NY schoolgirls hysteria doctor blames constant terror alerts

NEW YORK - Why have 12 teenage schoolgirls come down with a baffling form of “conversion disorder”, once known to Freudians as “hysteria”? The doctor now treating them warns that the answer could be a portent for an increasingly stressed-out America which has been taught to “live in fear”.

The girls all attend the same high school in Le Roy, in the snowy far north west of New York state, and are in the art class, soccer team and cheerleading squad together. 

Last October they started to fall victim to a mysterious malady with symptoms like Tourette’s. As TV footage (below) shot by NBC Today shows, they now twitch, stutter and sometimes suffer from incoherent outbursts. Their parents fear for their futures.

Local doctors have ruled that the 12 have no straightforward infections or disease. Environmental sleuths have given their school, the Le Roy Junior-Senior High School, a clean bill of health.

But a neurologist, Dr Lazlo Mechtler, believes he has the answer. “Each girl has conversion disorder, a psychological condition which manifests in actual physical symptoms,” Mechtler, who is now treating 11 of the 12 girls, told The Week. He emphasises that the girls are not just trying to skip school.

Conversion disorder is essentially the modern term for Freudian “hysteria” and, true to the Greek origins of the word meaning womb, is most commonly found in post-pubertal girls and women. The good news is that with the right treatment and counselling, it is curable. What makes this case extraordinary is that the disorder is an individual condition.  

“What is unique here is the statistical chance of having 12 girls all suffering from conversion disorder in one small community, which is unheard of,” says Mechtler.

It suggests that the girls’ case also constitutes an outbreak of Mass Psychogenic Illness, or MPI, although there is no record of that manifesting in ticks and twitches.

MPI, explains Mechtler, is different from “mass hysteria”, which is a crazed public response to external events, often resulting in witch-hunts such as the Tern County child abuse “epidemic” of the 1980s in California, and the original Salem Witch Trials.

MPI is what happens when an apparently physical ailment spreads through a community like a plague or a mass poisoning, but without any physical cause.

In the 1960s, 85 schoolgirls in Blackburn (UK) were taken to hospital after fainting. There was nothing wrong with them, but a rumour had spread that a girl had been poisoned. More recently, says Mechtler, most of the workforce of a factory in Lebanon collapsed after reports that they were under attack from terrorists with chemical weapons.

He says MPI also accounts for the 2,500 Americans who falsely believed that they had been poisoned in the anthrax attack scare which followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks. 

“Ever since 9/11, Americans have been subjected to warnings of orange alert and red alert, and, unlike Israelis for instance, they are not culturally used to it,” says Mechtler. “What has happened to these girls is the result of Americans being made to live in fear. We are going to see more of these outbreaks.”

But what exactly triggered MPI among Amherst schoolgirls?

Mechtler hopes to find the clue in the one girl who has yet to become his patient, Thera Sanchez. In the NBC film, shown in the States this week, Sanchez is the girl showing the most graphic symptoms. She was the first to come down with conversion disorder, stuttering inexplicably when she woke from a nap one day last October.

“I was perfectly fine,” she told NBC. “There was nothing going on, and then I just woke up and that’s when the stuttering started. I’m very angry. No one’s giving me answers.”

Sanchez’s family, citing fears of potential medical costs, has so far declined to bring her to Mechtler’s clinic.

“The other girls are following her symptoms, although less severely,” says Mechtler. “What set her off? We need to know. I am saying right now that we will treat her without charge. Bring her in.”

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