#mass psychogenic illness

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Andrew Doyle

Published: Apr 8, 2024

One of my shortest-lived jobs was as a teacher at a school for girls near Sloane Square in London. I resigned after just two weeks because the headmistress was a religious zealot who had objected to me teaching a text which featured a gay character. In my resignation letter, I explained that I wasn’t prepared to work at a school which fostered such antediluvian attitudes. I stayed on to finish the term, but was delighted when I eventually made my escape.

I had previously worked at a boys’ school, and I soon noticed that there were some broad differences that manifested in an all-female environment. One of the most concerning was that many of the girls were engaged in what can only be described as competitive starvation. During lunch duties, I was warned to keep an eye out for pupils who had taken just a single lettuce leaf from the salad bar. If I saw any girl doing so, I was told I must immediately intercept her and demand that she return and fill her plate.

My first teaching post had been at a co-ed school in which cutting one’s own skin was the fashion. We even had a visiting expert telling us how to encourage these pupils to hold ice cubes in their hands until they felt shooting pains as a substitute for the razor. I remember at the time thinking that this wasn’t the best advice, but I was too green to raise an objection. Besides, this speaker had spent a considerable part of the session reminiscing about a shepherd she had once counselled who had, over the course of many months on the hillside, used a sharp wire to whittle his penis so that it eventually became forked. To this day, I am none the wiser as to the purpose of this anecdote.

But the shift from cutting to starvation was striking. At the former school, pupils were not refraining from food, and at the latter there were very few who were injuring themselves with blades. It was almost as though only one form of self-harm could predominate at any given time. And when a small group started doing it, the trend spread with remarkable rapidity. I hadn’t seen an equivalent back when I was teaching boys.

I have since learned that social contagions are especially common among teenage girls, and that there are numerous historical precedents for this. I have written elsewhere about the Salem witch trials of 1692-93, in which a group of girls began seeing demons in the shadows and accusing members of their own community of being in league with the Devil. Then there were the various “dancing plagues” of the middle ages which seemed to impact young women in particular. In 1892, girls at a school in Germany began to involuntarily shake their hands whenever they performed writing exercises. And when I visited Sweden last year, I was told about a local village where, during the medieval period, the girls all inexplicably began to limp.

It's perfectly clear that the latest social contagion to take hold in the western world is that of girls identifying out of their femaleness, either through claims that they are trans or non-binary. Whereas in 2012, there were only 250 referrals (mostly boys) to the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS), by 2021 the figure had risen to more than 5,000 (mostly female) patients. Gender activists like to claim that this is simply the consequence of more people “coming out” as society becomes more tolerant, and at the same time insist that it has never been a worse time to be trans. Consistency is not their strong suit.

Of course there are no easy answers as to the explosion of this latest fad, but surely the proliferation of social media has something to do with it. Platforms such as TikTok are replete with activists explaining to teenagers that their feelings of confusion are probably evidence that they have been “born in the wrong body”. For pubescent girls who are uncomfortable with their physiological changes, as well as sudden unwanted male sexual attention, the prospect of identifying out of womanhood makes complete sense. These online pedlars have some snake-oil to sell. And while a limping epidemic in a medieval village would be unlikely to spread very far, social contagions cannot be so confined in the digital age.

Much of this is reminiscent of the recovered memory hysteria of the late twentieth-century, when therapist cranks promoted the idea that most victims of sexual abuse had repressed their traumatic memories from childhood. It led to numerous cases of people imagining that they had been abused by parents and other family members, and many lives were ruined as a result. One of the key texts in this movement was The Courage to Heal (1988) by Ellen Bass and Laura Davis, which made the astonishing and unevidenced claim that “if you are unable to remember any specific instances… but still have a feeling that something abusive happened to you, it probably did”.

A common feature of social contagions is that they depend upon the elevation of intuition over material reality. Just as innocent family members were accused of sexual abuse because of “feelings” teased out by unscrupulous therapists, many girls are now being urged by online influencers to trust the evidence of their emotions and accept a misalignment between their body and their gendered soul. We are not talking here about the handful of children who suffer from gender dysphoria, but rather healthy children who have been swept up in a temporary craze.

