In the fall of 2011, a high school cheerleader in Le Roy, NY, woke up from a nap feeling strange.

The Curious Case of Teen Tics In Le Roy, N.Y. NPR. March 10, 2012.

 

Her head had jutted forward uncontrollably and she was experiencing facial tics. Emergency room doctors chalked it up to anxiety and sent her home.

A few weeks later, the girl’s best friend woke up from a nap with a stutter. She went to cheerleading practice, where she could barely get her words out. Over the next couple of weeks, her symptoms worsened.

In the weeks and months that followed, 12 more students at the same school started experiencing strange symptoms, including arm flailing, leg numbness, vocal outbursts, and twitches.

 

What is mass hysteria?

 

“[Mass hysteria] has two components: hysteria and mass. So, in this context, the term ‘hysteria’ means ‘symptom that has a psychological cost,’ and ‘mass’ means that it happens in a group. And so what you see is groups of individuals, often adolescents or children, who often suddenly become ill, and the symptoms are spread through social contagion. They see one person gets sick, another person gets sick, and it seems like it's a real physical illness, but it has an underlying psychological cost,” Gary Small, MD, Chair of Psychiatry at Hackensack University Medical Center, tells MDLinx.

Neurologists believed that the girls were experiencing a conversion disorder, in which their bodies were subconsciously turning stress into physical symptoms. As so many students were afflicted at once, it was also considered to be mass hysteria.

Dominus S. What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy. The New York Times Magazine. March 7, 2012

 

 

Also referred to as epidemic hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, mass hysteria refers to a group of people falling ill en masse with no apparent physical or environmental reason for their illness.

The American Academy of Family Physicians. Mass Psychogenic Illness. Familydoctor.org. January 26, 2024.

 

Although the strange symptoms in Le Roy started among cheerleaders, other students at the school were also impacted in the weeks that followed. The students all had one thing in common: some kind of serious stressor.

The Curious Case of Teen Tics In Le Roy, N.Y. NPR. March 10, 2012.

 

The first girl’s mother had just undergone her 13th brain surgery. The second girl had experienced a traumatic loss 3 years prior, while another girl had been physically abused by her father.

Conversion disorder can be a physical manifestation of stress that can be difficult to talk about and, as in the case of the students in Le Roy, contagious.

Dominus S. What Happened to the Girls in Le Roy. The New York Times Magazine. March 7, 2012

 

 

It’s a pattern that Dr. Small has seen in his own research on mass hysteria.

 

Factors to consider

 

Symptoms of mass hysteria can vary widely but may include faintness, weakness, itching or rash, dizziness, headache, and a feeling of being choked.

The American Academy of Family Physicians. Mass Psychogenic Illness. Familydoctor.org. January 26, 2024.

 

Dr. Small has spent decades studying outbreaks of mass hysteria and says that they are likely occurring but not publicized. He argues that it’s important for physicians to consider mass hysteria as a possibility.

“[In] any kind of an epidemic outbreak, of course, it's very important to look for underlying, organic causes, but [doctors] should keep in mind the possibility of a psychological cause—being mass hysteria. If you look for the characteristic features— females being more affected, more likely to get affected than males; teenagers and children have a higher risk…Look for some kind of psychological stress in the environment, if the group is dispersed…If the symptoms go away quickly, that can be a clue as well,” Dr. Small says.

“It's important to look at those characteristic features, certainly to rule out physical causes, but also to rule in psychological ones if they're there, and then to keep in mind that it can be a mixture of the two,” he adds.