We Have Another One | 3
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Previously on hysterically. At first I was whispers s that was like, oh, it's this one girl like, don't know what's going on. The next thing I know, it's like doubling and tripping and all these girls.

So by then everybody thought was holding .

something something think that's full shit, like you're just to withhold all this information rules like what is actually going on. There's clearly something going on that you're covering. Let's start the day with a little role play.

You are a parent of a high school girl, and lively SHE in a bunch of classmates have been exhibiting some very wild symptoms. I scare you and they make you scared for her. And then at this big town meeting, you're told that what your kid has is this very rare, almost unbelievable illness, a phenomenon really that to you sounds a lot like it's on her head.

And then they ask you to just, you know, keep IT all on the down though, and to, please, please, please stay away from the media. All the attention would just make IT worse. What would you do from nbc news? This is today. That is what I would do to also, I had imagine if your child suddenly began to suffer from unexplained ticks and verbal outburst everyone is not lower at on the today show on CNN the usual suspects several parents go public rejecting mysteria in questioning the school secrecy y why they weren't making available any of the testing for toxins they had supposedly done. Here's one of the mom's live in the studio.

Where is where is the proof? Where is the data? Where's the testing? When is there have been been shown? Any, no, nothing.

And her daughter is sitting next to her on the couch. I was always so, I was always so active. I don't feel like myself anymore.

We hope that some doctor watching this now can help you and these other girls.

And so that's meanwhile at the school, once the story breaks nationally. I've been sitting in my tech class. This is rose. It's grade.

Someone was like, do there? There is a news vent outside. I took off so fast, I want to go out like work, like noisy.

What if I had just got a new car like around that time? So was like a big thing for me to look like finally driving. So I was writing the bus a little bit. Here's Jessica, a senior.

I remember exactly like where we part, like getting out and just like standing of staring at the cameras, like, holy shit, like what the hell is going on? And IT was the entire bus loop just filled with these, like giant satellite and cameras, and just people like, they were not allowed to, like, get out because the school and left bump, but they were like in their trucks videotaping us. IT was not.

IT was not. Camera crews lined up on main street. Mister maholm, the bound teacher.

IT was an absolute zoo in a little town, which only drives the fear. Moore, what makes you say them? Well, people knew something serious was happening then.

Like, is there really something bigger than we think going on here? Some people know would go as far to say there's a cover up. By now, many kids at the school has stopped drinking the water from the water founds.

This weekend, at least five basketball games scheduled in the roy had been cancelled. Parents of those players not willing to risk their children's health and safety for sport students take to facebook tracking who's come down with symptoms. Soon a video services of a strange looking crop duster dumpling, unknown chemicals onto a field that Jason to the school on main street at the pentecostal church.

The letters on the letter board sign out, front step rearranged. Now they say, we are praying for our library. High school girls, the emphasis, of course, is on the girls part, right? Until this point, one big indicator that IT at least might be mass syrian ic illness is that all the cases are confined to that one broad social group. In this case, teen girls at libera junior senior high school. The illness seems to be passing between the other female students at the school, but it's not jumping lanes to parents, to siblings, to neighbors or strangers.

Do you don't piece IT altogether as it's happening?

Then someone new comes forward.

things like blooded. And then I was trying to decide which pieces in. I picking up someone .

who lives in library, but she's not on the soccer team. SHE doesn't play in the marching band. SHE doesn't go to library, high school or high school. When did you start pacing IT together that other people were having .

similar symptoms? I only knew what was on the news. And people thinking that I was, like, contagious.

did IT start to recur you? That maybe .

IT was no, because I was all teenagers and I was far from a teenager.

I'm dana burki from wandering and pineapple studios. This is historical episode three. We have another one.

If you ever find yourself in paris in eighty and eighty two, with some time on your hands, just looking for something to do, head on over to the mental hospital. Because the biggest attraction in bela pok paris IT could be argued, isn't the love where the upper house, it's a place called sell petrol air. The holding structure on the left bank of the sun was once a gun powder factory.

