Micah Loewinger: Hey, it's Micah Loewinger, and you're listening to the On the Media podcast extra. Last April, I took a look at an affliction affecting American diplomats in Havana, Cuba and beyond.

Speaker 1: A new assessment by US intelligence officials says the debilitating ailment known as Havana syndrome cannot be linked to any foreign adversary or weapon.

Speaker 2: To make the assessment from that, it's likely not a foreign adversary. I think is very bad intelligence tradecraft. There's nothing in this latest report that disproves the possibility that this is from a foreign adversary, which is what we should worry about. So my suggestion here--

Micah Loewinger: Today, there's still a heated debate about the cause of Havana syndrome. Some patients, journalists, intelligence workers, and medical experts say that it was an attack from an unidentified weapon, maybe from Russia. Others argue that the culprit is more likely the human mind, what's known as mass psychogenic illness or mass hysteria. That's where I landed when I looked into it last April. You can find a link, by the way, to that piece in the description for this episode.

I had so many more questions about mass psychogenic illness that we didn't have a chance to answer in that piece, which is why I was so excited to listen to a new docu series called Hysterical, hosted by Dan Taberski. I called up Dan to talk about the podcast, which focuses on a curious story in Le Roy, New York, in 2011, when a group of high school students started exhibiting the same Tourette's-like symptoms.

Speaker 3: This is my eighth or ninth day straight ticking and doesn't stop.

Speaker 4: I would go to art class. I used to go to two art classes every day. [unintelligible 00:01:50] Now I'm not in school.

Speaker 5: She could not talk. Was stuttering so bad that she could not even get out a word. She's twitching. She's crying at that point, just trying to get out her words.

Speaker 6: We heard a lot of like a yipping sound from some of the students or a screeching sound.

Speaker 7: She went into a full on epileptic fit on the stage. It was on the ground screaming. It was scary.

Micah Loewinger: Here's Dan Taberski.

Dan Taberski: It all started, by most accounts, when a junior from Le Roy High School woke up from a nap with a stutter. She woke up and couldn't quite get her words out. She couldn't quite speak, which was not normal for her. The symptoms got worse. It became tics and verbal outbursts and twitching, things that you would normally associate with something like Tourette's syndrome. A couple weeks later, a friend on the cheerleading squad came down with the same symptoms, tics, jerks, vocal outbursts, twitching. Two became three, three became five, and it just took off from there. Almost all the girls experiencing the symptoms were students at Le Roy High School.

Micah Loewinger: By January 2012, 12 students at the school were showing symptoms. The high school started working with the state and an outside health contractor. They ran a bunch of tests on the students who were showing symptoms. They also did some environmental tests at the school. Then they held a town hall with parents and students. Do you want to talk about what went down?

Dan Taberski: The state basically held a town hall and said, "We know it's not environmental. We know it's not a virus or a bacteria. That's all you need to know." Basically they said, "We know what it isn't, but we're not going to tell you what it is." The reason behind that was because of HIPAA laws. They were concerned that by revealing the diagnosis for the group, they would also be revealing diagnosis for the individual girls, which violates the law. It's good to keep with the law, but a terrible way to scare the hell out of a town of really nervous parents who are watching this thing literally tear through that high school.

Micah Loewinger: Putting the HIPAA thing aside, you allude to this in the show, but it's kind of a damned if you do, damned if you don't. If you just say, trust us, we're working on it, that doesn't exactly inspire confidence, especially among people who don't trust local authorities or the government. If you do roll it out in public, you make it a group detective project.

Dan Taberski: Yes. The parents were really scared. Over a dozen girls at this point are having these incredibly violent symptoms. If you're a parent, the only thing to do is investigate. The only thing to do is to try to rule out every possibility. If it was mass hysteria or not, it is interesting to watch something like this unfold in a sort of can't stop it sort of way.

Micah Loewinger: You just use that word, hysteria. The name of the podcast is Hysterical. Hysteria is kind of a loaded term, especially when it's used to describe women, right?

Dan Taberski: Yes.

Micah Loewinger: You talk about that history on your show, and yet you embrace the word.

Dan Taberski: Yes. The history of the word hysteria is really, really loaded. For hundreds of years, it's basically been used as a bucket term to describe anything that men don't understand about women's bodies. Mysterious symptoms, that's hysterical. Things that don't seem to start from a physical place in the body or have an organic cause or that we don't understand what it is, you must be hysterical. That's a term that has been used historically as a way to dismiss their medical issues. It's a really loaded term.

