There’s something going around at LeRoy High School. More than a dozen young girls at this little school located in upstate New York are twitching with physical tics and blurting out sounds with a Tourette’s-like frenzy. And the girls say they can’t offer a clue as to how this uncontrollable malady suddenly gripped them.
In most of their cases, the onset was as simple as going to sleep while feeling fine and waking up with a severe tic-filled stutter. And, just in case you’re feeling particularly cynical, this isn’t a bunch of girls playing a quick joke. The incidents have been going on since October of last year. One of the sufferers is a 36-year-old woman who isn’t connected with the girls at all. And even though the students at the heart of the problem go to the same school, they’re not all in the same grades and don’t even travel in the same circles.
As you might expect, parents are going ballistic and demanding that somebody come up with answers. Mold, water and air-testing experts were called in. And even Erin Brockovich—the environmental frontperson who was made famous by Julia Roberts and her Oscar-winning performance (in a movie titled Erin Brockovich)—stepped in and started testing soil samples in connection with a chemical spill from a train wreck that happened in the area some 40 years ago. So far though, everyone’s tests have come up with zip. In fact, the New York State Health Department concluded that there were no environmental problems, though another battery of tests was recently approved.
So what is causing all this? Well, that’s still up for debate. Doctors have ruled out a laundry list of factors such as infections, drug use, food allergies and the like. A number of docs, however, are calling it “conversion disorder,” which is the modern day label for what used to be called “mass hysteria.” That’s essentially a psychosomatic issue where a group of susceptible people subconsciously adopt symptoms of a disease or ailment even though there’s really nothing physically wrong with them.
If the specialists are right, this situation certainly wouldn’t be the first of its type. There have been dozens of cases. I remember reading about mass hysteria that took place in the African city of Tanganyika back in the 1960s. In this case it was a big laugh … literally. A laughter epidemic started with three teen school girls and spread to over half of their school. They were reportedly laughing uncontrollably for anywhere from a couple of hours up to 16 days. The school had to eventually close its doors and send kids home, and the epidemic spread to a nearby village where more than 200 people were reported to have been hit by laughing attacks.
Getting back to the twitching kids in 2012, though, there is one more modern twist that was introduced by the Buffalo news station WKBW. University at Buffalo neurology professor Dr. David Lichter told the reporters that he thought the symptoms in the LeRoy case might well end up being enflamed by social media sites like Facebook and YouTube.
“I think you do have the potential for people going online and witnessing other students’ behavior, then I think this medium has the potential to spread it beyond the immediate environment,” Lichter told WKBW.
Other experts believe Lichter may be onto something. While mass conversion disorder is pretty rare, neurologist Laszlo Mechtler says it almost always strikes pockets of girls who often live in relatively rural areas. “This isn’t a sexist observation,” Mechtler told Newsweek. “It’s just a fact. These girls in this case are under an enormous amount of stress, and that has surfaced in this difficult way. The attention, the cameras, all the social media, it has made things much worse.”
And that’s no laughing matter.
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