And over the years, that had morphed into a hospice for poor women than a prison for poor women, and finally a woman's mental hospital. And I was around this time that something very strange started happening there. The beds and sul petr air began to fill up with patients all experiencing truly bizarre symptoms that no one could explain.

ticks, paralyses, loss of consciousness. Doctor jamison webster .

is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the new school for social research in new york.

Loss of language, abilities to speak languages they didn't know they could speak, different multiple personalities, emotional fits of all different kinds, whether to be crying, whether to be giggling, whether to be smiling uncontrollably.

all behaviors that to every doctor who examined to them appear to have no physiological cars. As far as they could tell, there was nothing physically wrong. They were symptoms that didn't make any sense that shouldn't be happening at all.

But there they were. Similar outbreaks were happening among women in Victorian london, in austria and germany. But IT was paris that became, as one historian put at the epicenter of the historia industry.

And that was because of a man named jama tash shark. O shako started a neology clinic that sell petch y air. IT was one of the first, and every friday, doctor shark o would put these women, his patients, on display, literally on a stage every friday afternoon like a madman. And the doctors from around the city would fill up the auditorium as these patients, one by one, took the stage in front of them to rise and bark and can tot into impossible shapes, while the men and the audience would watch and try to figure out what was causing you.

And the fascination was what they were doing with their bodies that was clearly related to their mind, was fascinating. These at the turn of the century.

Now, if you can believe IT, in some ways, this was good medicine before the nineteen century, the unexplained symptoms often associated with historia. We're thought to have their source in the uterus, the body constantly disrupted by the wandering moon. That's how they turned IT literally moving around in a woman's body.

Shark o rejected all that uterus jazz, and using medical observation and search for a real cause was a step up from his directories. Also what we're here. The myth d doctors used vibrators to treat hystErica in their female patients appears to be just that, a myth which, trust me, is for the best. Once you see what early vibrators looked like, why know? But on the flip side, sel perea was total insAnitary charcoal sessions drew more than just the medical community.

Writers and actors and artists came to in name red, with the mystery of the patients became famous, known by first names like Augustine and juvie, and for the drama of their specific symptoms, especially what shark o termed the grand hysteria, where the patient would violently confront herself pending backwards into a half circle. The sessions became so popular that shark o had a five hundred seat empathize re built at the hospital, with proper theatrical lighting and everything, including a huge spotlight to center the historic s on the dark in stage. Now, as those friday's ruled on, you would have started seeing a face showing up in the crowd more and more often.

He's about five, eight. He's sporting a tweet suit, a beard, maybe little cocaine lingering on his mustache and lodge in his mouth a cigar. Which legend has that he would one day insist that, despite its considerable length and earth, sometimes just a cigar. Sigma ford was a Young neurologist in from viana here to get a gander at the medical mystery, but where a shark o thought for sure that there were some physical explanation that they just hadn't found IT ford comes at IT differently.

And IT really took fryd, instead of just looking at them and looking at them and being excited and fascinated and interested, he was the first one who said, talk. And then.

you know.

he wanted them to talk about specific things. But this opened the door to something fascinating, which was the history that he speaks about in studies. And historia were like, okay, you want me to talk, i'm onna talk. Let me talk also about what I want to talk about. And then off they went.

And for the next twenty plus years, ford devotes himself to the mystery of history, trying to find its source. And as for doctor wester, her introduction to ferid came when he was a teenager herself.

I read freud when I was seventeen in early college, and I kind of got excited about IT.

What's early college?

You skip two years of high school.

Skip two years of high school. Yeah yeah.

And like the second semester that gave us ford nature on Marks, and I was like.

at seventeen, yeah is pretty and and you just ate IT up. I ate IT up. But especially for IT and is now famous case studies from the late eighteen nineties about the women they called historical.

And I was the story, the thing that I had to kind of present to the class, because they assigned me froid for its case of dora, the sixteen year old hysterically girl. And I was like, oh, that's me. SHE had what first called a petite history, like he had a small history, because I was in the form of stomach aches and coughs and fainting fits and moments of mutism. And he's listening to her. I mean, no one listen to her.