Over the years, it got taken out of this medical discourse. In 1980, it got taken out of the DSM, and they began using other phrases like conversion disorder or functional neurological disorder or sociogenic illness or psychogenic illness. I went back to hysteria because all those new words, unfortunately, seem to make it more confusing than less. For me, the word hysteria is the word that doesn't just describe the medical or psychological phenomenon that's happening. It also includes the cultural, the social.

Mass hysteria, if it's happening, is something that's happening on all those different levels and by taking the word out, it makes you not be able to identify it anymore. I wanted to get back to that thing, that word that really describes that group social phenomenon, just really kind of look at it for what it is.

Micah Loewinger: An interesting thing about the outbreak in Le Roy is that it primarily impacted girls. As we just discussed, there's this very gendered history to the idea of hysteria. Doctors used to blame it on a wandering womb that became misplaced and was wandering around the body but after observing women exhibiting symptoms of hysteria in Paris in the late 1880s, the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud made a breakthrough around the nature of hysteria. Can you talk about his research a little?

Dan Taberski: During the 1880s, there was an outbreak of hysteria in major cities in Europe, especially Paris, especially at this hospital called Salpetriere. The head neurologist there, Charcot, he would put the women on stage every Friday who were exhibiting these really bizarre symptoms. Doctors would come and observe to try to figure out what it all meant. Now, Charcot thought that there was something physical there. He's like, "For sure there's going to be brain lesions or there's some sort of physical source for these bizarre symptoms. We just haven't found it yet."

Freud thought something different. Freud began looking to the mind. Instead of just watching the women who were exhibiting these symptoms, in Freud's studies on hysteria, he would talk to them and they would talk back, and it would become a back and forth about what was going on, not just in the body of these women, but in their minds, in the culture, in the society that they were living in. He began to make the connection that it appeared that these symptoms were very often a manifestation of what was happening in their minds. Basically, that sort of stress and trauma converted from the mind into the body, into physical symptoms.

Micah Loewinger: Freud coined the term conversion disorder to describe hysteria. Returning to that town hall in Le Roy in 2012, one parent who we hear from on your show got very sick of all this HIPAA deflection. He walks up to the microphone and he says that the diagnosis that's been given to his child is conversion disorder. Do you mind just defining conversion disorder?

Dan Taberski: In general, conversion disorder is stress or trauma in the mind that exhibits itself as physical symptoms in the body. Generally, you know it's conversion disorder because there is no explanation for what's going on. You have a limp, but the x rays are normal, or you're having seizures multiple times a day, but the MRI show nothing. Basically, Freud figured it out. Doctors and psychologists have pursued since then that it was a conversion of this mental stress into physical symptoms, completely unconscious, which is just a huge important thing to remind people. It's not faking it. The patients aren't faking it. They are real symptoms that they can't control, but they're coming from a place and they're unconscious that they can't access.

Micah Loewinger: As you talk about on the show, conversion disorder is just the first part of it. Dr. Jennifer McVige, the neurologist working with the students, says.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: Each case, uniquely is a conversion disorder independently but when you mush them all together and they all have the same symptoms and they all know each other, then it's a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: We've spoken a little bit about mass psychogenic illness on the show before when we were looking at Havana syndrome. It's when physical symptoms that don't have a clear physical cause spread from person to person. This is what the state concluded was happening to the girls in Le Roy. Although they didn't come out and say it at this town hall. Some of the students and parents were not convinced at all. We hear from a student named Jessica who said.

Jessica: I don't believe that because after seeing, I was like, "There's just no way. I don't believe that." Seeing all these girls, they're not making it up. I just don't believe that that's the thing. I just couldn't. My mom and me were just so outraged to hear everybody just say that's what it was. After all of this, that's all it is. I just don't know how to believe that.

Dan Taberski: I just don't know how to believe that is such a great way of putting it. It appears that the families in that town, they weren't just having this willful, I don't believe the doctor. They truly didn't know how to believe it. It wasn't something that they could understand. They heard that, and they heard it's all in your head. They hear that thing that girls have been hearing since forever when they go to the doctor. I completely understand the impulse not to believe it, or at least not to believe it yet.