Activists have been quick to demonise the entire notion of “social contagion” as a “transphobic talking point”, but the evidence for it is now indisputable. The review into paediatric gender treatment by Dame Hilary Cass is due to be published this Wednesday, and is likely to include recommendations that schools stop the “social transitioning” of children. The interim review had already pointed out that enabling pupils to adopt alternative names, pronouns and dress codes was “not a neutral act”. And there is mounting evidence that such an approach consolidates a child’s psychological conceptualisation of herself as a member of the opposite sex. While social transitioning is seen as compassionate, in reality is causes long-term harm.

It would seem that teenage girls will always be prone to these social contagions, but some are more damaging than others. Whereas limping and dancing and trembling can be overcome, the lifelong impact of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgery will not be so transient. Let’s hope this particular hysteria soon goes the way of all the others.

#Andrew Doyle #gender identity #social contagion #mass psychogenic illness #hysteria #mass hysteria #born in the wrong body #metaphysics #gender thetans #gendered souls #religion is a mental illness

[randomwikiarticles]

Mass psychogenic illness (MPI), also called mass sociogenic illness, mass psychogenic disorder, epidemic hysteria or mass hysteria, involves the spread of illness symptoms through a population where there is no infectious agent responsible for contagion.[1] It is the rapid spread of illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group, originating from a nervous system disturbance involving excitation, loss, or alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously have no corresponding organic causes that are known.[2]

#mass psychogenic illness #mass hysteria #psychology #social contagion #medical

[jbfly46]

Psychogenic Electronic Illness

There appears to be a psychogenic electronic illness or mass hysteria plaguing the entire United States, with the symptoms ranging from symptoms of delusional disorder to symptoms of schizophrenia. I assume from my past research that the cause is a combination of a biological cause, from what seems to be a strain of frequently ignored black mold that is prevalent in poor regions, recent increased levels of stress from Covid-19, and the effects of late stage capitalism that the majority of people are born into. The majority of the people in the area appear to at least be experiencing functional delusions, with the lower classes and the poor experiencing more severe symptoms due to their increased levels of economic and other stressors. It’s likely that there is also a genetic factor in play, with certain epigenetics being activated by stress and the biological toxin. I am assuming that the minority of people unaffected by this don’t work in mental health, as these workers seem to be completely unaware of it or also affected by it. Portland is going to need outside help from people who won’t be affected by the causal factors. I’m unsure of who to contact about this as there is still no federal body that oversees issues of this nature, and I cannot be sure the people I’m contacting aren’t also being affected by it. This has happened before in the United States and Europe, but back then there was nothing known about psychology, and barely anything known about the causes of illness. This psychogenic event has everything to do with computational psychology and the internet. Facebook was not the first entity to use internet algorithms to brainwash people. That’s what controlling the emotions of people who don’t know how to control their emotions is. Brainwashing. Eliminating their ability to use their free will. I’ve seen zero efforts from any university to counter the obvious and blatant brainwashing of our youth. Y’all are corporate cowards in my book, and corporate cowards deserve a coward’s death. The entire concept of brainwashing leaves out the fact that free will is necessary and exists for good reason, so of course an attempt at brainwashing the entire United States populace is going to end in disaster. I just hope for the sake of everyone that it isn’t allowed to get worse. The area of psychology has gone in the completely wrong direction. The entire field was practically fulled researched by Freud and Jung, all it needed was to neutralize the pronouns and anything based on the pronouns into non-gender or non-race specific pronouns. Now the successful methodologies of hypnosis and psychoanalysis are done by supercomputers running off of secret black boxes in corporate labs. I hope y’all are fuckin’ happy with your careers. The United States is falling apart at the seams and the lower classes are struggling and dying at alarming rates. How am I the only one who can see what’s happening? The inability of academic professionals to view their own academic subjects objectively qualifies them as delusional. This is a fucking humanitarian war crime. Reality has turned into a living fucking nightmare. Fuckin do something about this. I’m literally invisible to the majority of the population because I somehow escaped this ensnaring electronic entrapment, even while frequently using social media. People literally don’t see or hear me. I saw these experiments being planned and go down online. I traced their originations to specific geographical regions, where specific groups were the only ones with access to the knowledge and resources necessary to undertake these experiments. I don’t see how they expected to escape the brainwashing, almost as if they thought they were special. They’re not special. They were brainwashed too. Some of these people have literally had their minds wipes by their own technology. They’re effectively braindead. From the outside it looks similar to delusional disorder, psychosis, Alzheimer’s or dementia.

