SYSK Gets Weird Playlist: What is Collective Hysteria?

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie To Me. I'm Lexi Juanio, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my food days, I've lived it all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, and welcome to. The stuff you should know gets weird playlists. This is another one of our quarterly playlists everyone that we compile. Because we found that people like us sort of grouping things and bucketing things and cataloging things into groups of 10 to 12. And I think we have 11 of them this time out. And we're getting started this week with the inaugural episode of The Stuff You Should Know gets weird playlists with our episode "What is collective hysteria?" So please give a listen and enjoy! Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from howstuffworks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me as always as Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And Jerry's over there to the left. And that makes the stuff you should know. Got the 18 in the hissy. I call face. What? Oh, I'm face. Oh, of course you're face, look at you. I would be a combination of Murdoch and Mr. T and me. Yeah. Your hair is kind of 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. Wearing a black glove. When did you start smoking cigars, Jerry? That's weird. Very timely. I said 18. I don't want to slag off, guess producer Noel. He's not exactly B team. No. We'll just call ourselves 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. Yeah. So I just figured we all had the same thing. All right. I'm going to 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 ticks 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 hysterical. So the idea of diagnosing somebody as hysterical under any circumstances. It's kind of a tad amount to panning, panning them on the head. Yeah. Here, nice lady. Right. You're just a little hysterical. You just go calm down and bake something. Right. Yeah. Stop being crazy. Yeah. No, 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 Serviman. Jeopardy champion. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he 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 episodes. Right. Which is why they should have a word for a set. I guess like the 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 Serviman 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 Chalco, Mexico, at a boarding school there. It apparently was a girls boarding school. And the girls that went to school there were ages 12 to 17. And all of a sudden they started, well, there was an outbreak. Yeah. A weird outbreak. Vomiting, I believe. Trouble walking. There was fever. Yeah. That's weird. Nasha. And so the people running this boarding school were like, what's it 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. And 3600 girls showed these symptoms, and nobody could figure it out. They did a lot of tests. They brought in people to check out the facilities, because as you'll see, there's a trend there. Here in the West, they start to blame it usually on environmental poisoning of some kind. Right. There's some sort of toxin present that is poisoned everybody. But they didn't find anything there. And eventually, they said this is, what do you call it, psychosomatic, mass psychogenic disorder. Okay. Mass psychogenic disorder. But no, that is one of the names of it. 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 was 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 head he days of 2000, you're 2000, the future. Wow. And he writes that you, 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 list 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 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 is 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. But 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. 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 symptoms of that. That's one. Yeah. I thought this was a pretty interesting part. Articles. Is that from slate? There was, yeah, one called the massac area 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 beetle 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 beetles 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. Right. Like guys just won't go to the doctor. Exactly. You have to be careful though. And 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 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 there were tainted cucumbers being served in the lunch room. - Yeah, and everyone knows boys hate cucumbers. - And so I mean, this is-- - So they didn't need it. - Right, but this is one of the issues with dealing with mass like a genetic disorder, and that it looks and acts a lot like some sort of weird epidemic. That basically, it looks like either something like bioterism, a rapidly spreading affection, infection, or affection, if it's a 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 'cause what if it is something for real. But it's also a double edged sword. Is that doctor pointed out you start ordering batteries of test and it can go both ways. It can, what the old saying is, if you order enough tests, you're gonna find something. - Right. - 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, it 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 tuted. - 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 shut down for two weeks. They did all this environmental testing, couldn't find anything. And finally traced it back to psychogenic, a mass psychogenic disorder, but that's what didn't. - 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 foreign schools. - No foreign calls, they were allowed letters. When they went home, immediately their symptoms cleared up. - Yeah. - The problem is that it doesn't automatically say, "Oh, well, it's obviously mass psychogenic disorder." It could be an environmental toxin that they are being exposed to still at the school. And we're 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 no-sebo effect, which we've talked about before and we will get into that right after this break. (upbeat music) - Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. - Oh my God, Lexi. I'm Lexi Iwaneo, we're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. - And I'm Lisa Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not gonna get any of your fighting. - That is wild. I learned that about you today. - Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. - If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. - We're gonna talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. - We're best friends, but we don't always agree. - Because you told us how accommodating you are. - Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Don't lie to me. - Liar. - Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I don't really care. (upbeat music) - So the no-cebo effect, we talked about that, and what? The placebo effect? - Oh, well, that makes sense. - Yeah. - I was trying to be more clever. We were more clever than that. - No. - No-cebo, I think we said in that other podcast too, is 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, "Ah-ha, 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's a, I mean, it was in, I can't remember the journal, but it was really nice. - Oh, yeah, it was a real deal. - Yeah, it was a real thing, and I didn't get to the bottom of why they presented this woman with a fake rose or whatever, but they definitely didn't. 