. Yeah, they have a point, though. I mean, I know in this article, too, it points out that pills that are blue and green

are usually associated with drowsiness. Pills that are orange or yellow are not. And I don't know if that's why they market it that way, or if it's the opposite, as we just see it that way, because of products like Nyquil and Dayquil. But the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue. And the one that keeps you awake, or that keeps you awake, but doesn't make you drowsy is orange.

I thought about it. I think, I mean, what do you associate with, like, daytime, sunrise, yellow, orange, red? It totally makes sense. What do you associate with nighttime? Like, something tranquil like blue. Yeah, Scotch amber. Yeah, I mean, you think of, that's what I think it came from.

I think the pills came after the association, rather than the other way around. Yeah, I think I even, like, when I get a prescription for something, when I see the pill, I make a judgment on it before I've even had it, just by saying, well, look at that thing. Or that, yeah, that's a horse pill, or that's a capsule with, you know, powdery stuff inside.

That's different than the chalky one. I think you just make an association. I don't think I have any preconceived notions on what a larger pill will do to me, or a capsule will do to me, other than a tablet. But I think it's interesting, though, how you make these judgment calls. But without even thinking about it.

Yeah, totally. You know, I mean, like, you probably don't sit there and look at a pill in your hand. You just take it and just make some sort of almost unconscious judgments about it. Yeah, it may remind you of another pill that helps you, that you're not even remembering. Exactly.

So that would be placebo. Yeah. That's great. No SIBO effect. Not great. No, and it poses a lot of problems. For instance, there was a study, I think, in the 90s that found that women who

believed that they were prone to heart disease were four times likelier to die of heart disease than women who didn't believe they were prone to it, even though they had all the exact same risk factors, basically the same risk factors. There was nothing differentiating these women, aside from a belief that they were going to die from heart disease, or a belief that they weren't.

Yeah. And that led to a four-fold increase in deaths from that. Just basically from a belief is what it suggests. Yeah. Well, it's sort of like the, I know it's kind of cheesy, but the PMA, the Positive Mental Attitude, I think we all know someone who walks around, so and so sick, oh, I know I'm going to get it.

I just know I'm going to get sick, or I just know I'm going to get cancer because it runs in my family. That I think that has an effect on things. I have to agree. I know some of our more skeptical listeners are pulling their hair out right now, but I totally agree with you.

When we did our show in Toronto, on the way back, Yumi and I flew out of Buffalo. And I was feeling a little down, but at the point where I feel like you can talk yourself into staying healthy, Positive Mental Attitude, I guess is what you call it, PMA. But we were leaving right at about dusk, and the sun was just beaming through the windows

and illuminating every single microbe, visible microbe, in the air, I could see them just going into my nose, my mouth, and I'm like, I couldn't stop. I was like, I'm not going to get sick, I'm not going to get sick, and man, did I ever get sick. But I noticed that right when we took off, and no, you know what it was? Somebody shut one of their window covers.

Yeah, yeah, the shade. Shade exactly is the word that I was looking for. Somebody shut their shade, and I couldn't see it anymore, and I immediately started to feel less symptomatic. Wow. Immediately, it was like turning off a light. Yeah. And I still got sick, but I was just drowning

in basically what my brain was interpreting is like being assaulted by foreign invaders, which I am all the time, but I normally can't see them. Yeah, well, I do that all the time when I open my curtains in the bedroom, and in the morning, I'll see that stuff in the air, and I just think, oh man, that's what I'm walking around. Breathing in every day.

Dog hair, and cat hair, and Emily hair. So your lungs are just chock-full of it. So one of the problems this poses, Chuck, for physicians is that we expect doctors, or we want doctors, to be transparent, to not lie to us. Yeah, we've talked a lot about this lately, I feel like. Yeah, we've talked a lot about diseases. Some of our hypochondriac listeners have been like,

please stop talking about diseases, because now I've got morgolans. I'm going to have some sort of toxic exposure. Toxic plasmosis. Yeah, and then very soon, leprosy. Spoiler. So the problem is, is if you tell somebody that's going into surgery, hey, by the way,

you might have trouble walking, you might feel nauseous for the next six months. All this stuff that could be associated with, which we demand from our doctors, it's been shown that if you are fearful or in despair going into surgery, that's associated with longer healing times and a higher risk of postoperative infection. So if you have the nocebo effect where doctors are saying,

OK, if I tell somebody, and it's been proven time after time, that in drug trials, people who are still are given placebo will drop out of drug trials because they're experiencing these negative side effects, even though they're given the sugar pill. So if you're a doctor and you know that you are telling somebody something that ultimately may end up harming them, and you've sworn an oath to do no harm,

you've got a conundrum going on right now. And that's what the nocebo effect poses. It's the problem the nocebo effect poses for modern physicians. Like, how much should they tell you if you're going to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for six months, even though they probably won't, should you tell them and give them a chance to basically have the psychosomatic symptom?

