If you are one of those who are easily infected by other people’s laughter, you probably would not have survived what happened to a town of Tanganyika on January 30, 1962.
This is what two doctors say who compiled the facts: at a girls’ missionary school in the town of Kashasha, on the coast of what we currently know as Lake Victoria (Tanzania), three students began to joke. His laugh mutated from normal to nervous, ceasing to be both a manifestation of humor and something more disturbing. The girls couldn’t stop laughing hysterically. Laughter, that traditional escape valve, was now a terrifying reaction.
Without knowing very well how, the rest of the school began to be infected with this effect, and within a few hours 95 of the 159 attendees at school were also laughing for hours, 16 hours in a row in the most serious cases.
These were the facts that caught the attention of the doctors: on the one hand, the Kashasha school also operated as a residence. The girls slept in communal rooms, dividing themselves into rooms with girls of various ages. Those affected were not located in specific points of the residence, there were no rooms where everyone suffered from hysteria at the same time, but instead They were distributed throughout the center. None of the two Europeans and three Africans who worked as teachers suffered any uncontrollable panic attacks.
Trying to put a stop to the phenomenon, the residence and school were closed for a month. The girls went home, but instead of stopping it, they extended it much further: after ten days, cases of uncontrollable laughter were observed 80 kilometers from the school.
Five months later the final count in this area of 10,000 people was 217 people treated and around 1,000 affected. Boys and girls suffered from it indiscriminately, children but also some young people, and mostly illiterate kids with modest finances. Each patient’s attacks lasted an average of four to eight hours, with a known case of 16 consecutive daysand after the attack subsided they usually suffered one or two more. No one had more than four attacks.
Although we imagine these abductions as something comical, comedy was the last of the predominant feelings during those episodes: to the laughter was added crying, respiratory problems, a general restlessness of the subject, manifestation of violence towards others and, in some specific cases, paranoia, with girls commenting that there were demonic subjects chasing them.
Would the corn flour have been contaminated? Maybe a new virus? Maybe a supernatural curse? The blood samples that were sent to the laboratories came back with a NAD, “Nothing Abnormal Detected”. There are even those who suspected that everything could have been distorted or invented. This hypothesis lost strength over the years. For a very simple reason: because other outbreaks of sudden, very strange social epidemics were observed.
The dance, the fainting, the dream
In 1983in the area of the West Bank occupied by the Israeli army, it was seen that at least 400 Arab girls and a teacher had spontaneously suffered nausea, nervousness and dizziness, ending in fainting and loss of consciousness. Over time, some Israeli female soldiers would also disappear.
In Virginia, United States, some high school students suffered a mass hysteria of laughter equal to that of Tanganyika in the 60s. Any new drugs? Anyone put laughing gas through the vents? “The school is still safe”said the authorities, who at the end of the cycle attributed the circumstance to a “unusual stress” that students might be suffering.
In 2017 a strange local Swedish phenomenon was published in the press for the first time that has been going on for decades. There have not been many cases between the 90s and 2010, but only between 2015 and 2016 there were almost 200 cases at once. Only the children of refugees who have requested asylum suffer from it. As soon as the parents know that permission has been denied, some of these children enter a kind of coma: they remain completely passive, do not speak, eat or drink, lose control of their sphincters and do not know how to react to pain.
Swedish doctors say they do not know what to do, since the investigation of the event causes the epidemic to spread with new cases. They do not doubt the veracity of the phenomenon: although attempts at fraud have been discovered, with parents simulating the effect on their children to stay longer in the host country, most cases have been authenticated. Psychologists have named the ailment as Resignation Syndromealthough the hypothesis of studying it as another case of “epidemic hysteria” was considered.
The academic term for epidemic hysteria is “mass psychogenic illness”or MPI, as it appears abbreviated in psychiatry manuals. To say that there are few certainties is to exceed the medical achievements achieved to determine what these attacks consist of. They are episodes so specific and so little controllable that, as they come, they go. Among the common aspects that have been seen are: a) that there is no plausible organic basis; b) that there is previously excessive anxiety in the affected group; and c) that spreads through sight, sound or oral communication.
Although the effects are physical, it seems that it is a disease closely linked to the psychological. Although it has not been possible to study it correctly due to its lack of data, some historical cases of hysteria have subsequently been read as examples of the MPI. There they were dance epidemics in medieval Europein which the local population danced or held obscene orgies for hours or days, leading some to death.
In search of answers
The priests who were going to exorcise the novices of the cloistered convents Sometimes they noted that several of these newcomers suffered from it at the same time. Perhaps in response to the excessive discipline and poverty of the lives that awaited them, many of them began to meow, insult and seduce their companions.
Although it has not been specifically linked to this same phenomenon, there have also been many cases from the industrial revolution of factory workers who jointly suffer serious respiratory problems, to the point of having to stop production or move factories, without the authorities being able to detect any polluting agent in the environment.
It is for all of the above that some have approached a hypothesis of social resistance. All those affected in the previous examples were part of the most vulnerable population of each group. The case of refugee children is obvious, but for example, the town of Tanganyika that we mentioned at the beginning had just gained independence from England and was going through a very tense period of political readjustment.
Thus, according to the theory of resistance, in a group of individuals who experience excessive stress, some unconsciously imitate others a set of common symptoms. There is much more to investigate and determine, among other things, because not all groups of stressed or miserable people end up involved in dance orgies or violent laughter therapy sessions.
Since human beings, from birth, imitate our peers for reasons of learning and adaptability, it is believed that this may be the hidden secret of these cases of hysteria. Following some rural North American teenagers who they had “stuck” on each other a kind of Tourette’s syndromethe researchers Yao-Tung Lee and Shih-Jen Tsai theorized that mirror neurons, popularly known as mirror neuronswould be the cause of the matter.
They partly supported their premise that women tend to be percentage-wise more susceptible to these attacks, and it is also believed that women are more prone to empathy, that is, the act of mirror neurons. Now, although correlations of imitative movements have been detected among humans, the very existence of something called “mirror neurons” is still in question.
In other words, we still don’t know anything.
Rare and unique cases? It depends on how we want to see it. Here is another demonstration in five Belgian schools in 1999. Here the closure of a Coca-cola factory months later in the same country. Here some rural Australian students in 2007. “There are about a hundred outbreaks each year, and most cause serious disruption in schools and factories, which have to close their doors while tests are carried out,” said sociologist Robert Bartholomew.
The latest research warns that, given the new era of hyperconnection that we live, the epidemics of hysteria could spread between individuals connected through social networkscausing, hypothetically, thousands of people to become infected at the same time in many parts of the planet, making it even more difficult to detect the causes. So, to avoid being a victim of the next collective anxiety attack, perhaps it is best to relax. Watch yourself a comic monologue or two and have a laugh. In this case, better alone than accompanied, because of what may happen.
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