BBC Radio 4 -What does a mysterious school illness tell us about our anxieties?

Sly Saint

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
In Sideways, Matthew Syed explores ideas that shape our lives through stories of seeing the world differently. In The Social Contagion, he looks into a strange fainting outbreak at a school, and other similar events, which can affect dozens, sometimes hundreds of people.
Can illness really spread instantly through social networks, felling us like dominoes, or is there a psychological explanation? And can our desire to explain such phenomena rationally lead to us explaining them away?
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“I started to look around for more examples and started to collect them”
In July 1980, at Hollinwell Showground near Nottingham, hundreds of children gathered for a jazz band competition. A wave of illness spread across the festival, with dozens of children fainting.
The event was written up in a medical journal where it captured the attention of a young student. Professor Sir Simon Wessely, now psychiatrist and epidemiologist at King’s College London, became captivated by these strange outbreaks and how they spread, because they all followed a similar pattern.

“Usually, it will take place in a fairly crowded atmosphere,” says the psychiatrist. This might be a school hall, or a marching band, where there are lots of people close together. “And often it will happen when people are getting slightly uncomfortable.” It might be too warm, or claustrophobic.

“Suddenly someone sees someone who they know who’s suddenly just keeled over,” he explains, and instead of concluding it’s a hot day, let’s not worry, they begin to think that something strange is occurring. “And then there’s something else happening: there’s a strange noise outside in a field, or there’s something wrong with the air conditioning that day, or maybe there’s a funny smell, and then very quickly what happens is people start to get anxious.”

It’s not a toxin or a poison which is causing the wave of illness, it’s people’s minds
“When you get anxious you get absolutely classic symptoms,” says Wessely. “You start to produce adrenaline and then your heart gets a bit faster, you get butterflies in your stomach, you sweat a bit.”

Once a crisis takes hold it can spread like wildfire.
“This can happen in almost fractions of seconds,” he explains. Then suddenly the person next to you is getting anxious, they get the same symptoms, someone else collapses, and you have an incident which has gone from being a single person falling over, to many. “This can spread so fast,” he says, “you might have hundreds involved.”

And if the emergency services are understandably called to treat people, they can have a compounding effect on the outbreak. “You have people running around, you have the ambulances being called,” says Wessely, “all of which are absolutely calculated to increase your anxiety, not decrease it.”

Once a crisis takes hold it can spread like wildfire.

“Spread is more likely with people that you know”
Psychologists call this “mass sociogenic illness”. But it used to be known by a more familiar name: mass hysteria.

It’s a bit more complicated than a wave of panic and screaming, because people genuinely feel unwell. And it’s our social connections that make us more vulnerable to this curious phenomenon.

“Spread is more likely with people that you know,” says Wessely. “It goes through your own social networks… Having a social connection with the person who’s suddenly collapsed in front of you, certainly increases the chance of transmission.”
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/ar...us-school-illness-tell-us-about-our-anxieties
 
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Spread is more likely with people that you know
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This seems entirely consistent with how a toxin or pathogen would spread. People who know each other would be more likely to spend time together and visiting places where they can be exposed to the pathogen or toxin.

Awareness of a problem would also spread more easily between people that know and talk with each other, but that doesn't mean that problem is imaginary.

Someone who spins normal events as evidence of mass hysteria, probably has no real evidence.
 
Speaking as someone who remembers fainting several times as a child, my memory is the triggers included the sight of blood on an injured animal, the smell of the disinfectant used on arms before vaccinations, and an over hot stuffy atmosphere in church. I find it entirely believable that sometimes being in a heightened atmosphere where people have started fainting, I might have fainted too.

Edit - there were also physical triggers too, like severe period pains and standing for too long especially in hot weather. I still have a tendency to fainting with severe pain or nausea or having needles stuck in me.
 
I had never heard of Wessely before joining this forum and now I see him everywhere. He was being quoted on social media toxicity at the weekend. Does he do nothing but opine to journalists, or does he have a team of research assistants who offer to confirm any pop psychology prejudice under Wessely’s name, for a small fee?
 
CRG said:
Syed has form: https://www.s4me.info/threads/tv-pr...en-dispatches-channel-4-uk.22848/#post-384764

Hollinwell incident

"Symptoms also included vomiting, sore eyes and throats, and dizziness".

"The official inquiry did reveal the use of Calixin, a pesticide that contains tridemorph, but it was not considered to be dangerous at the time."

Hysterical sore eyes !
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In that case I agree, it surely can't be put down to hysteria. I think the cases where there is only fainting and no other symptoms could be psychological, given that some people like me can faint as a result of psychological stimuli. But it shouldn't be assumed to be 'hysteria'.
 
“Usually, it will take place in a fairly crowded atmosphere,” says the psychiatrist. This might be a school hall, or a marching band, where there are lots of people close together. “And often it will happen when people are getting slightly uncomfortable.” It might be too warm, or claustrophobic.

