This Week: It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria. Monday, we looked at a French town that danced itself to death. Wednesday, your junk shrank into your body.

Today: Still Crazy After All These Years – Modern American Hysteria

It’s tempting to shrug off wild epidemics of inexplicable panic as the stuff of the uncivilized, overly superstitious or poorly educated, and conclude that mass hysteria is a fading remnant of an older, less rational past. But, of course, if that were true, the shrieking, sweat-drenched rioting of a wild-eyed, fear-addled public wouldn’t be assigned the anti-rational moniker “hysteria” and wondered over. Folks would just be like, “Oh. This again.”

In compiling modern, first-world examples of a sane public turning mental, it’s almost too easy to include Orson Welles’ 1938 nation-punking War of the Worlds radio play, during which Welles trompe l’oreille news-broadcast style collided with the looming specter of WWII to create a volatile reaction… but how about this: United States, 1962. After several dressmakers working in a textile factory began developing flu-like symptoms, the overworked employees heard rumors that a swarm of strange, poisonous insects was loose in the factory and spreading an unidentified virus through unprovoked bites. By the time the media picked up on the story, dozens were feeling dizzy, nauseas and numb. In the end, 62 people were sickened by the phantom ailment. Though some sufferers did exhibit small bug bites, others didn’t and, anyway, there’s no known species of insect capable of causing the symptoms reported. Now known as the “June Bug Incident,” the events were ruled the hysterical imaginings of over-stressed laborers.

More recently, in 1994, several hospital workers fainted, one after another, in the presence of a dying woman’s skin and blood, which the employees later alleged was emitting toxic fumes. No evidence supporting this claim was ever recovered, and while scientists have suggested a number of possible chemical causes, no one has explained why the supposed fumes only seemed to affect females, or why no evidence of a foreign substance was found at the scene.

Mass hysteria is a stark example of the power society holds over the individual human psyche. With all of their internal idiosyncrasies, preconceptions and limitations of perception, people depend on external stimuli to provide critical data about the surrounding world. In a civilized, socialized community, other people – people with those same idiosyncrasies, preconceptions and limitations – become one of the most important sources of that data. This process allows people to act and react based on the perceived needs and intentions of those around them. It’s the basis for empathy, cooperation and understanding. But when there’s a glitch in the process – a stress-induced stutter in the feedback loop or interference from the drifting ghost of some primal, forgotten neural sub-routine – that social data can become corrupted, leading to a contagious collective discomfort – a communal panic. Mass hysteria.