Teen girls and mass hysteria: new novel tackles rare and mysterious illness
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Version 0 of 1. The idea for award-winning crime writer Megan Abbott's latest novel, The Fever, came when she switched on her television one morning in late 2011. Two girls from the small industrial town of Le Roy in upstate New York were being interviewed about a mysterious illness that had swept through their school. As they spoke, they twitched and shook, seemingly unable to stop themselves. "They were talking in such a panicky way and having vocal tics and twitches as they spoke," says Abbott. "I was haunted by how frightened and vulnerable they seemed." No one could agree on what was behind the outbreak, which was also the subject of Channel 4 documentary, The Town That Caught Tourettes. Some blamed an old spillage from a train crash in the 1970s; others looked to the HPV vaccine. However, the New York state department of health found the girls were suffering from mass psychogenic illness, also known as conversion disorder, a form of mass hysteria. The solution? To treat them in isolation from their fellow sufferers. It sounds drastic but seemed to work. Dr Laslo Mechtler, who treated 15 girls at specialist clinic, Dent Neurological Institute in Buffalo, New York, told Reuters that the young women were "'80 to 90%' cured" in June 2012. Most of them graduated from high school that month. Outbreaks such as Le Roy's are rare, but not unheard of, and tend to affect young women and girls. In 1965, 85 girls passed out in two hours in a Blackburn school; in 2007, a Mexican girls' boarding school called in public health officials after 600 girls were suddenly unable to walk; last year Danvers, Massachusetts, originally known as Salem Village and home to the infamous witch trials, saw two dozen teenagers come down with uncontrollable hiccups. Why do young women seem to be most susceptible? In a 2008 article for this paper, John Waller, associate professor of the history of medicine at Michigan State University and author of A Time to Dance, A Time to Die: The Extraordinary Story of the Dancing Plague of 1518, wrote: "Most experts now think that… girls and women are more likely to succumb due to the frustrations of living in families and societies dominated by men. Others argue that hysteria offers distressed women a legitimate reason to 'check out' from the indignities of daily life." Certainly, the Le Roy girls seemed driven by a quest for perfection. "When the girls were interviewed on television they'd say things like, 'I had a perfect life, nothing was wrong with me'," says Abbott. "They wanted to be strong and not be the girl with the problems." Yet that desire may have also fueled their symptoms – a piece in the New York Times by Susan Dominus suggested that many of the girls were extremely stressed prior to falling ill. And media interest in the story seems only to have exacerbated the illness. "We noticed that the kids who were not in the media were getting better; the kids who were in the media were still symptomatic," Mechtler told Reuters. "One thing we've learnt is how social media and mainstream media can worsen the symptoms in these cases." It's a theory with which Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who specialises in studying cases of mass hysteria, would agree. Talking about the Danvers hiccupers, Bartholomew told The Atlantic magazine that there is "potential for a far greater or wider global episode unless we quickly understand how social media is acting as the primary vector for conversion disorder. It's just a matter of time before we see outbreaks that are not just confined to a single school or factory or even region." Abbott was interested in a situation with so many potential causes and so little actual evidence. "People see what they want to see," she says. "If you're nervous about girls' sexuality then you blame the vaccine; if you're concerned about the environment, that's where you look. If there's an outside cause then perhaps it can be fixed." Sally Hughes The Fever by Megan Abbott is published by Picador on 19 June, £14.99 |