#Covid-19 #delusional disorder #schizophrenia #psychosis #mass hysteria #psychology #computational psychology #psychogenic #illness #genetics #epigenetics #brainwashing #hypnosis #Jung #Freud #social media #algorithms #United States #plague

[gaia-prime]

the cilantro soap gene isn’t real it’s psychosomatic

#mass psychogenic illness tbh

[witchhakuba]

guys i feel like im tripping didn't gosho literally confirm toichi alive in an interview years ago. like. i have no idea where to find it but i know multiple people who also thought that so this is either mass psychogenic illness or it's true

#magic kaito #toichi kuroba

[allyycat]

one of my theories for mtsaafw!!

hello!! so, i went to do some digging around, and i have two main things i think might relate to the story!!

no 1. "folie a deux"

it's french for folly of two. also known as: shared delusional disorder and shared psychosis!! the definition of it that i found (on wikipedia, probably should fact check this further): "symptoms of a delusional belief, and sometimes hallucinations,[3] are "transmitted" from one individual to another.[4]"

it also has links to mass psychogenic illness, which is also known as mass hysteria, as referenced in the extract from the book in chapter 1!! coincidence? i think not. just another one of my silly theories :)

#mtsaafw #theory

[porcelain-rob0t]

mlp infection AU but its a mass psychogenic illness

[drjeanmoreau]

Walking out of his 'welcome' meeting at Town Hall, Jean shook his head. He still wasn't fully convinced this wasn't a unique case of mass psychogenic illness. Seeing someone near the building entrance, he held up a hand. "Excuse me, I have a question for you."

He pulled out his phone from his blazer pocket and brought up the saved picture of Kerry. The last Christmas family photo his daughter-in-law sent before their disappearance. "Have you seen either of these two? Or know the optimal location I can go to search for them." Jean long since gave up asking the local authorities for help in his search.

@ghostsbrokenbyfairytales

#closed starter #ghostsbrokenbyfairytales #c: spencer

[did-diggy-die-yet]

"Dignan Zazumba is a Eldridge being that exists only in your imagination. He's a collective hallucination caused by mass psychogenic illness or mass motor hysteria," says the nonbeliever, clearly. 🙄

#also diggy ain't dead yet #hivemind tv #did diggy die yet #hivemind dignan

[i-think-therefore-i-ar]

I feel like a mimic sometimes

When my OSDD was first showing up, I was dating a DID system. I don’t remember the exact details of how I found it out, but it was through them that it all got triggered. I know I have some old writing recounting the tale, but I’ll write something fresh and new here.

I was 15-16, and I was dating a DID system we’ll call Peter. I was experimenting with things like age regression, but things weren’t white adding up (slight memory issues between being “little Mal” and regular Mal, a clear distinction of identity between Little Mal and Mal, etc).

So much so that it became an issue. Little Mal was doing some sort of internal exploring, and found three more people in the process. Tori, Valentine, and I don’t quite remember who the last one was. After that, alter upon alter came pouring out, with some that were more frequent than others. Little Mal became Ezra.

But Mal wasn’t taking it well. It got to the point where suicide was very, very close to being attempted, and all sorts of other issues cropping up. So, Valentine killed him. Mal was pulled out of control and killed, leaving Ben in charge.

After that, everything slowly merged back together. Ezra, Valentine, Ben, Tori, they all disappeared. I was back, as Mal, but also completely different. The same puzzle pieces were being used, but they were in a totally different configuration. I’m Mal, but a far different *version* of the Mal that used to exist.

