I've been looking through some past cases of what is generally considered to be mass hysteria, and the definitive common factor between all of them is that all of the victims share the exact same symptoms. One girl in church starts uncontrollably laughing, and then there are a dozen girls in the same church uncontrollably laughing. One little boy in Japan is reported to have suffered a "seizure" after watching a certain episode of a popular cartoon, and next thing you know a hundred other little boys are suffering seizures after watching that episode. Sometimes there are multiple symptoms reported, like headaches AND nausea AND vomiting; but in those cases, every person who ends up being afflicted, has headaches AND nausea AND vomiting. I have yet to read about a single case where a Dancing Mania "evolved" into a Toothache Mania, or a mass schoolgirl fainting episode "evolved" into a mass gout attack, with one random bloke on the side wondering if his case of shingles is part of the same disease. This business of 20 different people with 20 different symptoms being bundled together into a single case of "mass hysteria" seems unique to this Cuba incident.
Yes, you have
"been looking through some (!) past cases", but apparently not enough, and there's probably a reason why you seem to prefer the medieval ones when no properly medically trained observer was present (or even existed) to take down
all the symptoms of
everybody (or at least as many as possible) affected. What is reported is the one thing that seemed to characterize the mania and also gave it its name. They are the records we are left with.
And I would
really like to see your documentation that this is what characterizes an outbreak of mass hysteria (or mass psychogenic illness):
"every (!) person who ends up being afflicted, has headaches AND nausea AND vomiting."
It simply isn't true - at least it isn't true of contemporary cases: sick building syndrome, complaints about electro smog or the recent, and to some extent still ongoing HPV-vaccine scare in my own country.
Skeptic Ginger already pointed that out to you:
The biggest tells:
No one has the same symptoms
Some nebulous rash, a scratchy throat and headaches dominate the complaints
One cannot find a correlating exposure
And not always but not an unusual finding, people are mad at some supervisor or employer action
which you dismissed at the time with a rather typical straw man:
Dishonest description. It's been reported that many of the complainers reported different symptoms, but you don't have enough information to justify reframing that as if there are absolutely no similar symptoms between any two alleged victims.
So let's continue:
That's obviously not true; after all this report we're talking about is months old already and there haven't been any new developments along the line that you predict, at least that have been reported.
So now you're blaming me that what I guess will happen
"in the near future" hasn't
already happened???! I'm sorry, but that's kind of how the future works, even the near one.
But, once again, you are leaping to conclusions. My "diagnosis" is that a person having devolving memory loss long after having returned from Cuba, probably has something genuinely wrong with him. A person suffering persistent hearing loss long after having returned from Cuba, probably has something genuinely wrong with her. It is only your continued, insistent presumption that I'm implying the "same thing" is wrong with both of them, AND that "thing" has anything whatsoever to do with Cuba.
If all you're saying is that sometimes people may develop memory loss, then I'll have to agree with you. People do that all the time and for various reasons. But the
kind of memory loss described here is pretty specific, and the reason why I mentioned my own experience with very similar 'symptoms' was that I seriously doubt that we're talking about anything other than people in a prolonged state of anxiety beginning to question and worry about every little thing that they
imagine might be wrong with them and a symptom of a serious defect - much like the tourist staying at the Hotel Capri who appears to have come down with a bad case of hypochondria based only on the
tingling sensations that he felt in his extremities when he started relaxing after a long day of walking in Havana.
Because since those September reports, with the only exception maybe of the headaches or hearing symptoms (because exposure to loud and constant sound is already well known to sometimes cause those transient conditions), I've pretty much discounted any of the medical symptoms having anything to do with the alleged Cuba sounds, because - as the articles back then pointed out - it's pretty obvious they couldn't be very related. And I've already said as much before in this thread; I shouldn't have to repeatedly assert it every page lest people forget it. I simply also object to the symptoms being handwaved as "mass hysteria", because there's no evidence they are, for one,
That is the problem with the diagnosis of mass hysteria/mass psychogenic illness that you seem to be unable to grasp: In modern medicine it has become fairly easy to find evidence for most diseases: you x-ray the led and find the fracture, you analyze the blood and discover the virus or the antibodies corresponding to a well-defined disease. That is proof positive. What's funny about the diagnosis of a psychogenic illness is that you do much the same thing, and when you don't find
anything, you begin to suspect hypochondria or - if you have a number of patients from the same group: mass psychogenic illness.
That is the 'proof', i.e. the
absence of proof of something else, an
actual disease - but, of course, proof is not what you're looking for ...
and for another the range of symptoms being reported is too vast and disparate compared to known cases of mass hysteria, which as I said involve masses of people all "succumbing" to a very particular and defined set of symptoms.
Yes, that's what you already said, and it remains a straw man the second time around.
Rather, I think that all the various people who reported nausea OR headaches OR "tingling sensations" OR vision problems OR whatever, most likely just had unrelated bugs of various types. When you travel, especially to different climates, places where the air and water have different chemical traces in them, places where you haven't developed saturation immunity to the local micro-critters, you get the sniffles, or diarrhea, or occasional muscle weakness, or what have you - it's just what happens. That, and not "mass hysteria", is actually the most reasonable explanation for what's going on.
No, it isn't! If you get diarrhea (and I've had the 'pleasure' more than once in Cuba), it's fairly easy to diagnose what causes it: You just have to look for the
"micro-critters" in a stool sample. Critters found - diagnosis complete: That is what
actually caused the symptoms, and it's usually relatively easy to cure. (And if not: drink plenty of water and wait it out.) What seems to be essential in the case of mass hysteria is the
story, the
paradigm! Concealed super weapons (nowadays in Havana) or 'the Devil made me do it' (the middle ages).
And that is how your true, real-life, actual diseases can
evolve into mass hysteria, contagious like a
meme within the
paradigm of the STORY!
The fact that a couple of people hearing sounds and feeling weird things around the same time led others to more keenly notice the random but innocuous medical issues they'd also started experiencing since moving to Cuba and simply wondering or even investigating if there might be a connection, is just fairly typical "inquiry" to me, not enough to go slapping the "mass hysteria" label on the entire affair and treating them like they're a bunch of woos crying about gluten.
(Checkmit's own use of bold, in this case; the ones above were mine, dann)
Wondering, investigating and inquiring are very admirable endeavors, but now you're trying to change the paradigm, to turn it into a case of semi-skeptics coming down with something on a sea cruise, which is obviously not what happened here. I am beginning to wonder what your relationship is to this group of people since you seem to have a very peculiar
need to invent a
story about the whole thing that doesn't in the remotest way reflect the description of the case that we have heard so far.
Mass hysteria or mass psychogenic illness, however, does!
