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In the early 1970’s, eight people checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States, complaining of hearing voices. They were all admitted, and during their hospitalizations exhibited no unusual behavior and claimed to no longer be experiencing auditory hallucinations. After stays between 7 and 52 days in the institutions, the patients were discharged and given diagnoses of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. None of these people had any mental illnesses, and had, in fact, falsified their symptoms as part of an experiment conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan (who was himself one of the “pseudopatients”). The results of the study were published in a 1973 paper in Science titled “On being sane in insane places” . In the paper Rosenhan argues that it is difficult to distinguish between “normality” and “abnormality” when it comes to mental health, and that, once applied, the label of a psychiatric diagnosis can be so strong that all of an individual’s ac...

Hysteria usually calls to mind thoughts of the Salem Witch Trials and delirious frenzies from history. However, mass hysteria, or mass psychogenic illness, is not simply an improbable, incomprehensible madness of the past. It has occurred throughout history and into our current generation, taking form as dancing plagues , dissociative possession of nuns , and involuntary twitches of high school girls in New York . Is it something they all ate? Or maybe there is something in the water… How is it that anxiety manifests itself into a dance that spreads among populations? Fear and distress terrorized populations in Medieval Europe and made them more prone to psychogenic illness . Certainly it seems there must be more to the story than merely these common denominators, for fear, anguish, stress, and trauma are commonly faced and dealt with sans mass hysteria. But the other factors needed for the exact formula of mass hysteria are difficult to pinpoint.  Is it the perfect combination o...