“Suddenly someone sees someone who they know who’s suddenly just keeled over,” he explains, and instead of concluding it’s a hot day, let’s not worry, they begin to think that something strange is occurring. “And then there’s something else happening: there’s a strange noise outside in a field, or there’s something wrong with the air conditioning that day, or maybe there’s a funny smell, and then very quickly what happens is people start to get anxious.”
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Ventilation is very important. Anyone working around HVAC systems is aware of CO2 concentration and how many people can safely remain over a period of time. This likely explains many of those along with excessive heat, which people react differently to, especially as we know for people with chronic illness or other issues, which is especially ironic considering this is Wessely's fake expertise. It's also well-known to people who work in this stuff, not to a psychiatrist, though, especially one with major expectation effect biases.

And they always have weird and completely made-up internal dialogues that no one has ever had in the history of this species, but they are necessary for their beliefs so they pretend like those made-up internal dialogues are actually happening. Exactly like the celestial spheres, a model created to explain reality without bothering with actual reality.

But even more absurd is that in almost all cases where the actual cause is found it's infectious diseases and when it's not it's toxins, which are far more common and present around us than people understand. Also, problematically: usually invisible. Unless you are explicitly searching for it no one would find it. This is why the "mass hysteria" ideology uses the language of infectious diseases, which actually do spread to people in close proximity, it's basically what they're known for, and it's basically what is actually happening most of the time.

So there is a perfectly good explanation that works almost all the time, is an actual rational explanation, and it has known mechanisms. It's also a fact that unless we know what virus to look for, we won't find it. So especially for small outbreaks where the resources won't be there to achieve this, it will not be found, leaving place for the usual default belief of magical psychology.

This is genuinely failing at object permanence. "Ghost chaser" TV shows do the exact same thing: something happened that they can't explain: it must be ghosts, after all they are chasing ghosts. Wessely really is a patient-hating charlatan. It's absurd this quack has any respect, it degrades the entire medical profession that this 19th century myth is still so important to them it's the default explanation despite being one of the most disproven hypothesis in history.

He had to apologize for Camelford but never did for what he said about 9/11 and other times he was proven wrong. An entire career painting targets about wherever he shot at, successful because most of the profession genuinely doesn't care, it's a long-standing tradition and that means it's unquestionable.
 
Trish said:
In that case I agree, it surely can't be put down to hysteria. I think the cases where there is only fainting and no other symptoms could be psychological, given that some people like me can faint as a result of psychological stimuli. But it shouldn't be assumed to be 'hysteria'.
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I remember lining up with other school girls to have a vaccine and one girl fainted. It didn't spread. No-one else fainted.

It's the idea that it can spread not a few faints due to blood, needles phobia, stimulus etc that is the problem.
 
John Mac said:
Babies and horses also became ill. How on earth is that "mass hysteria"?
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Horsteria?

I was a fan of Matthew Syed, read his books and listened to his podcasts, then went off him, can't remember why. He did a very good podcast episode about the Stockholm Syndrome, completely debunking it. It was of course made up by a psychologist who had never spoken to any of the people involved.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000s7n1
 
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When I was a teenager in school the school canteen was too small to cater for all the pupils who needed to use it. We had to queue up and were called in to the canteen in dribs and drabs. The line would get more and more densely packed and it would heave backwards and forwards in a way that nobody could control - it was completely absurd and very unsafe. Fainting was fairly common. Frankly, I'm surprised that nobody died of crush injuries, it was that bad. But once someone fainted it almost never caused any more fainting. I think I remember at most there being two faints on a single lunchtime - but that was extremely rare. Given that many of the pupils may have skipped breakfast, and then got crushed in a heaving mob, I don't think the fainting, under the circumstances, was caused by anything psychiatric or psychological.
 
Arnie Pye said:
When I was a teenager in school the school canteen was too small to cater for all the pupils who needed to use it. We had to queue up and were called in to the canteen in dribs and drabs. The line would get more and more densely packed and it would heave backwards and forwards in a way that nobody could control - it was completely absurd and very unsafe. Fainting was fairly common. Frankly, I'm surprised that nobody died of crush injuries, it was that bad. But once someone fainted it almost never caused any more fainting. I think I remember at most there being two faints on a single lunchtime - but that was extremely rare. Given that many of the pupils may have skipped breakfast, and then got crushed in a heaving mob, I don't think the fainting, under the circumstances, was caused by anything psychiatric or psychological.
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That's really the thing about this, it's fully cherry-picked, simply ignores the thousand-fold more examples where none of this happens. And never feels any shame or embarrassment at having been proven wrong more than probably any other theory used by professionals. Although let's be pedantic about this since this is a science forum: it's not even a theory, not even a hypothesis, it's an assumption, a default belief that needs to be disproven, requires no evidence.

Exact same with "nocebo" and the common scenario of "uh, didn't hurt as much as I thought it would", or the opposite where something that was expected not to hurt did. It's the perfect pseudoscience: it works when it works and when it doesn't it doesn't matter, it could still work, just look at the times it did. In the end all it is is a bunch of anecdotes and "trust us we're experts", which is the worst thing for a field based on expertise to do as it puts into question just how common this irrational attitude is.

Essentially the exact same logic as if the police declared every unsolved crime as not having happened, then prosecuted the victims for it. It's so absurd it has no counterpart in any other part of society. The last great belief system that is socially acceptable to believe everywhere.
 
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