How do you propose it should have been handled?
To spell it out based on the quotation from
The Guardian in post 2,029:
In Ripon, the fire services and school authorities seem to have handled the event well. But mishandled, an incident that should be brief and harmless, and which affects normal, healthy people, can leave a small number with chronic illness. A person who falls ill because of fear of an invisible gas, rather than from direct exposure, is still ill. But some who have their illness dismissed as “all in the mind” can struggle to rid themselves of the symptoms. They might embrace spurious explanations, suspect a coverup, and, faced with having to prove they are ill, fail to get well.
The challenge for emergency services, schools and public health officials, is how to get the balance right. They must investigate – gas leaks and hazardous chemicals need to be ruled out. But writing in the
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine with Robert Bartholomew, a social scientist in New Zealand, Wessely says this must be done in an atmosphere that allows fear to subside and anxiety to dissipate.
Was Ripon school gripped by mass psychogenic illness? (TheGuardian, Nov 14, 2015)
1)
In Ripon, the fire services and school authorities seem to have handled the event well. But mishandled, an incident that should be brief and harmless, and which affects normal, healthy people, can leave a small number with chronic illness.
The mishandling of the 'Havana syndrome' was grotesque. It not only left a small number with chronic illness. It actually persuaded people with minor symptoms, which they themselves didn't really think were anything serious, to believe that they had serious brain injuries, i.e. the 'jerky eye movements' as described in Project Brazen's podcast series and quoted in
post 1,680:
Cue, Doug: So even when we went to Miami, we really didn’t feel like we had any issues. You know, like I said, all the symptoms that we’d experienced, you know, some balance issues and, and headaches, that kind of thing. Nausea, easily written off to other things.
So it wasn’t until the doctors there put us in, certain equipment and certain situations where you could tease out the symptoms…
One of the tests they perform in Miami is a device that tracks eye-movement. It basically moves a dot back and forth in front of you. In a healthy patient, your eyes follow it smoothly.
Cue, Doug: … what we saw in the recording of our eyes was that tracking that dot across our field of vision was jerky.
Cue, Doug: It didn’t feel abnormal when I was doing it, but the doctor explained it to me. He said, look, here’s a recording of what normal eyes look like, and then here’s a recording of what your eyes look like.
And you know, it was at that moment when I go, ‘oh yeah, I can see that it’s messed up’…
it begins to dawn on Doug and Kate that something might be seriously wrong.
Cue, Doug: It really became apparent that we had some more serious impairment then you could just write off to, to something … And the doctor diagnosed us at that time with, uh, mild traumatic brain injuries.
In other words:
iatrogenic.
Notice that the researchers who interpreted the 'syndrome' symptoms (for the most part) as mass psychogenic illness not only didn't say that the 'syndrome' victims were crazy. They not only said that their
symptoms were real, but they had been saying it for years about MPI, even before the Miami doctors invented the 'syndrome' and persuaded people like Kate and Doug that they were brain damaged.
2)
A person who falls ill because of fear of an invisible gas, rather than from direct exposure, is still ill.
In other words: They suffer from a
neurological illness, but
neurological doesn't mean mental illness or crazy or '
all in the head or mind' even though the mind plays a significant role in mass
psychogenic illness.
3)
But some who have their illness dismissed as “all in the mind” can struggle to rid themselves of the symptoms.
It is
possible that some people, and even some doctors, may have put it to the 'syndrome' sufferers like that, but it wouldn't have been those professionals who said it was a case of MPI.
4)
They might embrace spurious explanations, suspect a coverup, and, faced with having to prove they are ill, fail to get well.
Notice that this is exactly what happened with the 'syndrome' sufferers: They embraced the spurious explanation that they were the victims of an attack with directed-energy weapons (sonic and/or microwave guns), they suspected that anybody who told them otherwise was trying to cover up the imaginary attack, which they considered to be an affront to their (real!) suffering, and they saw the people who were trying to convince them that they were the victims of an attack as being on their side, be it doctors like Hoffer or lawyers like Zaid, even though what those professionals were actually siding with was their
delusion.
No wonder that they failed to get well.
5)
The challenge for emergency services, schools and public health officials, is how to get the balance right. They must investigate – gas leaks and hazardous chemicals need to be ruled out.
The 'syndrome' was investigated, thoroughly, by several agencies. Very early on, the FBI investigation mentioned MPI, the JASON group said it could possibly be MPI (and ruled out the noise being an attack: crickets), but the Miami and Penn doctors maintained that the syndrome sufferers were attack victims, and we know that James Giordano is still adamant that 'his' cohort of 'syndrome' sufferers from the U.S. embassy in Havana are DEW victims.
And even though the ODNI report dismissed a DEW (or any other kind of) attack as an explanation for the rest of the 1,700 cases that the State Department, the DoD and the CIA managed to cause all over the world, they allowed Hoffer, Giordano, Golomb etc. to keep that cohort as their own, as the ones that
might have been the victims of DEW attacks even though not a shred of evidence of such an attack has ever been found.
And since DEWs were never unambiguously dismissed as the cause of the Havana cohort's symptoms, this allows the cohort's doctors and other researchers on their side to continue to tell the victims that they suffer from TBI. And they appear to have continued to tell the community of Targeted Individuals the same thing and even to have diagnosed some of them as being victims of directed energy attacks - not in Cuba! In the USA!
6)
But writing in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine with Robert Bartholomew, a social scientist in New Zealand, Wessely says this must be done in an atmosphere that allows fear to subside and anxiety to dissipate.
This is the exact
opposite of how the 'syndrome' was tackled by spreading it to thousands of new victims by means of
suggestion, 'information' about the signs that indicate that people may have experienced an 'anomalous health incident'. And this policy never stopped, as I pointed out in
post 2,006 about the
"Defense Health Agency’s National Intrepid Center of Excellence and the Traumatic Brain Injury Center of Excellence."
And one more quotation from the same article about an outbreak of MPI in a British school:
7)
The job may be harder now than in St Clare’s day. Bringing calm to a school, or an entire community, is far more difficult, if not impossible, now social media can spread anxiety further than line of sight. When a group of girls developed facial tics at a high school in Leroy, New York, in 2011, some doctors wondered whether the bizarre movements might have spread by YouTube videos victims posted. As soon as media coverage stopped, they began to recover.
Media coverage of the 'syndrome'
has more or less stopped after the ODNI report in March of this year, but the 'syndrome' is still alive and well on Twitter/X, YouTube and other social media. And the TI community is as eager to keep it alive as pro-Ana groups cultivating each other's eating disorders.
I haven't yet mentioned the role played by
politics, but the term
decision-based evidence-making probably describes it best. It has been used to describe Sweden's pandemic response:
'Our main objective is to achieve herd-immunity-by-infection, so the virus should be allowed to spread since attempts to slow it down will only prolong the pandemic. So we cannot allow the ECDC to declare that the virus is airborne, which would ruin our anti-mask strategy.'
In the case of the 'syndrome', it was to be handled as evidence of the
enemy's bad intentions, as proof that Cubans, Russians and the Chinese are
evil. Each and every doctor and scientist may not have been motivated by anti-Communism. Beatrice Golomb, for instance, probably saw it as a way to confirm her idea of the danger of
"exposure to electromagnetic radiation" from new technology, but since she embraced the idea that the 'syndrome' victims had been harmed by electromagnetic radiation, she served and still serves the same political purpose. (And the TIs love her for that.)
️ #NeuroWeapons #MilitaryGradeWeapons #CellTowers #DrJamesGiorando
