Mind Power

ANDREW BOLT



The power of panic
Andrew Bolt
25feb05

http://www.heraldsun.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5478,12358739%255E25717,00.html
It seems the constant scare-mongering of green and other groups may have made us vulnerable to attacks of mass hysteria.

IT seems Melbourne Airport may not have been crippled on Monday by a "chemical leak" but an attack of mass hysteria.
And thank our green paranoia for it.
"Oh, you probably did have mass hysteria there," prominent Sydney psychiatrist Dr Yolande Lucire said.
"But don't call it that. It's too impolite. Call it a mass psychogenic phenomenon."
We can't be sure it was stress, imagination and suggestion that made 57 people suffer palpitations, shortness of breath, dizziness and nausea. But there's no sign that a chemical spill or gas leak was to blame instead.
"All readings are showing zero," a fire brigade official said. Added a Melbourne Airport spokesman: "There was immediate testing done of the air quality and the air conditioning systems, and nothing was identified..."
Doctors couldn't find a cause, either, and most of the sick said they had smelled nothing odd.
Ah! said hysteria experts.
"The first day the mysterious Melbourne malady or `Virgin Blue flu' was reported on the TV news, I literally sat up and told my wife: `That looks suspiciously like mass hysteria'," said New York sociologist Dr Robert E. Bartholomew, author of Little Green Men, Meowing Nuns and Head-hunting Panics: A study of Mass Psychogenic Illnesses and Social Delusions.
"Hysteria is the number one suspect on my list."
Bartholomew and Lucire agree that the Virgin Blue Flu follows the script of mass hysteria, which can affect anyone. The symptoms fit, the rapid recovery of the victims fit, the lack of biological causes fit.
There are other clues: The sick came mainly from a unit of people close enough to react to each other - security staff and Virgin Blue employees, rather than random passengers. Their workplace was stressful - staff knew the risk of terror attacks, and now Patrick Corporation is bidding for their airline.
And it seems from the TV footage that most of the sick were women, although ambulance officials say many men were treated, too.
As Bartholomew details in The British Journal of Psychiatry, we know of many past cases of mass hysteria, whether among nuns in the Middle Ages, or in the strict schools of the 19th century.
"But ever since the mid-20th century, the pattern has abruptly changed as residents of Australia, Europe and America have been deluged with reports of mysterious transient illnesses for which doctors can find no cause," Bartholomew said yesterday.
"The most common trigger: a mysterious odour.
"With the birth of the environmental movement, concerns over the depletion of the ozone layer, acid rain, chemical and biological weapons, and fear of contaminants in our food, air and water, we have grown more suspicious and sensitive to strange smells."
Schools in Singapore, Hong Kong and America have been shut as classes panic. Factories and subways have been closed.
The Internet generation may also be Googling its way to illness, finding syndromes to fit their twinges, and a Poor-You support industry to make them feel as sick as they're told.
Take your pick of psychogenic pain - Gulf War Syndrome, Repressed Memory Syndrome, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or even, Lucire suspects, the epidemic of claims of childhood sex abuse. Australians seem as prone as anyone to all this, even giving the world Repetitive Strain Injury - the "Kangaroo Paw" epidemic of the 1980s.
It was Lucire, author of Constructing RSI: Belief and Desire, who did much to expose RSI as little more than mass hysteria. And it was also Lucire who found that to say so in this fact-lite Age of Victims was unhealthy for the sayer.
"I had to learn to be polite," Lucire said, and again warned me: "Don't call this mass hysteria."
She's right. Who wants to hear that they cost Virgin $2 million, thanks, perhaps, to an attack of the vapours?
bolta@heraldsun.com.au