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- [00:00]
Dan Tabursky
Wondery subscribers can binge all episodes of Hysterical early and ad free. Join Wonder in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Hey, everyone, it's Dan. I have an exciting announcement to share with everyone. Hysterical has been named the Apple Podcast's show of the Year. It's a recognition given to just one show that demonstrates quality and innovation in podcasting. The editors over at Apple Podcasts called our show an impeccably crafted and creatively structured investigation that sets a new standard for immersive audience experiences. And if you can't tell by the sound of my voice, I'm blushing. We really are so honored and so appreciative for the recognition and that you are here to listen to the show that we're really proud of. Thanks for listening. Now onto the show. Previously on Hysterical. At first it was whispers.
- [01:00]
Emily
It was like, oh, it's this one girl. Like, we don't know what's going on. Like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the next thing I know, it's like doubling and tripling, and it's all these girls.
- [01:09]
Dan Tabursky
So by then, everybody thought I was holding something back. Well, you were holding something back intentionally. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Like, I think that's bullshit. Like, you're just gonna withhold all this information from us? Like, what is actually going on? There's clearly something going on that you're covering up. Let's start the day with a little role play. You are a parent of a high school girl, and lately she and a bunch of her classmates have been exhibiting some very wild symptoms. And they 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 all in her head. And then they ask you to just, you know, keep it all on the down low 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, too. Also ahead, imagine if your child suddenly began to suffer from unexplained tics and verbal outbursts. Hey, look, everyone, it's Matt Lauer. On the Today show on cnn, the usual suspects. Several parents go public rejecting mass hysteria and questioning the school's secrecy why they weren't making available any of the testing for toxins they had supposedly done. Here's one of the moms live in the studio.
- [02:35]
Marge
Where's the proof?
- [02:36]
Dan Tabursky
Where's the data? Where's the testing.
- [02:39]
Alicia
When has this been done?
- [02:40]
Dan Tabursky
You've not been shown any data?
- [02:41]
Alicia
No, no, nothing.
- [02:43]
Dan Tabursky
Her daughter is sitting next to her on the couch. I was always so, ah.
- [02:50]
Alicia
I was always so active.
- [02:52]
Dan Tabursky
I don't feel like myself anymore.
- [02:55]
Alicia
We hope that some doctor watching this.
- [02:57]
Dan Tabursky
Now can help you and these other girls. And so that's the message. Meanwhile, at the school, once the story breaks nationally.
- [03:06]
Emily
I'd been sitting in my tech class.
- [03:08]
Dan Tabursky
This is Rose, 8th grade.
- [03:10]
Alicia
Someone was like, dude, there's a news van outside. I took off so fast.
- [03:13]
Dan Tabursky
I went to go see.
- [03:14]
Emily
I was like, what?
- [03:15]
Alicia
Cause like, you know, I'm nosy, whatever.
- [03:17]
Dan Tabursky
I had just gotten a new car around that time. So it was a big thing for me to finally be driving because I was riding the bus for a little bit. Here's Jessica, a senior. I remember exactly where I parked, getting out and just standing there staring at the cameras like, holy shit, what the hell is going on? And it was the entire bus loop just filled with these giant satellites and cameras and just people. They weren't allowed to get out because the school wouldn't let them. But they were in their trucks videotaping us. It was nuts. Yeah, it was nuts. Camera crews lined up on Main Street. Mr. Mihalik, the band teacher. It was an absolute zoo in a little town which only drove the veer more. What makes you say that? Well, people knew something serious was happening then. Like, is there really something bigger than we think going on here? Some people, you know, would go as far to say there's a cover up. By now many kids at the school have stopped drinking the water from the water fountains. This weekend, at least five basketball games scheduled in Leroy have 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 surfaces of a strange looking crop duster dumping unknown chemicals onto a field adjacent to the school on main street. At the Pentecostal church, the letters on the letterboard sign out front have been rearranged. Now they say we are praying for our Leroy High school girls. The emphasis of course is on the girls part right up till this point. One big indicator that it at least might be mass psychogenic illness is that all the cases are confined to that one broad social group. In this case, teen girls at Leroy 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 to strangers.
