This Week, It’s All in Your Heads – Mass Hysteria, Rampant Psychosomaticism and Contagious Hypochondria

Today: When Mirth Turns Malady – Dancing Plagues and Laughter Epidemics

It’s 1518 in Strasbourg, France. A lone woman dances in the street, pitching and twirling, her kinetic bodily enthusiasm clashing with her wide-eyed panicked expression. By the end of the week, 34 others have joined her, all of them endlessly swaying and skipping and lurching along to irresistible, inaudible music; it’s as if they’ve been hexed by the vengeful ghost of a forgotten melody. Soon, a morass of physicians is brought in to diagnose the sudden outbreak of rug-cutting insanity. They conclude that the condition is almost certainly a blood disease curable only through continuous dancing – the afflicted must boogaloo their sickness into remission. Bands are hired. A stage is built. Three weeks later, more than 400 hundred groaning, fear-stricken bodies flail and jitter through town. This is the dancing plague of 1518, an epidemic that only ended after a majority of the participants dropped dead from heart attacks, exhaustion and strokes.

Today, the dancing plague remains an enduring medical curiosity. Doctors have suggested phenomena ranging from ergotism (poisoning via a specific psychotropic bread mold) to chorea (a then-common movement disorder resulting from rheumatism) as possible, but unlikely, culprits, while other scholars have suggested that acute religious mania could be to blame. The most rationally palatable explanation seems to be Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI), a form of mass hysteria catalyzed by extended periods of widespread psychological stress – exactly the type of stress that Strasbourg endured throughout the fifteen-teens as a result of unprecedented famine, disease and, of course, religious torment from that incorrigible Roman Empire.

Frustratingly incomprehensible outbreaks of manic behavior, especially among superstitious or fervently religious populations, are not uncommon. In 1962, three Tanzanian schoolgirls began to laugh uncontrollably. The chorus of inexplicable guffawing spread to the girls’ classmates, who passed it along to their families, who managed to reduce over 1,000 individuals to gasping, rib-tickled jumbles of exhausted, teary-eyed chortling. A combination of village-wide quarantines and time eventually felled the laughing sickness, but to this day no definitive cause has been discovered.

These are just two examples of bizarre socially contagious mental illnesses, and the exacting power of mind over matter that allows them to propagate. Come back Wednesday for a closer look at the hows and whys of mass hysteria, this time in the delightful form of Genital Retraction Syndrome.