Comments on: Church giggles to the extreme

Church giggles to the extreme

lauranesson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:28:50 -0800

In 1962, in a mission-run girls' boarding school in Kashasha, Tanzania, a student started laughing uncontrollably. Her laughter spread throughout the school, and the girls grew violent when teachers tried to calm them. Administration closed the school, sent some girls home, and the "epidemic of laughing and crying" spread to villages up and down the Bukoba district.

The blog entry is from Radiolab producer Ellen Horne, who traveled to Tanzania with funding help from the folks at TED. The resulting segment can be heard today on the season 4 premiere, or later this week on their podcast. More recent episodes of "mass sociogenic illness" include a 2007 epidemic among students in Virginia high school, and a 1999 outbreak involving recalled Coca-Cola in Belgium. Here's a take on MSI in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

By: quin

quin — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:37:29 -0800

Her laughter spread throughout the school, and the girls grew violent when teachers tried to calm them. So, your saying it was a laugh riot?

By: quin

quin — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:38:34 -0800

you're, grrr.

By: MythMaker

MythMaker — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:42:10 -0800

um... weed?

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:43:08 -0800

typical middle school...

By: twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious

twins named Lugubrious and Salubrious — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:43:23 -0800

Paging Dr. Lambshead.

By: dances_with_sneetches

dances_with_sneetches — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:45:07 -0800

When I was 19 I attended a memorial service given by a recently minted priest, Fr. Ben. It was his first memorial service and, to make certain everyone knew how serious it was, he inserted the word "dead" as every third word in the liturgy. We tried not to laugh, but what laughter leaked out only incited Fr. Ben to use the word dead more often, modifying it to "really dead." When we got to the Lord's Prayer, he began "Our Father who looks over dead people. . ." The congregation lost it. Poor dead person. Poor really dead person.

By: fearfulsymmetry

fearfulsymmetry — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:47:53 -0800

At least it wasn't a penis panic

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:58:54 -0800

Did they tear off their clothes, bit off their tongues, and suddenly turn radioactive?

By: CitizenD

CitizenD — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:37:35 -0800

AVALANCHE! no, wait...

By: CitizenD

CitizenD — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 11:38:03 -0800

[curse you, astro zombie, and your fleet fingers!]

By: etc.

etc. — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:09:13 -0800

That reads like a Borges or Italo Calvino story. Weird.

By: LordSludge

LordSludge — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:14:35 -0800

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH... ...ahhhhhhh..HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! work with me here

By: LordSludge

LordSludge — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 12:18:42 -0800

Did they tear off their clothes, bit off their tongues, and suddenly turn radioactive? Puberty will do that to a girl.

By: Pendragon

Pendragon — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:05:28 -0800

The dreaded giggle loop.

By: LobsterMitten

LobsterMitten — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:09:03 -0800

By: quin

quin — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:22:33 -0800

I came >this< close to referencing that Coupling episode, Pendragon. I'm glad I wasn't the only one who thought of it.

By: omegar

omegar — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:25:22 -0800

Ah, and let's not forget what happened last year at Villa de las Niñas (sponsored by LG!) in Chalco, Mexico. Symproms included difficulty walking and nausea. From the first link: "Hundreds of girls at a Mexican boarding school run by Catholic nuns have been struck by a mystery illness that authorities say is psychological, raising questions about conditions inside the academy." More: 1, 2, 3

By: omegar

omegar — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:26:36 -0800

symptoms, dammit

By: HuronBob

HuronBob — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:35:00 -0800

Symproms happen in Sym City at the end of the school year, right?

By: rosswald

rosswald — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:37:41 -0800

Just heard about it on the radio: http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/02/22 interesting stuff

By: rosswald

rosswald — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:41:32 -0800

Ouch sorry, boss came up behind me before I could preview and read the rest of the post and see they were already cited.

By: symbioid

symbioid — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 13:49:39 -0800

Makes me think of Culture-bound syndromes

By: lauranesson

lauranesson — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 14:15:56 -0800

Silly little side notes: This is my first little fpp, so I'm glad you like it, LobsterMitten. I also got to "see" the premiere last night, which was pretty fun. The picture shown on their site was the one where they asked us to look very stern and slightly disapproving.

By: zengargoyle

zengargoyle — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 16:20:46 -0800

Curse you, Virginia High School was the actual name of my high school. I thought something interesting finally happened there, but no, just some random Virginia high school.

By: ErWenn

ErWenn — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:43:21 -0800

The attack is accompanied by restlessness and on occasions violence when restraint is attempted. This sentence bothers me immensely. Why are they attempting restraint before violence occurs? Also, I have to agree with Omegar, here. "..commenced to act in an abnormal manner" just isn't going to cut it. For such a phenomenally bizarre event, you'd think there'd be more attention given to writing a report about it. This seems like one of those cases where medical practitioners and researchers should have gotten a bit of training in ethnography. It's as though everything that didn't have a number attached to it was just left out. (Yes, when you can answer a question with quantitative data, it's easier to remain objective, but often, this is not an option.) Are there other reports/articles about the Tanzania epidemic?

By: ErWenn

ErWenn — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:02:09 -0800

Some thoughts about the other links (which I only just read): From the Guardian article on the Virginia outbreak: Why that school rather than thousands of others should be susceptible to mass hysteria is, for the moment, unclear. Why does a single outbreak of a rare condition indicate that one school is more susceptible than the others? Now if the school had had multiple outbreaks of sociogenic illnesses, this would be a more sensible comment. The BJoP article gives a much nicer definition of "sociogenic illness" than a lot of others that I read. Some of the Wikipedia articles on various related topics (quoting other sources) begin with a definition that mentions not seeming to have a common cause or having no identifiable physical cause, and proceeding on to discuss the conditions as though it were known that the cause was psychological. That just gets my pedanties all in a bunch.* *Oh wow, I just made that word up, and I now think it's the best sentence I've written in years.

By: Catfry

Catfry — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 02:42:31 -0800

MY pedanties are neatly laid out on a line, ordered after size and each one classified according to a system I designed myself.

By: nax

nax — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 06:51:16 -0800

Salem witch trials.

By: honest knave

honest knave — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 08:47:11 -0800

>>when restraint is attempted. It's entirely possible that family members and others in the community attempted to help by restraint. The passive voice doesn't state who was doing the restraining.

By: donaldekelly

donaldekelly — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 19:19:03 -0800

Ever hear of the Toronto Blessing at the Toronto Airport Vineyard Church (now Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship) and their holy laughter that spread through the congregation at times? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_blessing Hmm - maybe another form of the same thing? With added violence.