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 or hives. - Exactly, you can see those. I think they call it a rose cold or something like that. You can get, you know, 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 effects going on. And again, we should say it's not just making your nose run or you're releasing his means 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 going to try this one. Cola Sisto Kinnon. - That sounds great. - Thanks, man. - I haven't looked at the word, but it sounds right. - Cola Sisto Kinnon. - Yeah. - Do you see it now? - Oh yeah, that's totally right. I totally did. So 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 receptor? - Yes. - So does that mean if you slam your hand in a door, you won't feel it? - If you can block this. - Wow. - Yes. - If you can block Cola Sisto Kinnon. - 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 left. - Right, yeah. - They're like, what? It's showing white watch. - You look at him, right? - 30 minutes. And then they gave somebody, like the other group, control group, a chemical in injection that blocks that pain, but they were told that it was going to increase their pain, but they were given a chemical that blocks, colosistokinin, and the notes of SIBO 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 no SIBO effect is real. When they say it's not just in your head, you're experiencing the same thing as if you were experiencing somebody stabbing you. Well, what it is real, you know, 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 Julian 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, you know, there's more than her claiming it's called ES, electro-magnetic 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 cover all her 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 would suggest that it's no SIBO. Well, it's super fascinating because you see cases like this, from that to like gluten sensitivity, becoming a big thing now and people, 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 no SIBO effect right after this. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my god, Lexi, we have a new podcast. I'm Lexi, you want to wear two bus friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. I'm not gonna get any words I'm fighting. That is wild. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Lie. I don't really care. Chuck, back in 2007 in New Zealand, a drug called El Troxon. It was a pretty widespread drug in New Zealand. It's a hormone replacement drug. It was the only one that the government would pay for. Most people who were on this hormone replacement therapy were using El Troxon. It had been that way for decades. It was just an established drug. GlaxoSmithCline. What was it for, though? Hormone Replacement. GlaxoSmithCline, I think just those, there's no welcome involved, changed just the outer, the inner 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. 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 El Troxon increased 2,000 fold in a year and a half, because of the look of the pill. Because of the look of the pill. Yeah. They went back and studied this. And they found that in areas where there was more reporting about these adverse effects being reported for El Troxon. 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 know in this article, too, it points out that pills that are blue and green are usually associated with drowsiness. Yeah. 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, we just see it that way because of products like Nyquil and Dequeville. Right. But the one that makes you sleepy is green and blue, and the one that keeps you awake or doesn't make you drowsies orange. I thought about it. I think, I mean, what do you associate with daytime, sunrise, yellow, orange? It totally makes sense. What do you associate with nighttime? Like something tranquil? Like blue. Yeah. Yeah. Scotch, 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. 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 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. Yeah. No placebo 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-time, four-fold increase in deaths from that. Yeah. 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 of mental attitude, I think we've all known someone who walks around, oh, so-and-so sick. Oh, I know I'm going to get it. Right. I just know I'm going to get sick or, you know, I just know I'm going to get cancer because it runs with my family. I think that hasn't effect on things. I have to agree. I know some of our more skeptical listeners who are pulling their hair out right now, but I totally agree with you. Yeah. When we did our show in Toronto on the way back at you, me and I flowed out a buffalo. Uh-huh. And I was feeling a little down, but like at the point where I feel like you can talk yourself into staying healthy. Yeah. Yeah. Positive mental attitude, I guess. Sure. 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. Oh, no. Micro visible microbe in the air. Yeah. I could see them like just going into my nose and my mouth. And I'm like, oh, no, I couldn't stop. Like I couldn't, I was like, I'm not going to get sick. I'm not going to get sick and man, did I ever get sick? Yeah. But I noticed that right when we took off and no, you know what it was, somebody shut one of their, their window covers. Yeah. Yeah. The shade. Shade. Exactly. It's the word that I was looking for. Oh, 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. Sure. But I normally can't see them. Yeah. Well, I've done, I do that all the time when I open my curtains in the bedroom and I'll see you in the morning. I'll see that stuff in the air. And I just think, Oh, man, that's what I'm walking around. Right. Breathing in. Breathing in. dog hair and cat hair and Emily hair so your lungs are just chock full of it so one of the 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 hypokondriac listeners have been like please stop talking about diseases because now I've got morgolons I'm gonna have like some sort of toxic exposure yeah toxic plasma yeah and then very soon leprosy spoiler so the the problem is is if you tell somebody that's going into surgery hey by the way you know you you might have trouble walking yeah you might feel nauseous for the next six months you like all this stuff that could be associated with which we demand from our doctors yeah 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 post operative infection yeah right so if you have the nocebo effect where doctors are saying okay if I tell somebody and it's been proven time after time yeah 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 right so if you're a doctor and you you know that you are telling somebody something that ultimately may end up harming them and yet you've sworn an oath to do no harm you've got a conundrum going on right now yeah 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 right if you're going to tell somebody that they're going to feel nauseous for six months even though they probably won't yeah should you tell them and give them a chance to to basically have the psychosimony 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 right 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 percent don't right you're giving them the same information it's just frame more positively yeah and that one doctor who wrote the article on collectivist area said what he recommends is not naming the illness yeah said that can help out because as soon as you give something a name then it just instantly you know you have something you can call it and everyone's calling it that or the media picks up on it right and it's a thing yeah and that's actually again one of the one of the risk factors in the spread of mess like a genetic illness is the larger the response