And SHE talks about the adults in her life about affairs, lies and fractured.

Family kind of been the linchpin. And her father having this affair, SHE had helped him do IT.

And not just the trauma of family, but he placed in society. The doctor website door reads a smart and struggling with wanting more than the world was offering women then, in terms of self determination, in terms of a life.

And, you know, as they went then, you realize that these symptoms were tied into these huge networks of thoughts and complexes and histories and sufferings and feelings about themselves as women in this particular societal million. And the more they talked about them, the more they could shift, change and eventually disappear.

IT was the unconscious that is where ferid was looking for the source of the symptoms, an entire inner life we all have, but have no real access to forgery named historia conversion disorder. That was him. He believed that the stress or trauma in the mine was being converted into physical symptoms in the body, the unconsciousness way of releasing IT or getting IT out there. Now, important point about ferri, even his biggest fans will tell you his career ful of insight was also just riddled with off the wall ideas.

I mean, it's tough because there's a lot, I mean, I thought that strain out .

of their nose prejudices. He pushed his own interpretations and sexual obsessions. He did a ton of coke.

Look at up. But for our purposes here, you don't gotto buy everything about for red. You just gotta buy the big chunks, namely this uncomfortable, mysterious truth.

What happens in a life, what happens in the world and what happens in your body are really intertwined in a way that we don't understand, and certainly western medicine doesn't understand. And sometimes talking about this is helpful.

Once the last time we've taught publicly .

about this publicly when that happened.

So it's been a while. It's been a while.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.

I really appreciate IT. Regardless, even if you said there, they say nothing, how do you want to be identified first.

man, first things fine, merge. I mean, great. That's fine margins.

Symptoms started around the beginning of the school year at the same time as the first girls at lea high school. But there's a big difference between her and those students at the time. March was a thirty six year old mom. He'd been working as a nurse in a day hub for people with developmental .

disabilities. I started what I called at the time. I started losing time.

Losing time, like spacing out for long stretches.

And because I, because I have worked with individuals that would have absence seizure, I was like, is that what's happening to me? And IT wasn't because I could recall, like everything that was set around me. But to look at me, I would just, IT would look like, IT would look like I was daydreaming. That's what I was told.

Soon the symptoms evolved into the head jerks and the vocal outbursts.

My head would just randomly move, just rain, only move one size or the other. I would turn, and I would play IT off as, oh, I just thought I saw a something out of the corner of my eye. Then I started to have, any more often.

your kid is three years old. How do they respond to what's happening?

They called them hick ups. really. I had hiccups.

SHE changes her diet, thinking maybe its food allergies. SHE swap her kids diver cream any changes SHE had made when the sentence began. SHE changes back.

Nothing works. She'd heard about the outbreak in town, but to heard that about a bunch of teenagers, SHE didn't have any real connection to the school. So she's not putting IT together yet between her and IT, or that maybe he had caught whatever IT is until the pickles.

I was in the grocery store and I dropped a jar of pickles because my head twitched. I made this weird noise, and I lost the ability to hold the gera pics. And there was a mother and Young child in the store, and the mother grab the child's ARM and says, we don't wanna a catch the up. And that's when I realized that I didn't really know what was going on in the town.

Her sentence get worse.

I felt like Linda blair in the exercise. At one point, I had a Bruce on the back side of my shoulder from where my chin was constantly hitting my shoulder, the backside.

I don't .

even know how I could physically happen, but that's how loose my neck muscles were. I was having a hard time keeping my head up. I hate, couldn't eat unless somebody was home with me because I was choking. Oh.

my, I couldn't drink.

I had to drink with a teaspoon sipp of water.

Mark rees, out to a friend.

I was like, I am scared and I need somebody to be scared with me. So we went here to behave the hospital and. IT was rough. That's when I realize how bad everything had gotten in the roy because I heard one of the nurses say we have another one. And I heard, well, that makes vive this week, and we're just like pock.

SHE says they gave her a volume and sent her home.

I felt like nobody could help me.