At least to believe, fine, I understand what you're saying. Maybe it does have a psychological component to it, but there's no way that if I were a parent, I would stop investigating. I just wouldn't believe it until I had personally turned over every stone. In particular, I think the thing that people found most offensive about the diagnosis was the suggestion, or the implied suggestion that they were faking it. That's how a lot of people took it, that these weren't real. That's not the case with mass psychogenic illness. They are real symptoms. They are uncontrollable but it's just a real hard thing to make people believe.

Micah Loewinger: As you alluded to, the parents did not want to stop investigating it, and so they started to bring in a string of outside investigators. They brought the story to the press, and it became a national news story, an international news story. Camera crews from Sweden and Japan started showing up. The New York Times was on the scene.

Speaker 8: We have new information tonight on a medical mystery that's centered in western New York.

Speaker 9: The number of victims displaying involuntary Tourette's-like syndromes has grown.

Speaker 10: What could be the cause of all this?

Speaker 11: Is it a disorder or a kind of mass hysteria or is the cause and effect in their backyard?

Micah Loewinger: Dr. Drew, the tv and radio personality, picked it up.

Dr. Drew: The girls, I'm sure these symptoms, no matter what has caused them, gets worse when you're anxious and obviously, you're in front of a tv camera. Now, I want you to breathe deep and let's everybody calm down and let's have. Let's try to figure this thing out. You guys feel comfortable?

Speaker 12: Ah.

Dr. Drew: Okay.

Micah Loewinger: One of the students went on a show called The Doctors, which was hosted by a former bachelor contestant.

[music]

Speaker 13: 16 year old Alicia and her dad, Randy, are here with us now. So glad you picked up.

Micah Loewinger: Dan. How would you describe this portfolio of coverage?

Dan Taberski: Bizarre, expected, overly fascinated. The doctor's thing was crazy and oddly mirrored what was happening in Paris in the 1880s when Charcot would put these women having symptoms on stage, and the people in the audience would look. Here we are, 130 years later, and we're putting girls with mysterious symptoms on stage again, except this time, it's in front of a live studio audience, and it's on a show hosted by a former contestant from The Bachelor.

Micah Loewinger: Correct me if I'm wrong, but Alicia, the student who went on The Doctors, wanted to go on the show. She and her parents, their calculus was, "We're going to get really high quality doctors if we go on the show. The kind of care that we can't or wouldn't want to shell out for otherwise."

Dan Taberski: They didn't come from big urban areas. They came from places that they didn't have access to a lot of doctors. Certainly not the best in the business doctors that you would want for your own kid when something this strange is happening that you can't understand, that you're looking desperately for an answer for. People weren't talking to the press because they thought it'd be fun. People were talking to the press and going on these really strange shows and almost exploiting themselves because they were looking for an answer. This is the way that they could get attention, and this is the way that they could get doctors. Most of their insurance didn't cover this stuff, so not only just doctors, doctors they didn't have to pay for. It's not a small thing.

Micah Loewinger: When Alicia got the answer from the doctors, it was that she was suffering from conversion disorder.

Dan Taberski: They're basically telling her this news. They did all these MRIs. They got brain scans scattered all over the screens behind her. She's onstage, like she's on Jerry Springer with her father in front of this audience. They're giving her this diagnosis, basically saying that all her tests are normal, which sounds like a good thing, but the implication is that therefore, if your tests are normal, but you're still having these symptoms, that's conversion disorder. That's psychogenic illness.

It feels insulting. It's funny because when it was happening, she was a young girl of maybe 15, 16, and so she's very polite on the show. She says, thank you, and she says, I'm very happy but then you hear her talk as an adult when she can express herself more clearly. Her real disgust was really palpable.

Alicia: "It's all in your head," they're saying and I'm saying, it's not. I have physical symptoms. My mom would go to my appointments with me and a male doctor would dismiss everything we were both saying. It wasn't until my dad went into the meetings and then until we were heard.

Dan Taberski: The hard thing to really understand about conversion disorder is that you're having physical symptoms. They are coming from your mind, but you don't know it. It's coming from your unconscious mind. Even somebody who's having conversion disorder will never be able to bridge that gap. The mind, the brain, and how it interacts with the body and society is really complicated. It's a hard thing to accept, especially from a doctor who used to be a former contestant on The Bachelor. [laughs]

Micah Loewinger: It got more complicated. The coverage got kicked up another notch after an anonymous note was slipped under the door of one of the parents in the community.