Or tell them they're going to feel great. Well, that's another one. Somebody says the solution to this is just frame it differently. Like, don't say there's a chance you're going to have nausea for six months, say half of a percent of patients who go through the same procedure that you're about to go through have nausea for six months, 99.5% don't.

You're giving them the same information, it's just frame more positively. Yeah, and that one doctor who wrote the article on Collective Hysteria said what he recommends is not naming the illness. He said that can help out because as soon as you give something a name, then it just instantly you have something you can call it and everyone's calling it that or the media picks up on it and it's a thing.

Yeah, and that's actually, again, one of the risk factors in the spread of mass psychogenic illness is the larger the response, the emergency medical response to it, and then hence the larger the media response to it, the larger the outbreak tends to be. It's called line of sight exposure. Just knowing somebody is sick or seeing somebody sick can give you the same symptoms.

I'm sure if you see a news story that all the other news agencies are running that says there's been some weird chemical leak in the air in Atlanta, people are going to start walking around and coughing and saying, I'm not feeling so good. I have a bitter taste in my mouth. There's microbes everywhere. Well, here's a case from that article you sent that I think

is super fascinating, the one in upstate New York. Because it is not a rash or a cough or nausea. It is Tourette syndrome, a 16-year-old young lady named Lori Bronwell. What year was this? A couple of years ago? Yeah, not too long ago. I think 2012.

In Corinth, New York was at her school's homecoming dance in lost consciousness. This is after she had banged at a concert. Sorry, man. I thought you were going to leave out like the best part. Yeah, she was head banging at a concert. I wish I knew what concert that was. Me too.

I didn't find it anywhere. Apparently passed out there and had passing outfits. Involuntary twitching and clapping started, twisting her hair, fluttering her fingers. Hey, hey, hey. Starting stuff like that. And the doctor said, you know what? You've got Tourette syndrome.

So Tourette syndrome is we've had a podcast on it. It's a real thing. It's not psychosomatic. But since that time, 14 other students, along with her, 13 girls and one boy, started exhibiting at Leroy Junior High School. I'm sorry, Junior Senior High School, started coming down with Tourette's.

Right, which is not contagious. It is not contagious at all. Erin Brockovich got on the case. Famous environmental activist. And she said, no, I think this has got to do with this train derailment from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town. And I didn't see where they found any legitimate effects.

Right, again, that's the confounding thing about mass psychogenic disorder is that it is still possible that there is some weird toxin in the environment that is causing this. Like maybe there was exposure to cyanide that got in these people's brains and all gave them Tourette. And if you stand back and look at it, you're like Tourette syndrome isn't contagious.

That doesn't mean that you can't all come down with Tourette syndrome from exposure to a toxin. It's just still, it's this X factor that's out there that you can't just necessarily rule out with confidence. Yeah, and I believe in that case, too, that those 14 students didn't end up with Tourette syndrome. That was a good episode, man. Love Tourette syndrome, one.

Yeah, that's an oldie, oldie with a goodie. And it all came from head banging. That's how it started at a Nickelback show. Yeah, because Corinth is near Canada. Canada doesn't let Nickelback out any longer. Oh, really? Are they caged in there? Yeah.

Nice. There's another case of the toxic lady. Do you hear this one? In Riverside, California, a woman named Gloria Ramirez, she was dubbed the toxic lady in 1994. She had cervical cancer and was being treated. And all the medical staff started to get sick that was treating her.

This sounds gross, but they said her body exuded a garlicky fruity smell, and her blood had flecks of what looked like paper, which sounds kind of like morgulons, actually. Nice. You like that? Yeah. And they said that most of the people that got sick

while treating her were women, more women than men. And they all took blood tests and came back normal, and the health department said, mass hysteria. So that's funny, because I looked. I remembered that story, and I was like, I wonder if that was mass hysteria. And I looked it up, and I found that no, it was an environmental toxic.

Oh, it was? That's what I found. So they called it mass hysteria at the time, and then later found out? I think like a year or two later, she was using some sort of salve or something on her skin, and they think that an interactive with her biochemistry and really did produce a toxic gas.

She said it may be this fruit-garlic salve. Right, exactly. That's interacting badly with my pancreas. Oh, well, this list needs to be updated. That is a fascinating case. It is. People got really sick from that. I think I remember hearing about that, too.

Well, I'm glad they found a real cause in that case. From what I understand, but that's the point. You can say, well, obviously, women were more affected than men, right? Well, is that because there's more women in the nursing profession, and there were more nurses in the room? Yeah, maybe.

There's a lot of different things you have to take into account before you just write it off. Sometimes it is real, like sick building syndrome. Yeah. That's a tough one, because after the OPEC oil embargo, apparently, people started designing buildings to be more airtight. So your ventilation system was really important,

and these buildings haven't aged necessarily very well. So the ventilation system is not doing what it's supposed to any longer. And so they think, possibly, that's leading to what we know as sick building syndrome, which is malaise. It's when you don't feel good when you go to work. Exactly, which is everybody.

