Vsauce! Kevin here.
Possessed witches, bedeviled dancing, crazed laughter and a TV show that actually made
people sick. It’s not fiction. It’s mass hysteria.
Clinical mass hysteria describes the spread of a psychologically-manifested illness. One
or two people show signs of illness that they blame on poison gas, genies or a ghost, and
suddenly others begin to show the same symptoms -- or worse. Mass hysteria typically occurs
in high-stress situations among people in confined areas like schools, factories or
small villages in Colonial Massachusetts.
Haha, I get it. Mass hysteria. Colonial Massachusetts.That's very funny! Hey, Mike from Idea Channel here.
Kevin, do you mind if I?
Oh go right ahead. Thanks, man!
The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a catastrophic overreaction to mass psychogenic illness.
Two young girls began having fits of screaming and contortions - symptoms that commonly accompany
mass psychogenic illness - which spread to other girls in the Salem Village. The town’s
verdict was that the devil had turned the girls into witches, and panic consumed the
villagers until 20 people were tried and executed. Modern theories for what caused the first
two girls’ symptoms range from eating rye bread infected with fungus to contracting
bird-borne encephalitis lethargica. Doctors found no evidence of injuries or explanations
for the girls’ behavior, and in the absence of a scientific reason, the occult filled
the gap and what ensued was quite literally a ‘witch hunt’.
The bodies of over 400 people in Strasbourg, France were infected by a plague of dancing
in 1518. During a time of extreme famine, a woman began dancing in the middle of the
street, and by the end of the month hundreds more had been consumed by the trance. Officials
believed the afflicted had to dance the sickness out of their systems, so musicians were hired
to keep them moving and guildhalls were dedicated to the frenzied dancing. Dozens died from
exhaustion, strokes and heart attacks, and eventually the surviving dancers were loaded
onto wagons and taken to a shrine to beg for mercy. Europe experienced dozens of dance
plagues throughout the Renaissance, with Southern Italy seeing such an uptick in possessed dancing
that they blamed it on tarantula bites, a syndrome fittingly dubbed “Tarantism.”
Laughter might be the best medicine, but it can also be part of the disease. In 1962,
several villages in what is now Tanzania couldn’t stop laughing. Three girls at a boarding school
started laughing uncontrollably and it spread throughout the school, forcing it to close.
The girls returned home where the laughter spread to their neighbors and then to nearby
villages, eventually affecting thousands of people. Of course, it’s physically impossible
to laugh continually for days due to the strain on respiration, with the current world record
for longest laughter clocking in at just three hours and six minutes. The afflicted separated
their bouts of laughter with crying, fainting and exclamations of pain from rashes. And
rashes are never funny. Mass hysteria continues today. In 2006, an
episode of a popular teen soap opera in Portugal, called “Strawberries With Sugar,” caused
over 300 students from 14 schools to develop symptoms depicted by characters on the show.
The dizziness and difficulty breathing forced some of the schools to close due to what is
now referred to as the Strawberries With Sugar virus, which coincided with students’ stress over fibal exlams.
Don't you mean "final exams"? Yeah, what did I say? You said "fibal exlams".
Fibal exlams?
*hysterical laughter*
Those aren't words! Those aren't words!
And as always, thanks for watching.
Special thanks to Mike from PBS Idea Channel for helping me out.
Yeah man, thanks for having me.
And all this talk of mass hysteria might make you wonder how it is that people start to believe these kinds of things,
And it has a lot to do with 'proof', which we're gonna go talk about over on Idea Channel right now.
So let's check it out, and while you're there, make sure you Subscribe.