Dan Taberski: Slipped under the door? Some people say it was slipped under a doormat. Some people say it was slipped into their mailbox. We know that there was an anonymous note and some documents, and they were anonymously given to one of the affected families. The documents basically reminded people that if you're looking for the cause of this outbreak, if you're looking for the toxic cause of this outbreak, you need to go back further.

It reminded people that in 1973, there was a train derailment 3 miles from the school that dumped 35,000 gallons of trichloroethylene solvent into the ground and that it was still there. 50 miles away in Niagara Falls, New York, was where Love Canal happened, which was one of the greatest environmental disasters in American history. Very similar circumstances with mysterious symptoms that were unexplainable and turned out to be caused by the chemicals that had been dumped into the ground decades before and that was now poisoning their children. The fear that this trained derailment and Le Roy might have something to do with it wasn't just some made up media thing. It was a real possibility and it was something that the people in this area had seen before.

Micah Loewinger: This theory became even more plausible when Erin Brockovich got involved. The Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist played by Julia Roberts in the movie from 2000.

Erin Brockovich: We have more than 400 plaintiffs. They may not be the most sophisticated people, but they do know how to divide and $20 million isn't shit when you split it between them.

Micah Loewinger: Did she and her team solve the case?

Dan Taberski: They investigated six fracking wells that were situated on the high school. They investigated other environmental problems that were happening in the community. They went to that train derailment to see, you know, how the cleanup efforts were and realized that there were still over 150 gallon drums of toxic waste from the site that had been cleaned up back in the '70s that had never been removed. Apparently those steel drums had decayed and the toxins in those drums had seeped back into the ground. They were right in that there were serious environmental problems in the area. They were not able to show through any tests that that was the source of the cause of the symptoms for the girls.

Micah Loewinger: Something interesting happened following the environmental investigation, following Erin Brockovich's involvement, when the press coverage was at a fever pitch. Many of the girl's symptoms actually got worse. Here's Dr. McVige.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: It got crazy because first everyone starts with tics, and so we're managing these tics and we were worried about motor issues. Then it turns into which I think is so interesting, syncopal events. Syncope is when we pass out. Near syncope is when I feel like I'm going down and I feel dizzy but syncope is actually the act of passing out.

Speaker 14: People start passing out.

Dr. Jennifer McVige: People start passing out right and left. Now we're passing out.

Micah Loewinger: Then what does this culmination tell us about the relationship between mass psychogenic illness and the media?

Dan Taberski: I will say this, that very often what happens with a mass psychogenic illness is that the symptoms get worse over time. As a mass psychogenic illness is growing and spreading, the symptoms tend to evolve.

Micah Loewinger: We don't know that the media coverage exacerbated it in this way.

Dan Taberski: Dr. McVige has done the research and really difficult research. It doesn't prove causation, it proves correlation, but it's still pretty impressive. Dr. McVige was the neurologist that treated the majority of the girls who had the symptoms, and she charted when there would be what she called exacerbations. Anytime that symptoms would get worse in a patient, an ER visit, if they would start passing out, if their symptoms evolved, she would keep track of that.

Then she basically put that up against a calendar of when the big events in the mass hysteria happened, to see if she could pinpoint what was causing these symptoms to worsen. She basically found out that the week that the press attention got the absolute most cacophonous.

Speaker 15: Tonight, activist Erin Brockovich has launched her own investigation. ABC's Lindsey Davis is in upstate New York.

Lindsey Davis: Now, enter the famous environmental activist Erin Brockovich. Brockovich speculates that when this school was built in 2003, that some of that contaminated soil may have been used during construction.

Dan Taberski: The Brockovich team was there, and they were talking about the possibility of cancer cells and media from around the world was there. It was just the super intense focus on this town that the symptoms got markedly worse that following week. There were 11 exacerbations in the week after the Erin Brockovich team came, which was by far the worst week of the mass hysteria, if you do believe it was a mass hysteria. She was able to show that there was at least some sort of connection between the attention we give a situation like this and the potential for it to get worse.

Micah Loewinger: There was that fascinating moment where Bob from Erin Brockovich's team, he seems conflicted.

Bob: Did something good come out of it from an environmental investigator's perspective? Yes, I got the TCE site cleaned up that had been neglected for probably the better part of 20 years. Did the fact that I came to town and found environmental things of concern exacerbate or contribute further to the psychological impacts to these kids, did it validate their feelings? Could have. Could we have made it worse? We tried not to.