- [05:13]
Alicia
You don't piece it all together as.
- [05:16]
Dan Tabursky
It'S happening, then someone new comes forward.
- [05:20]
Alicia
Things like exploded. And then I was trying to decide which pieces am I picking up.
- [05:28]
Dan Tabursky
Someone who lives in Leroy, but she's not on the soccer team, she doesn't play in the marching band, she doesn't go to Leroy. High school or high school, period. When did you start piecing it together that other people were having similar symptoms?
- [05:42]
Alicia
I only knew what was on the news and people were thinking that it was like, contagious.
- [05:49]
Dan Tabursky
Did it start to occur to you that maybe it was?
- [05:53]
Alicia
No. Because it was all teenagers and I was far from a teenager.
- [06:03]
Dan Tabursky
I'm Dan Tabursky from Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. This is hysterical. Episode 3 we have another one. If you could do one thing this year that could help you lose up to 20 to 30 pounds without lifting a single weight and it would actually be good for you, would you do it? And if it would actually improve your health and digestion and it tastes like a chocolate shake, wouldn't that be the ultimate win? Well, here it is. It's called Shakeology. Packed with vital nutrients, protein, probiotics, adaptogens and superfoods, it's the easiest way to reset your nutrition, curb cravings, and feel incredible all in under the two minutes it takes to make a simple shake. No meal prep, no guesswork, just a smarter way to fuel your body and start feeling your best. Shakeology isn't just a shake. It's a lifestyle upgrade that makes healthy living easy, delicious and totally doable. Shakeology is all your vital nutrition made simple. You can get free shipping, big discounts, and a free Shaker cup when you subscribe@ shakeology.com that's shakeology.com hey, it's Hey Martinez. I work on a news show and yeah, the news can feel like a lot on any given day. But you just can't ignore la noticias when important world changing events are happening. So that is where the Upverse podcast comes in. Every single morning in under 15 minutes, we take the news and boil it down to three essential stories. Listen to the Upverse podcast from NPR. If you ever find yourself in Paris in 1882 with some time on your hands just looking for something to do, head on over to the mental hospital. Because the biggest attraction in Belle Epoque, Paris, it could be argued, isn't the Louvre or the Opera House. It's a place called Salpetriere. The hulking structure on the left bank of the Seine was once a gunpowder factory. And over the years it had morphed into a hospice for poor women, then a prison for poor women, and finally a women's mental hospital. And it was around this time that something very strange started happening there. The beds in Salpetriere began to fill up with patients, all experiencing truly bizarre symptoms that no one could explain.
- [08:45]
Marge
Tics, paralysis, loss of consciousness.
- [08:49]
Dan Tabursky
Dr. Jamison Webster is a clinical psychologist and a professor at the New School for Social Research in New York.
- [08:55]
Marge
Loss of language, abilities to speak languages they didn't know they could speak. Different multiple personalities, emotional fits of all different kinds, whether it be crying, whether it be giggling, whether it be smiling uncontrollably.
- [09:11]
Dan Tabursky
All behaviors that, to every doctor who examined them, appeared to have no physiological cause. 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, in Germany. But it was Paris that became, as one historian put it, the epicenter of the hysteria industry. And that was because of a man named Jean Martin Charcot. Charcot started a neurology clinic at Salpetriere. It was one of the first. And every Friday, Dr. Charcot would put these women, his patients, on display, literally on a stage every Friday afternoon like a matinee. 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 writhe and bark and contort into impossible shapes, while the men in the audience would watch and try to figure out what was causing it.
- [10:13]
Marge
And the fascination with what they were doing with their bodies that was clearly related to their mind was fascinating. These doctors at the turn of the.