the emergency medical response to it yeah and then hence the larger the media response to it the larger the outbreak tends to be it's called line of sight exposure yeah just knowing somebody is sick or seeing somebody sick can give you the same symptoms i'm sure if you see a new 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 gonna start walking around and coughing right and saying yeah 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 yeah because it is not a rash or um a cough or nausea it is Tourette syndrome uh sixteen-year-old um young lady named Lori Bronwell uh what year was this a couple of years ago yeah not too long ago i think 2012 um and Corinth new york um was at her school's homecoming dance and lost consciousness um this is after she she had banged at a concert sorry man i thought you're gonna leap out like the best part yeah she was head banging at a concert i wish i knew what concert that was so bad me too i didn't find it anyway uh apparently passed out there and had passing outfits uh involuntary twitching and clapping started twisting her hair fluttering her fingers uh hey hey hey starting stuff like that yeah and the doctor said you know what you've got Tourette syndrome so Tourette syndrome is is uh we've had a podcast on it's a real thing it's not psychosomatic um but uh since that time 14 other students along with her 13 girls and one boy started exhibiting at loroid junior high school i'm sorry junior senior high school uh started coming down with Tourette's right which is not contagious it is not contagious at all um Aaron Brockovich got on the case um famous environmental activist and she said now i think this has got to do with this train derailment from 1970 that dumped cyanide all over this town right um and i didn't see where they found any uh legitimate effects right again that's the confounding thing about mass like a genetic 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 gotten these people's brains and all gave them Tourette and if you stand back and look at it you're like do you 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 com yeah and i believe in that case too the um 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 yeah oldie but a goodie and all came from head banging that's how it started that mess at a nickelback show yeah because Corinth is near canada canada doesn't let nickel back out any longer oh really are they caged in there yeah nice uh there's another case of the toxic lady do you hear this one and Riverside California woman named Gloria Ramirez um yeah she was dubbed the toxic lady in 1994 she had cervical cancer was being treated and all the medical staff started to get sick that was treating her um this sounds gross but they said her body exuded a garlicky fruity smell and her blood had uh flex of what looked like paper um which sounds kind of like morgolons actually nice you like that yeah um and they said that most of the people that got sick while treating her were women uh more women than men and they all took blood test 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 sav or something on her skin and they think that it interacted with her biochemistry and really did produce toxic gas she said it maybe this fruit garlic saff right exactly that's interacting badly with my pancreas oh well uh this list needs to be updated that that do that is a fascinating case it is and people got really sick from that I think I remember hearing about that too yeah well I'm glad they found a real cause in that case from what I understand but that's that's that's the point like right you can say well obviously there's women were more effective than men yeah 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 in after the uh opek oil embargo uh-huh apparently people started designing buildings to be more airtight so your ventilation ventilation system was really important yeah and these buildings have an age 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 is sick building syndrome which is malaise it's when you don't feel good when you go to work exactly which is everybody everyday but some studies have found like no that is the better predictor of sick building syndrome yeah is job stress or job dissatisfaction yeah um if you have a building full of people who don't like their jobs you're gonna have a building full of people with sick building syndrome but if you go on to say like 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 but also apparently it can um set off bouts of asthma yeah um which is another reason why they think it might have something to do with like volatile organic compounds in the ventilation system or new carpeting that kind of stuff yeah off-gassing man you you smell that stuff when you open up a new product right yeah there's also the dancing plague which we mentioned briefly tell me about it uh frowl trofia uh july 14th 1518 when i own 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 yeah saying this is a good time um said within a month a hundred people were dancing with her and couldn't stop and uh hyperventilating hallucinating some drop dead of heart attack and stroke and exhaustion and the uh authority said let's just hire a band and let them dance it out yeah because they've got the hot blood is what they called it all right and so they did and um a lot of people died as a result it said 400 people in the end were struck. I don't think they died, but we're dancers. Right. And then it just stopped. And that's when they blame, a lot of people blame, on Urgot poisoning, which we've mentioned before. We always go with Urgot poisoning. Yeah, back then. And 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. Yeah. He just started running and people started following it. 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 derailed things for a while for me. Yeah. I don't think that movie's age well, though. I haven't seen it before. Other people say, though, that it was Sid and Ham's Korea, a disorder linked to strep throughout in 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 modern cases. Are the devils 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 that 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. Yeah. And don't think that people weren't freaked out when they thought that the devil was there in town possessing people, in the same way that, you know, you're freaked out by the idea that it's cyanide in the soil from a trained derailment from 1970. Or beetle mania. Exactly. Yeah. 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. And then you go to work. Nice. 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 that continue, that continue to roll in. Yeah. 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 why I'm writing in guys is I lost my twin sister back in 2010. It was 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 and getting through every day at the office. PS, my twin Jessica, passed away from epilepsy, actually, a condition called Sudep, a 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. We'll follow up with a 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, if you'd like 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 syskpodcast. You can join us on facebook.com/sub. You should know. You can send us an email with attached artwork to [email protected]. And as always, join us at our home on the web. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. I'm Lexi Juanio, where two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. I'm Lisa de Julio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions. And at this point in my footies, I've lived it all. Guaranteed Human.