Dan Taberski: For him, it's like, "Did we make it worse? I hope not." But in his mind, and I'm inclined to agree, I'm not sure what the other alternatives are. The best way to deal with a mass psychogenic illness, once you realize it's a mass psychogenic illness, is to stop giving it attention, to try to stop talking about it, potentially separate the people who are experiencing symptoms. On the whole, it will probably fade away. It's the pattern of mass psychogenic illnesses.

That's an impossible thing to do because who's going to prove that there is no other explanation for these symptoms unless you do a real investigation? The only way a mass psychogenic illness is a mass psychogenic illness is if there's no other plausible explanation. As far as the people in that town were concerned, and Erin Brockovich was concerned, they had not ruled out the environmental yet, not by a long shot. I'm inclined to agree, the only thing to do is to investigate. The only thing to do is to stir things up a little bit to make sure that you're turning over every stone. It's sort of a catch 22 that I think is fascinating and we could watch, actually play out in real time in this case.

Micah Loewinger: One way to treat mass psychogenic illness is to stop giving it attention. That's exactly what some doctors did when they reached out to some local tv stations in Le Roy and the journalists listened.

Dan Taberski: Basically, the neurologists asked the television stations not to stop covering the story, but to stop showing the tics on television. Mass psychogenic illness is a line of sight illness, and it spreads, usually in tight social groups like a convent or a small town or a high school, where people usually know each other. The way it spreads is line of sight. You see it happening. What the doctors feared was going on was that by covering this story so incessantly, and by showing the girls ticking and having symptoms on television so incessantly, that was a vector for spread so they asked the television stations to stop showing it, and a couple of the local stations did. They didn't stop covering the story, they just stopped showing the tics, which I think is commendable.

Micah Loewinger: It's responsible journalism.

Dan Taberski: If we're being honest with ourselves, the thing that people want to see are the symptoms. That's a salacious thing. That's the thing that makes it watchable and they stopped doing that. I thought that was super interesting and super responsible on their part.

Micah Loewinger: You compare what happened in Le Roy to another case, a similar case in Danvers, Massachusetts, shortly after. How did that episode differ from Le Roy?

Dan Taberski: Shortly after what happened in Le Roy, there was an outbreak in another town, in a town called Danvers, Massachusetts. The difference here is that there were no town hall meetings, nobody talked to the press, there was no secret sources. They didn't give it any attention, they didn't fuel the fire, there was no media attention because of that and eventually it went away without the Erin Brockovich showing up and crazy town halls with people screaming and constant people passing out on Dr. Drew. None of that happened.

Of course, the ultimate irony of that is that Danvers, Massachusetts was not always called Danvers, Massachusetts. In 1752, they changed their name to Danvers from what it was before, Salem, Massachusetts, which is where the original Salem witch trials happened, which a lot of people think was a mass psychogenic illness, that those girls obviously weren't witches, and that maybe what was happening was a psychogenic illness like what was happening in Le Roy.

Micah Loewinger: You go through some other examples of suspected mass psychogenic illness on the show. You look into, for instance, the fear that cops were overdosing on fentanyl by merely making physical contact with it, or in some cases, just being near fentanyl. You and your team counted over 300 cases of alleged police fentanyl overdoses reported in the press. How did that all start?

Dan Taberski: It seems that it all started in 2015, when there was a report released by the DEA and a video that went along with it that showed the personal testimony of two police officers who say they had incidental contact with fentanyl in the context of an arrest and began to basically experience overdose symptoms because allegedly of how dangerous and how incredibly reactive fentanyl was. This video was used as a warning to send to every police station, telling police officers to not get anywhere near fentanyl, that you could overdose just by being near it, just by potentially inhaling at the wrong moment, if there's a bag of it somewhere nearby. Just by potentially touching a little bit of the powder.

Micah Loewinger: We know that fentanyl is 50 times stronger than heroin or 100 times stronger than morphine. No one's disputing that.

Dan Taberski: It's just a matter of how can you overdose from it? The Society of Medical Toxicologists and other experts like that have told us over and over since 2015 that is not possible to overdose on fentanyl in that way, that you're not going to overdose on fentanyl just by being near it or potentially breathing in while there's some in the room. It's not possible. It's theoretically possible. There hasn't been a case, as far as they can tell. What happened is that after this video came out, police officers began overdosing by being near fentanyl. They began reacting to the point where they were getting Narcan administered to prevent the overdose.