- [10:23]
Dan Tabursky
Century, now, if you can believe it, in some ways, this was good medicine. Before the 19th century, the unexplained symptoms often associated with hysteria were thought to have their source in the uterus, the body constantly disrupted by the wandering womb. That's how they termed it, literally moving around in a woman's body. Charcot rejected all that uterus jazz, and using medical observation in search for a real cause was a step up from hysterectomies. Also, while we're here, the myth that doctors used vibrators to treat hysteria 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, no bueno. But on the flip side, Salpetriere was total insanity. Charcot's sessions drew more than just the medical community. Writers and actors and artists came too, enamored with the mystery of it. Patients became famous, known by first names like Augustine and Genevieve, and for the drama of their specific symptoms, especially what Charcot termed the grand hysteria, where the patient would violently contort herself, bending backwards into a half circle. The sessions became so popular that charcot had a 500 seat amphitheater built at the hospital with proper theatrical lighting and everything, including a huge spotlight to center the hysterics on the darkened stage. Now, as those Fridays rolled 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 tweed suit, a beard, maybe a little cocaine lingering on his mustache and lodged in his mouth a cigar, which legend has it, he would one day insist that despite its considerable length and girth, is sometimes just a cigar. Sigmund Freud was a young neurologist in from Vienna, here to get a gander at the medical mystery. But whereas Charcot thought for sure that there was some physical explanation that they just hadn't found yet, Freud comes at it differently.
- [12:29]
Marge
And it really took Freud, 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 hysterics that he speaks about in Studies in Hysteria. We're like, okay, you want me to talk? I'm gonna talk. Let me talk also about what I want to talk about. And then off they went.
- [13:01]
Dan Tabursky
And for the next 20 plus years, Freud devotes himself to the mystery of hysteria, trying to find its source. And as for Dr. Webster, her introduction to Freud came when she was a teenager herself.
- [13:14]
Marge
I read Freud when I was 17, in early college, and I kind of got excited about it.
- [13:22]
Dan Tabursky
What's early college?
- [13:23]
Marge
You skipped two years of high school.
- [13:25]
Dan Tabursky
You skipped two years of high school?
- [13:26]
Marge
Yeah.
- [13:26]
Dan Tabursky
Oh, wow.
- [13:27]
Marge
And in like the second semester, they gave us Freud, Nietzsche and Marx.
- [13:30]
Dan Tabursky
And it was like at 17.
- [13:33]
Marge
Yeah, it was pretty great.
- [13:34]
Dan Tabursky
And you just ate it up.
- [13:36]
Marge
I ate it up.
- [13:37]
Dan Tabursky
But especially Freud and his now famous case studies from the late 1890s about the women they called hysterical.
- [13:44]
Marge
And it was the story, the thing that I had to kind of present to the class because they assigned me Freud was Freud's case of Dora, the 16 year old hysterical girl. And I was like, oh, that's me. She had what Freud called a petite history. Like she had a small hysteria because it 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 listened to her.
- [14:14]
Dan Tabursky
And she talks about the adults in her life, about affairs and lies and fractured family.
- [14:20]
Marge
She had kind of been the linchpin in her father having this affair. She had helped him do it.
- [14:27]
Dan Tabursky
And not just the trauma of family, but her place in Society. To Dr. Webster, Dora reads as smart and struggling with wanting more than the world was offering women then in terms of self determination, in terms of a.
- [14:39]
Marge
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 milieu. And the more they talked about them, the more they could shift, change, and eventually disappear.
- [15:05]
Dan Tabursky
It was the unconscious. That is where Freud was looking for the source of the symptoms. An entire inner life we all have, but have no real access to. Freud renamed hysteria conversion disorder. That was him. He believed that the stress or trauma in the mind was being converted into physical symptoms in the body. The unconscious way of releasing it or getting it out there. Now, important point about Freud, even his biggest fans will tell you his career, full of insight, was also just riddled with off the wall ideas.
- [15:37]
Marge
I mean, it's tough because there's a lot. I mean, Freud thought that men had menstruation out of their nose.
- [15:43]
Dan Tabursky
He had his own agendas, his own prejudices, he pushed his own interpretations and sexual obsessions. He did a ton of coke. Look it up. But for our purposes here, you don't gotta buy everything about Freud. You just gotta buy the big chunks. Namely this uncomfortable, mysterious truth.
- [16:01]
Marge
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.
- [16:27]
Dan Tabursky
When's the last time you've talked publicly about this?
- [16:30]
Alicia
Publicly? When it happened.
