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In 2011, at a school in Le Roy in upstate New York, a group of teenage girls were stricken by Tourette’s-like vocal tics, twitches and head spasms which they claimed were involuntary. As the condition began to spread and reporters flocked to the town, local officials were under pressure to come up with an explanation. After weeks of testing, doctors decreed the girls had conversion disorder, an illness in which the body reacts to stress or buried trauma. This, they said, can be contagious when a person’s brain mirrors what they see in others, causing what is called a mass psychogenic illness. Or, to use an older and more judgmental term: hysteria.
In Hysterical, Dan Taberski re-examines the case that gripped the country and divided the town as parents, children, medical experts and environmentalists all cleaved to different theories. Taberski is the prolific podcaster behind Running from Cops, Surviving Y2K and 9/12, all series that approach familiar topics from an unusual angle. The host’s trademark has been his archly quizzical tone, though Hysterical brings a distinct softening and sensitivity in his approach. Here he speaks to several of the girls, now women, who were affected by the illness and who vividly relate what it was like to lose control of their bodies; one describes feeling “like Linda Blair in The Exorcist”. He also talks to their mothers, who were insistent their daughters were not, as some suggested, faking it.
Taberski takes his time with the story, building a nuanced picture not just of events in Le Roy but of the misogyny that has long underpinned notions of hysteria, from Plato’s “wandering womb” theory to the Salem witch trials. Among the common complaints here from the sufferers and their mothers is how they fought to be listened to by medical professionals.
He also interrogates some of the wild theories put forward to explain the symptoms, which included leakage from a former Jell-O plant and poisoning from a toxic chemical spillage that occurred when a train derailed in the town in 1970, a claim which caught the attention of environmentalist Erin Brockovich, who sent a team of investigators to Le Roy.
It is with the benefit of hindsight that Taberski also notes the similarities to Havana syndrome, the name used for the neurological disturbances experienced by US diplomats in Cuba in the 2010s where doctors similarly struggled to pinpoint a cause (possible explanations ranged from noisy cicadas to ultrasonic weapons).
The intense media scrutiny served to compound the stress and the symptoms experienced by the Le Roy schoolgirls. But as the months went by and interest in the story waned, their symptoms gradually dissipated, rendering the theory of mass psychosis, or psychological contagion, the most convincing one. This doesn’t make any of what happened less real, says Taberski, who approaches his subject with the utmost sincerity. “It’s contagious,” he says, “it’s unexplainable and it’s scary as hell.”
