Mass hysteria or demonic possession?

HAPPY WEEKEND
Gina Dizon

BONTOC, Mountain Province -- Medical specialists attributed the fainting spells which happened to some 100 students here the past two weeks as “mass hysteria.” With no medical findings of sickness among students, the fainting and screaming were mass hysteria, Dr Elizabeth Solang told school and municipal authorities here.

Mass hysteria is " socio-psychological phenomenon of the manifestation of the same or similar hysterical sign by more than one person. A common manifestation of mass hysteria occurs when a group of people believe they are suffering from a similar disease or ailment. Features of mass hysteria include no plausible cause found, ambiguous symptoms, rapid escalation of cases- often spread by line of sight and rapid remission of symptoms." (Wikipedia)

Dr Solang said features of the Bontoc fainting phenomenon are similar to features of mass hysteria. The cause of mass hysteria is often “a baseless belief that begins small but, like a hurricane, travels and becomes more devastating as it picks up speed.”

Mass hysteria describes the spread of psychologically produced symptoms such as fainting and screaming from person to person. In most cases, mass hysteria occurs in schools and institutions to young women in response to group tensions or worries and often triggered by one of two persons.

Dr. Timothy Jones of Tennesse Department of Health says that outbreaks of mass hysteria “often occur in groups experiencing physical or emotional stress. From 1973 to 1993, one half of reported outbreaks of psychogenic illness occurred in schools, followed by factories (29 percent), towns and villages (10 percent), families and other institutions.”

We talk about the mass hysteria in Tanzania where 20 girls fainted after taking their final exams a year ago. There were more girls, (at least two thirds) than boys in the recent mass fainting in Bontoc.

Hysteria is derived from the Greek word uterus. Hysteria was originally thought to be a physical disorder confined to women. By the 19th century, hysteria was believed to have a psychological origin.

Mass hysteria is also termed as mass psychogenic illness according to Dr Timothy Jones. It is “characterized by symptoms, occurring among a group of persons with shared beliefs regarding those symptoms, that suggest organic illness but have no identifiable environmental cause and little clinical or laboratory evidence of disease. Mass psychogenic illness typically affects adolescents or children, groups under stress and females disproportionately more than males.”

American Medical Association says, “Today, many psychiatrists feel that the term hysteria is no longer helpful in diagnosis. In modern classification, the symptoms formerly grouped under this term are now included in the more specific diagnostic categories of conversion disorder, dissociative disorders, somatization disorder, and factitious disorders, and anxiety reaction”.

Anxiety disorder is characterized by chronic free-floating anxiety and such symptoms as tension or sweating or trembling or lightheadedness or irritability that has lasted for more than six months

Dissociative disorders are defined as” conditions that involve disruptions or breakdowns of memory, awareness, identity and/or perception. The hypothesis is that symptoms can result, to the extent of interfering with a person's general functioning, when one or more of these functions is disrupted.

Dissociative symptoms seem to be more common in less industrialized societies, whereas the pure anxiety symptoms are more common in industrialized ones. The crucial point is that symptoms appear to be contagious. Usually, the sufferers have had a high level of communal stress.”

Tribal priests performed a ritual of butchering chicken and offering these to the spirits believed to be hovering at the school grounds. The tribal priest spewed rice wine from his mouth to the branches of an indigenous tree and let it hung at the entrance of the school.

In the case of the Bontoc mass hysteria, observations were noted about a sleeping girl who was “lifted at an angle without support until she was literally standing. Someone’s hair was flying as if the victim was in front of an electric fan. A student-victim spat on a Bible, one broke a cross.”
In a related event, an outbreak of mass hysteria is reported to have struck three indigenous communities living near the river Coco in northern Nicaragua. A total of 43 people have reportedly fallen ill with what is known locally as "grisi siknis" (crazy sickness) March this year, Nica Times reports.

“Thirty four young people were affected putting them in trance and with super-human strength. A 15-year-old girl with grisi siknis can overpower six or seven men. The men can't detain her, and have to tie her up in bed sheets", Nica Times adds.

The people who were attacked were cured by a traditional healer using herbs and candles. Doctors, anthropologists and sociologists who have studied this case of mass hysteria have so far failed to come up with any clear explanation for the phenomenon which happened in Nicaragua.

Recommendations from medical institutions who studied cases of mass hysteria among students forward the need for separation of the affected individuals from the group for quite some time. Psychologically, mass hysteria-related attacks cause a considerable burden on the students and their families. In some cases, students who underwent the attacks reported some type of adverse social or psychological consequence, such as ridicule from other students, and strained family and interpersonal relationships.

American Medical Association in its studies says, “Delayed recognition of mass hysteria led several individuals to have diagnostic procedures and receive treatment that could have been avoided had the similarities between these individuals been noted earlier.

Another factor may have been the reluctance of some families to consider psychological explanations for the episodes. Its prompt recognition allows physicians to avoid unnecessary tests and treatments and to reassure both the affected individuals and the public.”