Lauren Dimon revisits an apparent outbreak of mass hysteria two years ago, when more than a dozen young women in western New York reported mysterious spasms and tics. After a battery of medical and environmental tests, one high-school student was confirmed to have Tourette’s Syndrome, while the rest, who were classmates, were thought to have unconsciously modeled their illnesses after her. Dimon zeroes in on the only non-student to catch the disease, a 36-year-old woman named Marge who apparently learned of the illness through Facebook:
[Sociologist Robert] Bartholomew said that it’s not unheard of for one or two adults to be affected, but he cannot recall any cases like Marge’s, in which the adults were not intimately involved with the children suffering from the malady. Marge said that she knew about what was going on in town mainly through Facebook postings.
Catching an illness through Facebook sounds wonky. But the contagion of hysteria relies, among many things, upon the unconscious interpretation of what is suggested to us. Fitzsimmons did not even have to be in physical contact with the other girls to “catch” their disease. Marge encapsulates the power of social media to penetrate and trigger actions of the unconscious mind. She marks “a historical shift in terms of the trigger for people being affected and sucked into these cases,” Bartholomew said.
According to Bartholomew, there is “potential for a far greater or global episode, unless we quickly understand how social media is, for the first time, acting as the primary vector or agent of spread for conversion disorder.” He believes that epidemics spread by social media are “inevitable” and that “it’s just a matter of time before we see outbreaks that are not just confined to a single school or factory or even region, but covering a disperse geographical area and causing real social and economic harm.”
The Dish 