Mass Hysteria: From Dance Floors to Factory Floors - Miller-McCune
Throughout the years, people’s minds have played tricks on them, but oftentimes their bodies react for real.
Do you have an uncontrollable desire to jump up and dance while watching “Dancing with the Stars”? Perhaps it’s not the music and excitement, but tarantism. In the 17th century, this urge to engage in a frenzied whirling dance, accompanied by nervous bouts of melancholy and hysteria, spread widely in southern Italy. The syndrome’s name comes from an energetic dance, the tarantella, a supposed cure for the venomous bite of a tarantula.
The officially dubbed “tarantism” followed a 1518 outbreak when a woman danced for days in the streets of Strasbourg. Before long, dozens of others joined in, and within a month, this frenetic dance plague spread among hundreds of people and resulted in many deaths. To exorcise the demons thought to be causing this mass hysteria, people prayed to St. Vitus, now the patron saint of dancers. And in his honor, St. Vitus Dance became the popular name for a nervous system twitching disorder doctors know as Sydenham chorea.
What’s of interest to skeptical and critical thinkers is how such symptoms and behaviors spread like a contagion without any biological or viral sources. Lest we think these manias are relegated to medieval times, consider events in LeRoy, New York. In November 2011, six teenage girls at the local high school reported waking up with mysterious Tourette-like (or perhaps tarantist-like) symptoms of shaking, verbal tics, and twitching. By February 2012, 18 girls claimed similar symptoms. Explanations reflected people’s personal anxieties: ticks spreading Lyme disease, HPV vaccinations, fracking, and pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcal infections. Speculation concerning possibly polluted air and water even led Erin Brockovich to investigate a decades-old toxic chemical spill.
Not everyone cited their favorite bugaboo; others focused on mass psychogenic illness — mass hysteria — sometimes called “conversion disorder.” The Mayo Clinic explains conversion disorder as “a condition in which you show psychological stress in physical ways. The condition was so named to describe a health problem that starts as a mental or emotional crisis — a scary or stressful incident of some kind — and converts to a physical problem.”
New Zealand sociologist Robert Bartholomew has written extensively on mass hysteria in his books, such as Hoaxes, Myths, and Mania (co-authored with Benjamin Radford), which are packed with examples, such as reactions to Orson Welles’ infamous 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast, which included people sensing the heat from the Martian rays, choking from the gas emanating from the spaceships, and seeing flames from the fires set by the invaders. In 1944, residents of a small town in Illinois experienced nausea, burning lips, dizziness, and headaches after one woman smelled gas from a “mad gasser” supposedly stalking the area.