6 ms·

The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy

74 points by wallflower 15y ago

aspensmonster 15y ago
And this is the link for the entire story on a single page without the annoying navbars and advertisements. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html?_pagewanted=print http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twi... EDIT: So you can't jump straight to the meaningful content. Cute.
- andrewfelix 15y ago
  http://www.readability.com/ http://www.readability.com/ EDIT: For those misunderstanding the context. Readability allows reading of NYT articles on a single page. Something the parent comment was unable to link to. It's a very useful plugin.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- sanukcm 15y ago
  There is a single page link under print... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twi...
Maciek416 15y ago
At first I was a little irritated at the article's style and how it holds back the truth for a few pages, but the truth of this story turns out to be absolutely fascinating stuff. A quote: "Cheerleaders frequently come up in case histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because psychogenic outbreaks often start with someone of high social status. But it might also be that their enviable unity is what makes them more susceptible. In 2002, 10 students, 5 of them cheerleaders, in a rural town in North Carolina suffered from nonepileptic seizures and fainting spells. In 1952, the Associated Press reported that 165 members of the Tigerettes cheerleading squad from Monroe, La., fainted before halftime at a high-school football game in nearby Natchez, Miss." I would love to hear someone try to speculate on an evolutionary reason for this kind of behaviour. What kind of advantage might this sort of thing have given humans in the past?
- droob 15y ago
  Panglossian!
- mcantelon 15y ago
  >the truth of this story turns out to be absolutely fascinating stuff The theory of the story, more like.
  - cperciva 15y ago
    The very well understood and widely studied phenomenon which is a perfect fit for observations? Saying that it's "just a theory" that mass psychogenic illness is involved here is like saying that it's "just a theory" that humans evolved from non-human primates.
    - mcantelon 15y ago
      >Part of what is baffling about the Le Roy case is that it seems to combine two equally poorly understood phenomena: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness Note the word "seems" and "poorly understood". They don't know what this is. They are acting on a theory.
      - Produce 15y ago
        In the language of science, they are acting on a hypothesis. Theory does not mean the same thing in science as in ordinary language - in science it typically refers to a well tested model which is capable of making predictions with a high degree of accuracy. It is far-fetched to call most things in modern psychiatry theories. The models are still underdeveloped, bad at making predictions and fail at treating ailments a lot of the time.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  Three things come to mind: (1) imitating higher-status individuals may give you reproductive advantage by getting you access to a larger pool of potential mates. (2) fitting in with the herd may be beneficial in short term because that way you don't have to think for yourself (of course becoming a lemming has disadvantages as well...), (3) sharing emotions with others may help group cohesion (people develop trust of each other by observing and attempting to predict each other's behavior; the people typically deemed to be most trustworthy are those who are both friendly and easy to predict, think dog/man's best friend).
mrtimo 15y ago
i still don't understand
eps 15y ago
A spoiler would be hugely appreciated.
- bluekeybox 15y ago
  I sometimes feel there is a peculiar and rare speech/writing disorder endemic to writers and editors of the NYT which causes them to express everything they are trying to say in the most "litterary" (as in "litter") way possible. You thought Victorian English was verbose, ornate, and unnecessarily obscure? Try the modern NYT! Shorter sentences but longer nearly everything else.
  - aba_sababa 15y ago
    What's the problem? I enjoyed "like a hitchhiker's thumb that lost its way". And that opening paragraph was badass.
  - notatoad 15y ago
    It's not specific to NYT, you see it in any newsmagazine type article. Washington post and Boston globe are also big offenders. I can just imagine them sitting around some pub drinking expensive liquor and talking about how bloggers will never be able to replace the sort of serious, high quality journalism they do. The snobbery is jut dripping off every word in that article.
- jholman 15y ago
  THPOILER ALERT! By the end of the article, we still don't know what's affecting the girls, but the author is strongly hinting in the direction of a mass pychogenic illness, a.k.a. mass hysteria, which has been a front-runner diagnosis from the beginning (although generally rejected by the victims and their parents). There's no evidence of environmental contamination. One doctor has come up with a fringe diagnosis, and is treating for it, with some success, but international experts on his diagnosis say it's basically impossible. Oh, and there's a pattern of weak family ties in the homes of the afflicted girls. It ends with some talk of the successes of a doctor who is pursuing psychological therapy as the main treatment (along with exhaustive testing for other causes, just in case).
dazbradbury 15y ago
Definition of Conversion Disorder, which the girls are "diagnosed" with: Conversion disorder is a condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other nervous system (neurologic) symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.[1] Along with Mass Psychogenic Illness: 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 aetiology.[2] [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001950/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001950/ [2] - http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/180/4/300.full http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/180/4/300.full
noonespecial 15y ago
There's a long history of weirdness surrounding this sort of illness. This one is my favorite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