Micah Loewinger: You speak with Ryan Marino, an ER doctor in Ohio, who has been trying to publicly debunk this claim. He backs his stuff up with science and he says you can't overdose on fentanyl by touching it or accidentally breathing it in.

Ryan Marino: Fentanyl that's in street drugs is a solid. Solid doesn't just turn into gas. We do know, too, that through another law of physics, we have this concept of vapor pressure, which is the ability of something to transition into a gaseous state or aerosolize spontaneously. Fentanyl has a very low vapor pressure. Under any normal conditions on the planet earth, fentanyl in a powder form sitting somewhere is not going to aerosolize.

Dan Taberski: It's a hard stance to take because people are really fucking scared of fentanyl, and they should be. It's really scary. It's destroying lives. 100,000 people last year, something like that, overdosed on fentanyl. It's incredibly destructive so I get the fear. There's this fear on the one hand, but the facts are another. It makes you question what is happening to these police officers as they're "Overdosing." By the way, what's so interesting about this case in particular is that because of police body cams, all these overdoses, we're seeing them all, and we're not only seeing them all, it's that they make great news footage.

Speaker 15: Shocking body cam video released tonight by the San Diego Sheriff's department shows a deputy on the brink of death after being exposed to fentanyl.

Speaker 16: The power of even the smallest touch of fentanyl, shown in this video. Watch as a Bartlesville police officer wearing protective gloves is packing up drug evidence believed to be laced with fentanyl when he slowly starts to collapse.

Speaker 15: A video tonight of a New York state trooper on Long Island helping revive a woman, the victim of a possible fentanyl overdose.

Speaker 17: We believe that it is that fentanyl and heroin that ultimately, he was somehow exposed to it.

Speaker 16: Police say it's yet another risk of the evolving opioid epidemic, a risk to law enforcement.

Speaker 18: Earlier this week, we reported on an Ohio police officer who accidentally overdosed after coming into contact with fentanyl.

Speaker 19: He absorbed the drug through his skin. Fellow officers had to use Narcan to revive him, and he woke up in the hospital.

Dan Taberski: There are police officers who think they're having overdoses. They're getting Narcan administered to them by their partners and by EMTs on camera. We're seeing the symptoms. We're seeing them freak out. We're seeing them panic. We're seeing them fall to the ground. Then it gets put on the news very often, without question, unfortunately, and that is just an incredible way for a mass psychogenic illness to spread. It's what a lot of people think is going on here.

Micah Loewinger: What do you think is at stake when journalists are credulously covering these stories of police overdoses from simply being near or making contact with fentanyl, beyond, let's just say, some misinformation about the drug? Is it doing any harm?

Dan Taberski: Yes. The problem is, is that because fentanyl is such a dangerous drug and people are overdosing from it at such a high rate, people believing that you can overdose from incidental fentanyl contact creates big problems in terms of caring for people who really are overdosing on fentanyl because that fear means that they put safety protocols into hospitals so that doctors and others don't overdose by getting near the people who are actually overdosing but that slows down medical attention for these people, and there's no time. These people are overdosing.

Even worse is that many municipalities are now charging people found with fentanyl. They're charging them with attempted assault on a police officer, alleging that having that fentanyl with them is an attempted assault, and putting those police officers at risk to the point where people are serving time in jail for attempted assault, for having just fentanyl on their body.

Micah Loewinger: We should add that fentanyl is used very often in hospital settings. Doctors and nurses and medical staff are handling this drug and they're not overdosing, right?

Dan Taberski: Yes. It's one of those things where when you stop to question, how do we know that those police officers aren't overdosing? You ask yourself, how are doctors and nurses dealing with fentanyl all the time? Fentanyl is one of the most useful drugs in medicine. It's used to help people with fear, used to help people with pain. It's used constantly and doctors and nurses aren't overdosing on fentanyl in that way. Even further, think about people who are actually using fentanyl as a drug illegally.

They're not overdosing accidentally on fentanyl just by being in the same room with it either. They have to snort it, they have to take it, they have to do what they have to do to actually get it into their system. It's not an accidental thing. The fact that it's restricted to the criminal justice system and criminal justice workers, is another indication that it could be a mass psychogenic illness because mass psychogenic illnesses tend to spread within pre existing social groups. Police officers and criminal justice workers definitely count as that.