But some studies have found, no, that is the better predictor of sick building syndrome is job stress or job dissatisfaction. If you have a building full of people who don't like their jobs, you're going to have a building full of people with sick building syndrome. But if you go on to say a local government's website or whatever, and you look at sick building syndrome,

it's treated as a real thing. Yeah, well, it definitely affects your gastrointestinal, like stress does. Also, apparently, it can set off bouts of asthma, which is another reason why they think it might have something to do with volatile organic compounds in the ventilation system or new carpeting, that kind of stuff. Yeah, off-gassing, man.

You smell that stuff when you open up a new product, right? There's also the dancing plate, which we mentioned briefly. Tell me about it. Frau Trophia, July 14, 1518, went out on the streets of Strasbourg, France, and started dancing, even though there was no music, and dancing like a maniac for three straight days. And all these people started dancing with her,

saying this is a good time. Said within a month, 100 people were dancing with her and couldn't stop. And hyperventilating, hallucinating, some dropped dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion. And the authority said, let's just hire a band and let them dance it out, because they've got the hot blood, is what they called it.

And so they did. And a lot of people died as a result. And it said 400 people in the end were struck. I don't think they died, but were dancers. And then it just stopped. And that's when a lot of people blame on ergot poisoning, which we've mentioned before. Always go with ergot poisoning.

Yeah, back then. Those people were clearly tripping on something. They got the hot blood. But what it sounds like you just described is basically how Tom Hanks invented jogging in the 70s. Yogging? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

He just started running, and people started following him. I wish that part had been cut out of that movie. Oh, really? Yeah, I thought that it was a weird thing that should have been on the editing room floor. They really kind of derail things for a while for me. Yeah. I don't think that movie's aged well, though.

I haven't seen it in forever. Other people say, though, that it was Sid and Ham's chorea, disorder linked to strep throat and rheumatic fever that causes dance like twitches. And then, of course, modern medical historians say it was mass psychosis. I would go with that one. Yeah, but back then it made more sense, though,

when during the Salem witch trials, and before they knew anything about medicine, and you could just say you got the hot blood, or you're having the fits, like these modern cases. Or the devil's possessed you? Yeah, exactly. These modern cases are the ones that really freak me out, because so much is explainable now.

Here's the thing, Chuck. We've always explained it with something that comes easily to mind. So back in the day before science and medicine, it was the devil possessing you. And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they thought that the devil was there in town and possessing people in the same way that you're

freaked out by the idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a trained derailment from 1970. Or betel mania. Just exactly, which is the deadliest of all the manias. But it's just as real. To the experiencer. And it all comes down to people just basically being sick of the establishment and letting loose for a while.

Don't want to go to work. So I'll dance. You got anything else? No, sir. If you want to know more about collective hysteria, which is the name of this article, type those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com, and it will bring it up. And I said search bar, which means it's time for listener mail.

I'm going to call this episode on grief. We got a lot of great feedback, and they continue to roll in. Hey guys, just stumbled upon your podcast through my tune in radio app. I guess that's a mini plug. We're available there now. I've devoured almost all of the 600 plus shows. I may be a new listener, but I'm already a lifelong fan.

So what I'm writing in, guys, is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. It was a rough time because as a fraternal twin, me being the boy, I looked at her not only as a sister, but as a mother and friend too. Long story short, I wanted to comment on the grief show some time ago. I've dealt with my grief through my artwork.

I'm a small town artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, and I rarely can get noticed or any attention with my art. I wanted to share my new piece. I've just finished after listening to how comic books work. I'm a huge fan of Marvel Comics, and I hope you both enjoy this. And he sent this really cool. I think it was like every member of the Marvel universe had to be in this picture that he did.

I didn't see that one. It's really, really neat. Just jam-packed full of Marvel comic heroes and villains. So Josh and Chuck, thanks for the inspiration, laughs in getting through every day at the office. PS, my twin, Jessica, passed away from epilepsy, actually, a condition called Sudep, sudden unexplained death of epilepsy.

My mother is trying to raise awareness because November is Epilepsy Awareness Month. So if you guys wouldn't mind mentioning this on the show, she would be so happy for that. Also, an epilepsy show would be cool, too. Not a lot is discussed about it. And that is Jason Flack. And Jason wrote you back that is heartbreaking about your twin

sister. Very sorry to hear that. And we will definitely do a show on epilepsy. And since this is November, though, people should go out and find out what they can during National Epilepsy Month. Yeah, and we'll follow up with the show. I don't know if it'll be in November,

but we'll get to that one for sure. And thanks for that piece of art. And if anyone's interested in a great comic book artist from Johnson City, Tennessee, it could be a lot worse than Jason Flack. Jason, thank you very much for sharing that with everybody. That means a lot to us. If you want to share with us and all of our listeners out

there, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com. You should know. You can send us an email with attached artwork to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. MUSIC

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