frisco 15y ago
It seems to me like medicine has had trouble saying "I don't know" since the beginning. Throughout the ages we've had "default" diagnoses to fall back on when we couldn't figure out anything else better. And we don't seem to learn. Medicine should be conducted solely on the basis of evidence: in lieu of a clinically proven, statistically sound diagnostic test, the default should be, "I'm sorry, but I don't know" and a referral to a higher specialist. I suppose we always want to feel like we can do something (and who knows, maybe the psychological counseling here will help), but ultimately it's not falsifiable. Maybe they'd have spontaneously resolved anyway? Or maybe it's truly a new disease. What is absolutely true, though, is that the human body, and especially the brain, are mindblowingly complex and can do crazy things. We barely understand even the most well known neurological disorders. But this speculation-based post hoc rationalizing is just bad medicine. As an aside, I wonder if health insurance has limited the diagnostic work up on these girls or if the publicity ensured they were taken care of there. A full neuro imaging suite and chemical workup is easily over $100k in the US.
pessimizer 15y ago
Quick book recommendation if you want to read descriptions of dozens of incidents from around the world of groups of girls around the same age that go to the same school or belong to the same convent going through the exact same thing while their parents and community leaders demand answers from the government and blame pollution, demons, or witchcraft. OUTBREAK! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew. This type of thing seems to potentially happen in any group, but these group Tourette's-like symptoms are particularly frequent in institutionalized young girls under stress. If this case is typical, we'll eventually find out that the girl who started twitching first was a fairly popular or influential girl within the group and has a troubled personal history, or even actually was having some sort of seizure condition that nobody was aware of. You'll be able to connect her to every other girl because they either saw her or heard about her before showing symptoms themselves. http://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=37 http://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=37 The authors' stated goal in compiling the book was as a reference for studying whatever it is about people that makes this happen. Pretty great bedtime reading.
- emmelaich 15y ago
  The classic text is (from 1841 !) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...
mkramlich 15y ago
I'm betting it's fraud, started first by one teen girl to get attention, then "spread" to others as it became clear it would be a cool joke to play on adults, and get attention, get famous, etc. Is it possible it's truly some kind of involuntary medical/mental phenomenon? Of course. I'm just saying that I doubt it.
- YmMot 15y ago
  This is a very destructive and incorrect attitude. Psychogenic illness is not "faking it"...it is very real. It simply means the cause of the problems are based somewhere in the "software" rather than the "hardware". The brain is an exceptionally complicated thing, and the interactions between parts of it can result in all sorts of feedback loops, errors, etc. If you really don't think it's perfectly possible and probable for a group of teenage girls to develop a shared psychogenic illness completely spontaneously without any sort of guile or even conscious awareness on their part, then unfortunately you have a very simplified and inaccurate understanding of just how complicated and fuzzy our brains are. Most people have a very poor conception of just how fuzzy the line between what lay people call "sane" and "crazy", and just how easy it is for your brain to trick you. Consider this: a sizable portion of your memories are false. I don't care who you are, this is simply a fact of being human. Some of your memories are constructions based on friends/family describing the event to you some of them are just complete fabrications. However, if asked you would swear up and down they are real. It's not hard to create false memories in people...show them commercials of a non-existent product and many will remember having used it at some point. They're not liars....they're not fakers...they're not idiots...it's just that the human brain is not as simple as we like to think. This attitude is extremely harmful because it creates an environment where nobody wants to be told they have a "psychogenic illness"....and we get people claiming that hamburgers/magnetic waves/whatever are causing their strange symptoms...and since that's not the case they won't get effective treatment. Furthermore, these people are now potentially harassed by the ignorant; accused of "faking" it for attention...so we have a whole class of illness that isn't being treated due to this ignorant idea. You've actually got it backwards. It's "possible" that they are faking it, but this sort of involuntary tic is not easy to fake under medical examination. The most likely scenario is that to whatever extent the girls are "doing it themselves", they are unaware of it. I'm sure the attention they get is a part of the feedback loop causing the behavior, but it's important to realize that that does not mean this is some cynical plot to get attention. That's possible of course, but there's no reason to believe it's the most likely possibility and many to believe it's not.
the_tubes 15y ago
I think I am dead, but what was up with the government not letting them do soil samples from a private company. Did they ever do it?
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
arctangent 15y ago
This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time. See this, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
adaml_623 15y ago
I wonder how long it will be be before this type of Mass Hysteria situation can occur with geographically diverse groups who are linked via online social networking. Obviously once people start hanging out in shared video conferencing situations you have the possibility of people copying one another's visual cues and perhaps that leads to this disorder. Has anybody heard about this happening over facebook yet?
- khafra 15y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons

