A whole group of college students were taken in by unexplained headaches and nausea. Nuns who did sobs at fixed hours in a convent in Paris. A laugh that has been shared between girls in Tanzania for months. Many examples of the amazing and poorly understood phenomenon once called “mass hysteria.” Rare episodes, but striking, because in the absence of an identified organic cause, all hypotheses, including conspiracy, can arise. But how to understand these “epidemics of the mind”?
An epidemic of the “dancing plague” in Strasbourg in 1518 is one of the first well-documented cases of “mass psychogenic disorder” (MPD); hundreds of people, especially women, begin to dance uncontrollably, to the point of exhaustion and sometimes death. . The phenomenon, which lasts for several weeks, is widely discussed throughout Europe, and the authorities finally deny the supernatural origin in order to agree…
Source: Le Figaro