Peter and I broke up. I tried to bring everyone out, but was absolutely desperate for any sort of sign that they were still there. It’s terrifying, to experience something like that and be left in the dust by both the person who had some semblance of answers and everyone else in my brain.

For a few months, I fought to get answers. I got a psychological evaluation and got diagnosed with OSDD. It didn’t fix anything. After a couple years, I gave up. I avoided anything talking about DID or OSDD like the plague, didn’t even acknowledge it in myself.

I tried going to a specialist for dissociative disorders, and nothing ever came of it. There were steps made in therapy, but he was the only specialist in the area, and I just didn’t mesh well with his style of therapy. I didn’t trust him.

So, eventually, I gave up. I let it be.

But I opened back up to it. I met a system online and decided to give them a chance, to try and put my own issues aside and attempt to make friends. I told them to not bring up DID or OSDD unless absolutely necessary, and they respected it.

Less than three days into knowing them, Hal showed up. It was unmistakeably another part, alter, whatever you would call him.

It’s not accurate to say that I’m copying others. Every time, I have stark differences from the systems around me, which run consistent with my own experiences. It isn’t like I’m mimicking their exact experiences, or using it to malinger. I am still *experiencing* Hal being here, the fuzzy memory, the dissociation.

I don’t know if it’s some weird attempt at masking, or if it’s a modern form of mass psychogenic illness, or if it’s simply just being around other systems triggering it out from me. I don’t know. I don’t like not knowing.

#malposts #mal speaks

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Suzanne Moore

Published: Apr 9, 2024

The alarm bells have been ringing for some time, but now the entire narrative around adolescent gender dysphoria is breaking apart

I remember as a teenager reading about a strange disorder called anorexia. I had never heard of it – and then I noticed one of my best friends cleaning her teeth several times a day and exercising manically. And it wasn’t just her that was acting weirdly. Several girls I knew were clearly suffering. Then came bulimia, which turned the school loos into sad places in which certain girls spent worrying amounts of time.

Then, as a mother of daughters, I remember reading about an epidemic of cutting among teenagers. Surely this highly unusual behaviour was not rampant? Well, the internet told me it was and an NHS psychiatrist informed me about self-harm circles in certain schools. 

These thoughts occur because I am trying to understand how we started talking of “trans children” and thought this was somehow some kind of “progress”. This, after all, is a new phenomenon. In 2010, for instance, with the Equality Act, which made gender reassignment a protected characteristic, the intention was surely to avoid discrimination against adult transsexuals. This is a laudable aim, but no one was talking about children then. The phrase “gender dysphoria” was not bandied about. It was rare to come across a child who had such severe gender issues they needed specialist services. Indeed, in that year, only 75 children were referred to Gids (the NHS’s Gender Identity Development Service, based at the Tavistock Centre in north-west London). By 2021 it was 5,000.

Now we are in a situation where celebrities wear T-shirts saying Protect Trans Kids and where schools, even primary schools, are colluding with the idea that children are whatever they say they are, that their bodies are somehow wrong and that they can change their names without parental consent.

The alarm bells have been ringing for some time about Gids. What was most alarming was this sudden spike in girls presenting with gender dysphoria and the increasing evidence of the harms of puberty blockers.

When Dr Hilary Cass was commissioned to report on standards of care within the NHS, it was as if finally an adult had stepped into the room. She and her team have looked at the evidence and practices that had recently evolved the affirmative model (designed to support and affirm an individual’s gender identity) and found much wanting. She also signalled the high levels of comorbidities with gender dysphoria. A high proportion of these girls who did not want to be girls were autistic. Many had troubled childhoods or had been in care. Many were gay. All of this resulted in the unravelling of Gids and a ban on puberty blockers.

In the full report, which is due to be published this week, Cass is not only concerned with medical intervention (puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, surgery) but is also expected to come out against “social transition”. Though this is not something that happens within the health service, it is, she says, an “active intervention because it may have significant effects on the child or young person in terms of psychological functioning. There are different views on the benefits versus the harms of early social transition… it is not a neutral act and better information is needed about outcomes.”