Yeah.

regardless of if they went into or not.

it's really hard to overstate just how frightening .

markest systems were. Yeah.

we used sitting out in the quality we used.

This is her on the local news of the time when cameras captured a particularly violent outburst. ed.

There were times where I thought I was crazy, like, am I going crazy? Is this really happening?

And until what feels like the truth of the situation shakes out for march IT becomes difficult to even just be around people.

I don't know if I was ashamed or embarrass. I isolated myself and I could just be like, I am home up by myself.

doors locked, curtains drawn, light to them.

I would have headphones on so that I wouldn't hear any of the outside world. I twilight, he just .

come .

out so I listen to the view.

I listen to a later fergie and lady gaga, anything that, anything, even glory again, or I will survive. yeah. But IT depended on what I was feeling at the moment. But I was having troubles with vocal tax. I would come out with the most vulgar nineties wrap that you could think of, just so that I could justify all the fox shits counts mother fuckers coming out of my mouth.

You really head of that severe symptoms.

IT looked like to IT really did. But you don't catch to ads.

Incidentally, clog D, B, C wrote this piece in paris during the history there for ten years. He studied and performed on stage of the pairs conservative, or just across the river from so patri air, not quite close enough to imagine that the women there might have heard the notes wafting in through open windows while they were made to perform on a different stage altogether.

Marge isn't the only new person to come forward with symptoms around this time, not by a long shut, puzzling medical condition that's affecting a dozen girls. And genesis conney now has some similar cases near Robin. In fact, once the story of what was happening and library blew up, people begin connecting dots left and right.

Hey, everybody. So I know I ve done a video. Hi in a while. member. The girl who sent out those videos on youtube and someone who were heard about leery gets in touch with her, and he calls the newspeople and comes forward.

They say their symptoms are similar to what twelve girls in the have been dealing with you. Your mom speaking to a reporter trying vaLances to talk later than her daughters. Ticks, ticks here that they have tried to help control this.

Hey, jill doesn't really hard. As a friend of the youtube girl also came forward. Her name is Alyssa.

Both girls played together in my staff body. There is something actually happening to their bodies. This is delicious. Dad on the local news, believe I N ra one big.

But though neither girl is from li, they live in another town in new york, two hundred and fifty miles away. So maybe not related, right? Well, here's a counter bug.

Both girls did eat at a restaurant in lauri over the summer. Their softball team had recently passed through livery and ate lunch at a cafe on main street. If it's just a coincident, it'd be a huge one.

So the outbreak in livery is now the outbreak centered in library, which brings us to some more road play. This one here is a sophie choice. You are having unexplainable neurological systems, and you have to choose.

You can either be evaluated on a stage by doctor jom r. Tash h. Arco, risen from the dead from one thousand nine th century pairs, or you can be evaluated on a stage on T, V, in front of a live studio audience by a former contestant from the bacheller.

This is the doctors. Have you seen the doctors is cancelled now. Anyway, sorry. IT was a medical advice talk show.

And the main doctor on the doctors had previously been the main bacheller on the bacheller season and eight travis store. Hello, and welcome to the doctors today will go in via role and no one not talking about that. Don't worry, he is an actual doctor and we can be sure of this because he's wearing blue scribes.

Why a hosting attack show sixteen year old elisha enter dad, Randy are here with this now. So lad. So this is how long if you've been dealing with these symptoms.

Now i've been dealing with these symptoms.

let's talking about this. Elisha had been pitching a softball game one day when he passed out on the mount in the middle, the first inning. Since then, her symptoms grew to include convultions, ticks and seizures like events, all with no clear source.

No one wanted to listen to me. The doctors didn't. They thought I was all in my head and that I was making IT up.

Here I am with elisha today, twelve years later.

it's all your head they're saying, and i'm saying it's now I have physical symptoms and my mom would go to my appointments with me and a male doctor would dismiss everything we were about saying IT wasn't until my dad was into the meetings in then, until we were hard.

But then the doctors called, well, the doctors exclusive militia came all the way to loss Angels, desperate for help. And we actually set her up with a battery of both physical and psychological testing, as well as objective testing for which we are about to get the results. But first, why you decide to go on.