74 points by wallflower 15y ago

And this is the link for the entire story on a single page without the annoying navbars and advertisements. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html?_pagewanted=print http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twi... EDIT: So you can't jump straight to the meaningful content. Cute.

andrewfelix 15y ago
http://www.readability.com/ http://www.readability.com/ EDIT: For those misunderstanding the context. Readability allows reading of NYT articles on a single page. Something the parent comment was unable to link to. It's a very useful plugin.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
sanukcm 15y ago
There is a single page link under print... http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twitching-le-roy.html?_r=2&hp=&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/11/magazine/teenage-girls-twi...

Maciek416 15y ago

At first I was a little irritated at the article's style and how it holds back the truth for a few pages, but the truth of this story turns out to be absolutely fascinating stuff. A quote: "Cheerleaders frequently come up in case histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because psychogenic outbreaks often start with someone of high social status. But it might also be that their enviable unity is what makes them more susceptible. In 2002, 10 students, 5 of them cheerleaders, in a rural town in North Carolina suffered from nonepileptic seizures and fainting spells. In 1952, the Associated Press reported that 165 members of the Tigerettes cheerleading squad from Monroe, La., fainted before halftime at a high-school football game in nearby Natchez, Miss." I would love to hear someone try to speculate on an evolutionary reason for this kind of behaviour. What kind of advantage might this sort of thing have given humans in the past?

droob 15y ago
Panglossian!
mcantelon 15y ago
>the truth of this story turns out to be absolutely fascinating stuff The theory of the story, more like.
- cperciva 15y ago
  The very well understood and widely studied phenomenon which is a perfect fit for observations? Saying that it's "just a theory" that mass psychogenic illness is involved here is like saying that it's "just a theory" that humans evolved from non-human primates.
  - mcantelon 15y ago
    >Part of what is baffling about the Le Roy case is that it seems to combine two equally poorly understood phenomena: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness Note the word "seems" and "poorly understood". They don't know what this is. They are acting on a theory.
    - Produce 15y ago
      In the language of science, they are acting on a hypothesis. Theory does not mean the same thing in science as in ordinary language - in science it typically refers to a well tested model which is capable of making predictions with a high degree of accuracy. It is far-fetched to call most things in modern psychiatry theories. The models are still underdeveloped, bad at making predictions and fail at treating ailments a lot of the time.
bluekeybox 15y ago
Three things come to mind: (1) imitating higher-status individuals may give you reproductive advantage by getting you access to a larger pool of potential mates. (2) fitting in with the herd may be beneficial in short term because that way you don't have to think for yourself (of course becoming a lemming has disadvantages as well...), (3) sharing emotions with others may help group cohesion (people develop trust of each other by observing and attempting to predict each other's behavior; the people typically deemed to be most trustworthy are those who are both friendly and easy to predict, think dog/man's best friend).

mrtimo 15y ago

i still don't understand

eps 15y ago

A spoiler would be hugely appreciated.

bluekeybox 15y ago
I sometimes feel there is a peculiar and rare speech/writing disorder endemic to writers and editors of the NYT which causes them to express everything they are trying to say in the most "litterary" (as in "litter") way possible. You thought Victorian English was verbose, ornate, and unnecessarily obscure? Try the modern NYT! Shorter sentences but longer nearly everything else.
- aba_sababa 15y ago
  What's the problem? I enjoyed "like a hitchhiker's thumb that lost its way". And that opening paragraph was badass.
- notatoad 15y ago
  It's not specific to NYT, you see it in any newsmagazine type article. Washington post and Boston globe are also big offenders. I can just imagine them sitting around some pub drinking expensive liquor and talking about how bloggers will never be able to replace the sort of serious, high quality journalism they do. The snobbery is jut dripping off every word in that article.
jholman 15y ago
THPOILER ALERT! By the end of the article, we still don't know what's affecting the girls, but the author is strongly hinting in the direction of a mass pychogenic illness, a.k.a. mass hysteria, which has been a front-runner diagnosis from the beginning (although generally rejected by the victims and their parents). There's no evidence of environmental contamination. One doctor has come up with a fringe diagnosis, and is treating for it, with some success, but international experts on his diagnosis say it's basically impossible. Oh, and there's a pattern of weak family ties in the homes of the afflicted girls. It ends with some talk of the successes of a doctor who is pursuing psychological therapy as the main treatment (along with exhaustive testing for other causes, just in case).

