What Witchcraft Is Facebook?

Mass psychogenic illness—historically known as “mass hysteria”—is making a comeback.

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MPI is not a new phenomenon. Devinsky hails the 1965 book Hysteria: The History of a Disease as the best historical road map of the illness. In it, author Ilza Veith, who holds a PhD in the history of medicine, writes that hysteria is traced as far back as the ancient Egyptians in 1900 B.C., who believed that it resulted from the “discontent” womb of a woman who didn’t reproduce soon enough after puberty (hystera is Greek for “uterus”.) Various outbreaks can be traced through history; there were probably 50 outbreaks in medieval European nunneries during the latter Middles Ages alone, Bartholomew says, when theories of witchcraft were prevalent. The Salem Witch Trials resulted from a well-known example of MPI. Notable outbreaks since then include a 1962 incident at an all-girls boarding school in Kashasha, Tanzania, where there was a “laughing epidemic,” and a 1965 incident in Blackburn, England at another girls school, where 85 girls were sent to the hospital with dizziness and convulsions, with no medical or environmental culprits found. More recently, in the winter of 2012, there was an outbreak of MPI that affected more than 1,000 students and five teachers across 15 different schools in Sri Lanka, where people complained that they were having vertigo and uncontrollable coughing.