I think IT was my parents. This was new to them, and they didn't know they were looking for answers. The doctors, they have these renowned doctors that they work with and collaborate with some.

Obviously, my parents are like, oh, they we can get some answers from them. They're smart. They know what they are doing.

idea. And they sent a list .

of all the test they are going to run. We're going to run this and there's all these different tests and like, okay, that sounds great. Let's do IT maybe well as answers and we get there and they don't do have the test.

Good morning. How are you? So examine a couple of things here on the show. They play video of the doctor's examination of alesia.

IT was more like, well, if we get a shot of this, that look really good. Oh, I didn't like how you said hi, can you say a different way? And then we'll talk to you.

I didn't know what happen. Hind, the scenes, this was all new to me and to my dad. IT was a budget hoe.

and that is followed by this scene in the studio. Everything delicious. Her dad are sitting on stage looking, look nervous. Jerry springer, guests waiting for the you. That shooting drop.

This is a functional emi ze scan and fiber tracking in the brain, just as we do in a tumor patient. Then the TV doctors reveal ellice ous brain, a video wall full of her mrs. Scans rit giant.

And then we, the folks at home, watched the live studio audience, watched alysha and her dad get her diagnosis. Define the entire wired diagram of delicious brain to see if we can pick up any abNormality. I'm happy to tell you IT looks completely Normal. And what was their diagnosis?

I think that's when they said conversion disorder.

In the final edit that we see on TV, they actually never say IT to our face, but when all her other tests come back Normal, the implication is pretty clear by really not a lot of these scary things. Is that reassuring?

That's really, really reassuring. That makes me feel a lot Better .

and makes me a lot happier tale. That's what we when I had and put through all these and let you know in.

Back then on stage, alesha was quiet and polite, doesn't say much. Now is an adult SHE can express with a bit more clarity for feelings about conversion disorder.

I hate that race. IT makes me want to vomit. I hate that phrase because that is a term it's a real thing in the dsm, yes, but it's overused and it's not used for the right reasons, in my opinion, is used when doctors don't know that diagnosis.

There's just a syrian of women being dismissed by doctors. You know, it's hysterica. It's all in your head.

It's not physical. You, oh my gosh, are exaggerating that kind of and that IT just didn't sit with me. I did not make sense. Like then how does this explain everything else that's happening to me?

Did you feel like that they were telling you with conversion to store that, that there's something that you or have that there's something big in your head you're not talking about that's making you do this?

yeah. And I think that's a lot of times account behind conversion. The shorter that there's some trauma that you are not willing to talk about, but you understand a lot.

People don't want to talk about chama. It's a hard thing like this was traumatizing this whole experience. But that wasn't IT for me. I had a really good a childhood, a supportive family. I could talk to people I, I felt supported and loved, and I was .

very fortunate.

That just does not fit. That doesn't land with me. That is not a just doesn't know that's not IT. I know it's not.

And that IT seems to me, became the unspoken assumption for all the girls who went public. This is conversion disorder. And conversion disorder is very often associated with stress and trauma and what's going on over there.

And if you're the girl's parents or her teachers or the small town around her, conversion disorder can start to feel less like a diagnosis and more like an accusation. So what if the doctors telling you what is happening to you? A mostly that is stress.

When, no, here's how one of the girls addressed IT on the today show. When this started, I was fine. I was perfectly fine.

I felt good about everything I was on. On all, there was nothing going wrong. You can answer this question and anyway, you want to, but I, but I do.

I want to ask IT. I'm talking with Emily. SHE was an eight grade when her symptoms began part of having conversion disorder. If IT was conversion disorder, is that IT comes from stress or trauma?

How were you having any extreme stress drammen that people didn't know about or that you were having a hard time talking about at the time that that may have contributed to something, not anything that would have made IT into something like this? Know what I mean? Like typical, Normal, a grade drama and stuff between friends, but like, nothing wild.