Micah Loewinger: Let's return to Le Roy. Some of the cases were ultimately resolved. Some of these young women got over their symptoms.

Dan Taberski: Most of them did.

Micah Loewinger: How?

Dan Taberski: If you believe it was a mass psychogenic illness, the traditional trajectory of mass psychogenic illness is to flare up, is to cause havoc and it's to fade away. Eventually, as the news value of these dies down, as the media tiptoes away, as the headlines get smaller, it's almost like you're starving hysteria from the attention that it needs. Eventually the symptoms faded away.

Micah Loewinger: For the patients who never believed that it was mass psychogenic illness, how do they say they were healed?

Dan Taberski: Basically what happens is that another doctor, and I will say mysterious doctor because he never talked to us about it. Another doctor shows up in town and gives an alternate diagnosis. He says that he believes it's more likely something associated with an illness called PANDAS, which is basically, pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorder associated with strep. It's basically people who have a lingering strep infection can sometimes begin exhibiting symptoms that are similar to the symptoms that the girls in Le Roy are experiencing.

Unfortunately, if you ask me, and if you ask the neurologists in Le Roy who were treating the other girls, this did not line up with PANDAS. PANDAS is a pediatric disorder, first of all, and this was happening to kids who were past that point. They were in their teens. PANDAS is something that tends to happen mostly to boys, and this was happening mostly to girls. There are a host of reasons that PANDAS does not work as a diagnosis for this, but a lot of the families in the town believed it, and they took the treatments that he recommended.

Micah Loewinger: They say that the treatments work. As you say in the show, belief gets you out of the psychogenic illness, just like belief is what got you there in the first place.

Dan Taberski: Yes, I guess it's important to say, I don't mean this as a knock on the parents who believe this. It's just one possible theory, is that this alternative diagnosis and the pretty simple therapies that he prescribed because of it, that it was a placebo effect, that because the parents believed the diagnosis, and because the parents believed the therapies that he was suggesting, that that is what made it work, that's what made the symptoms go away. It's fascinating.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you, zooming out a little bit, what you learned over the course of reporting these stories. What did you set out to investigate, and do you feel like you found the answers you were looking for?

Dan Taberski: Yes. On the one hand, you're asking, what was this mystery illness? Am I able to say, beyond a shadow of it out that I know what it was? No, but I don't think that's necessarily appropriate when you're talking about individual medical diagnoses.

Micah Loewinger: You think it was mass psychogenic illness, what happened in Le Roy?

Dan Taberski: I believe it was a mass psychogenic illness on the group level. I think the minute you get down to individual people, it's impossible to say but I think looking at it as a group, I think it was 100% a mass psychogenic illness.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, the podcast is more than just this mystery. It's a show about attention. It's a show about groupthink. It's a show about belief and how we conceive of ourselves. You've described mass hysteria as "The defining disorder of our time." Why do you think that outside of these medical examples, this is a useful metaphor for thinking about our culture?

Dan Taberski: In the process of doing this. One neurologist we talked to that treated many of the girls, he was talking about something that they had pinned to the wall in his medical school. It's a quote that I think is pretty common among doctors. It's if the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't. I love the logic of that. Just the idea that we think we know what's going on in our brains, that we know it all is hubris. There's something at the podcast where I feel like I never quite go as far as to make the connections to how we're all feeling, even though I feel like this is how we're all feeling.

Micah Loewinger: You just use the term how we're all feeling. What do you mean by that?

Dan Taberski: I feel like we're all feeling at the mercy of our feelings and our thoughts and our brains and what we hear around us and all the information saying, could it be this or could it be that? I feel like we all feel like we're at the mercy of not understanding what's going on because it's just so incredibly complicated. For me, a certain sense of giving yourself over to that creates a little more sanity.

Micah Loewinger: Dan, thank you very much.

Dan Taberski: Thank you so much, man. I love doing it.

Micah Loewinger: Dan Taberski is a documentary podcast creator. His latest series is called Hysterical.

[music]

Thanks for listening to this week's midweek podcast. By the way, I'd love to hear from you. Hit me up if you have a tip, if there's something you want us to dig into or if there's something you think we should know about. It can be a personal story or a question about the media that you want answered. My contact information is on our website onthemedia.org. All right, that's it. Be sure to catch the big show on Friday. I'm Micah Loewinger.

[music]

 

Copyright © 2024 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.