Some believe that socially transitioning kids will lock them into a gender identity and medical pathway that is detrimental. Cass emphasises that gender expression is indeed fluid and changeable for adolescents and that many may take till their mid-20s to settle. In other words, leave these kids alone.

Indeed, faced with this huge increase in kids saying they are trans, many schools have acquiesced. Yet teachers are not clinicians, nor are they there to diagnose children. Do they understand what they are doing? The entire narrative around trans children has been imported from America, but it is breaking apart.

Those who want to see themselves as compassionate and modern have embraced some seriously dodgy ideas. The evidence against puberty blockers, which were sold as “a pause” and reversible, mounts up. The Mayo Clinic has suggested that these drugs can lead to cancer. There is a court case coming up in Italy, and many predict that once the dam breaks, many who have been prescribed these drugs will sue their doctors. 

This has all been allowed to happen because children have been lied to. They are told they can change sex; they are told that puberty will be awful; they are told they will feel suicidal. Anyone who challenges this has been deemed a pariah. So we end up with newly qualified English teachers now deciding that they are doing the right thing by keeping a child’s fantasy identity secret from their parents.

Many are terrified of this issue and go along with what they must know to be dubious. We have yet to see where the Labour Party will go on this, because it too quakes in front of its own activists. Yet any serious person must address the issues around safeguarding. The gender dysphoric child must be protected, of course, but so must the other kids in the class who have a right to single-sex changing rooms.

Now is the time to step back and ask ourselves how we got here. The trans child is a manifestation of a recent story that the culture has told itself. This is a story of social contagion combined with the genuine distress of mostly young girls.

Children cannot be blamed for acting out, but the adults who have encouraged this, while patting themselves on the back for their progressive views, still need to be challenged. Cass is but the start. 

#Suzanne Moore #Hilary Cass #Dr. Hilary Cass #Cass report #social contagion #mass psychogenic illness #ROGD #rapid onset gender dysphoria #anorexia #anorexia nervosa #gender ideology #gender identity ideology #queer theory #intersectional feminism #religion is a mental illness

[ms-hells-bells]

yeah, i think i have changed my opinion on the iranian government being involved. it's clear that they are panicking, not doing properly investigation, and are scapegoating innocent people, including other schoolgirls, in an attempt to placate the angry public. they would not be acting this frantic and kneejerk if they had any inside knowledge of what happened. though unlikely, for all we know, it could be completely mass psychogenic illness and they're just throwing people in jail to try and prevent another jump up in protests again.

[eosphorusss]

the open tabs i had left on my computer after yesterday’s very productive study session (on civil procedure) were the wikipedia pages on the following topics: list of mass hysteria cases, saint vitus, mass psychogenic illness, chorea, great fear

#pugamemnon

[redacted-metallum]

TELL ME ABOUT THORPE what was his deal in the 1600s/1700s & how did the herald interact with his congregation then :3

Ouggh thorpe my stinky who doesn't even serve cunt about it

So he was "born" in the 1600s to exploit the thought patterns that would eventually grow into American Puritanism & Protestantism, feeding off off of the mass psychogenic illness and moral panic of the Salem witch trials. For the most part he took on the role of a wandering evangelical preacher, basically bouncing from town to town and claiming to communicate with "angels". Thorpe didn't really find his niche until the invention of commercial radio in the 1920s, so he was sort of a shitty pathetic parasite leaving wreckage in his wake.

The Herald of Blinding Light didn't interact Super directly bc like. It's either a ball of light or a Throne and. Can't speak in a way that doesn't involve melting people like the end of Raiders

Whenever Thorpe would decide it was time to move on from a town though, he would sew the seeds of some sort of panic, and then call the Herald in and burn the church down with the congregation inside. Because he's an asshole.

#revs thoughts #ocs #thorpe #the herald of blinding light

[vitruvianmanbara]

the sk8 the infinity hype should be classified as an instance of mass psychogenic illness imo

#'bitches bros and nonbinary hoes'

[buffporcupine]

kiyomi [an oc, please ask] really said “mass psychogenic illness? sounds rad, lemme get in on that!!” and everyone else went with it