You know what I mean? Here's Emily's mom, Cathy. Nothing outside the typical teenage middle school. I mean, he was a middle school or SHE was eight, thirty eight. He was thirteen.

No, I wasn't like drivers that is such a terrible year, right? There's no subtext here, by the way. There's no suggestion that anyone is hiding something or denial about what's really going on for a lot of the girls in the parents in leery IT just didn't feel true. Was IT shocking to hear my conversion disorder?

Or, I mean, I didn't even really understand. I knew it's a psychological disorder.

In fact, one of the only people who seemed willing at first to even entertain the idea of conversion disorder that this was all a mass psychogenic illness, march. The thirty six year old mom.

I was like, okay, I can deal with mental illness, so I take some cycles. Ds, I can. People do IT all the time if Williams gonna IT give me the volume. Well, volume didn't do IT give .

me the zenos SHE doesn't shut IT down completely to her IT just doesn't seem impossible. One of her doctors uses a metaphor they .

described to me as a volcano. I have never been able to deal with stress ever. I dealt with a lot of abuse when I was Younger, so I just buried feelings.

I didn't and deal with feelings. Nobody wanted to be around somebody who is crying all the time, so I didn't deal with the abuses and stuff. I didn't deal with the aftermath of all that. So everything that I ve been pushing down and not wanting to deal with started bubbling up .

into the physical symptoms that were erupting of all cano. March has good reason to give conversion disorder a chance because to her, it's a lot less scary is in the alternatives because martis n't just looking for the right answer. SHE needs IT to be an answer. SHE can actually live with.

My gosh, I could live with conversion disorder. I could not live with the environment. Did IT to me ah as .

mass pa genc illness proponents were lining up. So two were those who believed that that wasn't IT at all. They believed IT was a chemical in the ground or something in the water or a taxi in the air that was to blame.

I mean, I couldn't work with that. I couldn't work with that because when it's an environmental thing is it's like it's a cancer. Because I like again, thinking I have a three year old. So I was like, no. The environmental to me was terminal.

But the state said everything was OK on that front, right? They did all those tests at the school. They checked the old water records that all in fine. But let's say you don't trust the state. And at this point, in really a lot of people don't let's say you think it's some sort of taxing and someone's covering something up, where do you even begin to look to find that smoking gun that you suspect is out there? What you need is a fresh clue pointing you in the right direction.

You need, say, someone to walk up to the home of one of the affected families and analysis, slip some documents and a note under the door, or drop IT in a mail box, or place IT under the dorm. P, as i've also heard this story told, but wherever it's found, that document and that note, that d be the thing, that d be the thing that turns a lot of people's suspicions into full blown panic. And that is next time on hysterically, you are not doing your job.

You are not doing your work. When the medical mystery in library has its top enough in our big story this morning, nationally known environmental alist iron broke of age sena him till the road yesterday to dick for answers about a mysterious medical condition there. I mean, everybody knew what sn I was.

Nobody know what. Try claw athans shit having those natural gas wells on my football fields. Not a really fucking smart thing to do now is IT. Follow hysterically on the wondering APP amazon music or whether you get your podcasts.

You can be in all episodes early and add free right now by joining wander plus in the wondering APP or on apple podcasts before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at wondering that com slash survey, and if you have a tip about a story that you think we should investigate, please write to us at wondering that com slash tips. Hysterically is a production of wondering and pine street studios. Our lead producer is hendering milosis.

Our associate producer is mary exocet, a producer sophie bridges, managing producer eron Kelly, senior producer lenna cities. Additional production by SAndra Allen. Dian hanson is our editor. Our executive editor is joe level fact checking by not sumi argia ca.

Mixing by hand Brown, our head of sound and engineering is rage mckey original music composed and performed by dina makey legal services for pineapple street from Crystal tupia for wondering, our senior producers are lazy basket and cleared chAmbers coordinating producer maria gossips, senior managing producer callum blue historical is written and executive produced by me on dana versy. Our executive producers for pineapple street are maxell ski and remsen asa salute and genius burman executive producers for wondering are Morgan Jones, martial lui and genseric's. Thanks for listening.