dazbradbury 15y ago

Definition of Conversion Disorder, which the girls are "diagnosed" with: Conversion disorder is a condition in which a person has blindness, paralysis, or other nervous system (neurologic) symptoms that cannot be explained by medical evaluation.[1] Along with Mass Psychogenic Illness: 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 aetiology.[2] [1] - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001950/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001950/ [2] - http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/180/4/300.full http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/180/4/300.full

noonespecial 15y ago

There's a long history of weirdness surrounding this sort of illness. This one is my favorite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania

frisco 15y ago

It seems to me like medicine has had trouble saying "I don't know" since the beginning. Throughout the ages we've had "default" diagnoses to fall back on when we couldn't figure out anything else better. And we don't seem to learn. Medicine should be conducted solely on the basis of evidence: in lieu of a clinically proven, statistically sound diagnostic test, the default should be, "I'm sorry, but I don't know" and a referral to a higher specialist. I suppose we always want to feel like we can do something (and who knows, maybe the psychological counseling here will help), but ultimately it's not falsifiable. Maybe they'd have spontaneously resolved anyway? Or maybe it's truly a new disease. What is absolutely true, though, is that the human body, and especially the brain, are mindblowingly complex and can do crazy things. We barely understand even the most well known neurological disorders. But this speculation-based post hoc rationalizing is just bad medicine. As an aside, I wonder if health insurance has limited the diagnostic work up on these girls or if the publicity ensured they were taken care of there. A full neuro imaging suite and chemical workup is easily over $100k in the US.

pessimizer 15y ago

Quick book recommendation if you want to read descriptions of dozens of incidents from around the world of groups of girls around the same age that go to the same school or belong to the same convent going through the exact same thing while their parents and community leaders demand answers from the government and blame pollution, demons, or witchcraft. OUTBREAK! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior by Hilary Evans and Robert Bartholomew. This type of thing seems to potentially happen in any group, but these group Tourette's-like symptoms are particularly frequent in institutionalized young girls under stress. If this case is typical, we'll eventually find out that the girl who started twitching first was a fairly popular or influential girl within the group and has a troubled personal history, or even actually was having some sort of seizure condition that nobody was aware of. You'll be able to connect her to every other girl because they either saw her or heard about her before showing symptoms themselves. http://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=37 http://www.anomalistbooks.com/book.cfm?id=37 The authors' stated goal in compiling the book was as a reference for studying whatever it is about people that makes this happen. Pretty great bedtime reading.

emmelaich 15y ago
The classic text is (from 1841 !) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions...

mkramlich 15y ago

I'm betting it's fraud, started first by one teen girl to get attention, then "spread" to others as it became clear it would be a cool joke to play on adults, and get attention, get famous, etc. Is it possible it's truly some kind of involuntary medical/mental phenomenon? Of course. I'm just saying that I doubt it.

YmMot 15y ago
This is a very destructive and incorrect attitude. Psychogenic illness is not "faking it"...it is very real. It simply means the cause of the problems are based somewhere in the "software" rather than the "hardware". The brain is an exceptionally complicated thing, and the interactions between parts of it can result in all sorts of feedback loops, errors, etc. If you really don't think it's perfectly possible and probable for a group of teenage girls to develop a shared psychogenic illness completely spontaneously without any sort of guile or even conscious awareness on their part, then unfortunately you have a very simplified and inaccurate understanding of just how complicated and fuzzy our brains are. Most people have a very poor conception of just how fuzzy the line between what lay people call "sane" and "crazy", and just how easy it is for your brain to trick you. Consider this: a sizable portion of your memories are false. I don't care who you are, this is simply a fact of being human. Some of your memories are constructions based on friends/family describing the event to you some of them are just complete fabrications. However, if asked you would swear up and down they are real. It's not hard to create false memories in people...show them commercials of a non-existent product and many will remember having used it at some point. They're not liars....they're not fakers...they're not idiots...it's just that the human brain is not as simple as we like to think. This attitude is extremely harmful because it creates an environment where nobody wants to be told they have a "psychogenic illness"....and we get people claiming that hamburgers/magnetic waves/whatever are causing their strange symptoms...and since that's not the case they won't get effective treatment. Furthermore, these people are now potentially harassed by the ignorant; accused of "faking" it for attention...so we have a whole class of illness that isn't being treated due to this ignorant idea. You've actually got it backwards. It's "possible" that they are faking it, but this sort of involuntary tic is not easy to fake under medical examination. The most likely scenario is that to whatever extent the girls are "doing it themselves", they are unaware of it. I'm sure the attention they get is a part of the feedback loop causing the behavior, but it's important to realize that that does not mean this is some cynical plot to get attention. That's possible of course, but there's no reason to believe it's the most likely possibility and many to believe it's not.

the_tubes 15y ago

I think I am dead, but what was up with the government not letting them do soil samples from a private company. Did they ever do it?

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

arctangent 15y ago

This sort of thing has been going on for a very long time. See this, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania

adaml_623 15y ago

I wonder how long it will be be before this type of Mass Hysteria situation can occur with geographically diverse groups who are linked via online social networking. Obviously once people start hanging out in shared video conferencing situations you have the possibility of people copying one another's visual cues and perhaps that leads to this disorder. Has anybody heard about this happening over facebook yet?

khafra 15y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgellons