principals who might have to deal with this type of incident. It’s just one page with a few questions for the parents. The kids don’t have to be involved at all. You and your school would be helping a lot of other school systems.” I tried to play down the idea that we’d be doing a research study and appeal to his sense of altruism, as well as his ego. It worked.
“I guess that sounds reasonable. It would be nice to help other schools, and since it won’t involve the students directly, I think I can get it past the board. Can you get me a copy of the questionnaire?”
“No problem. I’ll send one over today.” Maybe there was a future forme in research after all. If not, perhaps I had a shot at elementary school politics.
With numerous phone calls and persistence, I eventually got an 80 percent response to my questionnaire. I had a statistician help me analyze the results, and my hypotheses proved to be true. The outbreak definitely had the characteristic features of mass hysteria. And early loss—a death within the family or parental divorce—was significantly more frequent in students who got sick than in those who did not.
I was thrilled. My first attempt to publish a study succeeded, and I got it into a fairly good journal.
It was interesting to note the reaction of the medical community itself to my findings. I remember presenting my paper to the medical staff at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital Research Symposium. When I reported that mass hysteria consistently affected girls more than boys, many of the scholars and clinicians actually hissed and chuckled. Whenever I described the gender differences in hysteria symptoms, it often seemed to stir up a charged response from both scholars and families of victims. Years later Harvard’s Larry Summers lost his presidency there for suggesting, at an academic conference, that “innate sex differences” might explain why fewer women have successful careers in science. I made sure that when I talked about women being more prone to mass-hysteria symptoms I was merely reporting the news, not editorializing. The studies proved it so, but no one really knew why—perhaps it had to do with girls having closer friendships and tighter social networks, or maybe they were just more likely to talk to one another about their feelings than boys. Adolescent boys tend to hold their feelings inside and tough it out, the way they envision their fathers would behave.
Almost exactly two years after the mystery illness in the suburbs, a strikingly similar outbreak struck a different Boston suburb: another chorus rehearsal, kids fainting and being rushed to the hospital, and lots of worry about environmental toxins. Again the kids got better quickly, and before I could even get out there, the school decided to go ahead with the actual performance that very evening. However, soon after the kids began to sing, a new wave of nausea and fainting spread through thechorus. Ambulances and fire trucks stirred up the hysterical crowd of parents as the sickest kids were rushed to the hospital for the second time that day. Once again, all the children recovered in a few hours, and, like most mass-hysteria outbreaks, mostly girls were afflicted.
Before rushing down to another principal’s office, I decided to get some advice from one of the top psychiatric researchers in the country. Gerald Klerman had returned to Harvard after a stint at the National Institute of Mental Health, and I was able to meet with him that afternoon. I summarized the current mystery school illness, as well as the events and study I’d conducted two years earlier. He told me to forget about dealing with the school this time and go straight to the local health department. Health officials have a mandate to get to the truth; the school system, on the other hand, is usually more interested in not making mistakes and covering its tracks. What Klerman said seemed so obvious to me now—I wished I’d had
“I guess that sounds reasonable. It would be nice to help other schools, and since it won’t involve the students directly, I think I can get it past the board. Can you get me a copy of the questionnaire?”
“No problem. I’ll send one over today.” Maybe there was a future forme in research after all. If not, perhaps I had a shot at elementary school politics.
With numerous phone calls and persistence, I eventually got an 80 percent response to my questionnaire. I had a statistician help me analyze the results, and my hypotheses proved to be true. The outbreak definitely had the characteristic features of mass hysteria. And early loss—a death within the family or parental divorce—was significantly more frequent in students who got sick than in those who did not.
I was thrilled. My first attempt to publish a study succeeded, and I got it into a fairly good journal.
It was interesting to note the reaction of the medical community itself to my findings. I remember presenting my paper to the medical staff at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital Research Symposium. When I reported that mass hysteria consistently affected girls more than boys, many of the scholars and clinicians actually hissed and chuckled. Whenever I described the gender differences in hysteria symptoms, it often seemed to stir up a charged response from both scholars and families of victims. Years later Harvard’s Larry Summers lost his presidency there for suggesting, at an academic conference, that “innate sex differences” might explain why fewer women have successful careers in science. I made sure that when I talked about women being more prone to mass-hysteria symptoms I was merely reporting the news, not editorializing. The studies proved it so, but no one really knew why—perhaps it had to do with girls having closer friendships and tighter social networks, or maybe they were just more likely to talk to one another about their feelings than boys. Adolescent boys tend to hold their feelings inside and tough it out, the way they envision their fathers would behave.
Almost exactly two years after the mystery illness in the suburbs, a strikingly similar outbreak struck a different Boston suburb: another chorus rehearsal, kids fainting and being rushed to the hospital, and lots of worry about environmental toxins. Again the kids got better quickly, and before I could even get out there, the school decided to go ahead with the actual performance that very evening. However, soon after the kids began to sing, a new wave of nausea and fainting spread through thechorus. Ambulances and fire trucks stirred up the hysterical crowd of parents as the sickest kids were rushed to the hospital for the second time that day. Once again, all the children recovered in a few hours, and, like most mass-hysteria outbreaks, mostly girls were afflicted.
Before rushing down to another principal’s office, I decided to get some advice from one of the top psychiatric researchers in the country. Gerald Klerman had returned to Harvard after a stint at the National Institute of Mental Health, and I was able to meet with him that afternoon. I summarized the current mystery school illness, as well as the events and study I’d conducted two years earlier. He told me to forget about dealing with the school this time and go straight to the local health department. Health officials have a mandate to get to the truth; the school system, on the other hand, is usually more interested in not making mistakes and covering its tracks. What Klerman said seemed so obvious to me now—I wished I’d had
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