- [16:33]
Dan Tabursky
Well, so it's been a while.
- [16:36]
Alicia
It's been a while.
- [16:37]
Dan Tabursky
Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate it. Regardless, even if you sit there and say nothing. Thank you. How do you want to be identified? First name?
- [16:46]
Alicia
First name's fine. Marge. I mean great. That's fine.
- [16:51]
Dan Tabursky
Marge's symptoms started around the beginning of the school year at the same time as the first girls at leroy High School. But there's a big difference between her and those students. At the time, Marge was a 36 year old mom. She had been working as A nurse in a day hab for people with developmental disabilities.
- [17:10]
Alicia
I started what I called at the time. I started losing time.
- [17:16]
Dan Tabursky
Losing time, like spacing out for long stretches.
- [17:19]
Alicia
And because I have worked with individuals that would have absent seizures, I was like, is that what's happening to me? And it wasn't because I could recall, like, everything that was said around me, but to look at me, it would just. It would look like. It would look like I was daydreaming. That's what I was told.
- [17:44]
Dan Tabursky
Soon the symptoms evolved into the head jerks and the vocal outbursts.
- [17:49]
Alicia
My head would just randomly move, just randomly move one side or the other. It would turn, and I would play it off as a. Oh, I just thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye. Then it started happening more often.
- [18:05]
Dan Tabursky
Your kid is 3 years old. How do they respond to what's happening?
- [18:11]
Alicia
They called them hiccups.
- [18:13]
Dan Tabursky
Really?
- [18:14]
Alicia
I had hiccups.
- [18:16]
Dan Tabursky
She changes her diet, thinking maybe it's food allergies. She swaps out her kids diaper cream. Any changes she had made when the symptoms began, she changes back. Nothing works. She'd heard about the outbreak in town, but to her, that's 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 she had caught whatever it is until the pickles.
- [18:44]
Alicia
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 jar of pickles. And there was a mother and young child in the store, and the mother grabbed the child's arm and says, we don't want to catch that. And that's when I realized that I didn't really know what was going on in the town.
- [19:29]
Dan Tabursky
Her symptoms get worse.
- [19:31]
Alicia
I felt like Linda Blair in the Exorcist at one point. I had a bruise on the backside of my shoulder from where my chin was constantly hitting my shoulder, the back.
- [19:45]
Dan Tabursky
Wow.
- [19:46]
Alicia
I don't even know how it could physically happen, but that's how loose my neck muscles were. I was having a hard time keeping my head up. I couldn't eat unless somebody was home with me because I was choking.
- [20:01]
Dan Tabursky
Oh, my goodness.
- [20:02]
Alicia
I couldn't drink. I had to drink with a teaspoon sips of water.
- [20:08]
Dan Tabursky
Marge reaches out to a friend.
- [20:10]
Alicia
I was like, I am scared, and I need somebody to be scared with me. So we went here to Batavia Hospital, and it was rough. That's when I Realized how bad everything had gotten in Leroy. Because I heard one of the nurses say, we have another one. And I heard, well, that makes five this week. And we're just like, fuck.
- [20:58]
Dan Tabursky
She says they gave her a Valium and sent her home.
- [21:02]
Alicia
I felt like nobody could help me.
- [21:04]
Dan Tabursky
Yeah.
- [21:05]
Alicia
Regardless of if they wanted to or not.
- [21:08]
Dan Tabursky
It's really hard to overstate just how frightening Marge's symptoms were.
- [21:13]
Alicia
Yeah, we used to hang out in the quarry.
- [21:16]
Dan Tabursky
We used to. This is her on the local news at the time when cameras captured a particularly violent outburst.
- [21:31]
Alicia
There were times where I thought I was crazy. Like, am I going crazy? Is this really happening?
- [21:39]
Dan Tabursky
And until what feels like the truth of the situation shakes out for Marge, it becomes difficult to even just be around people.
- [21:47]
Alicia
I don't know if I was ashamed or embarrassed. I isolated myself and I could just be like, I am home all by myself.
- [22:01]
Dan Tabursky
Doors locked, curtains drawn, lights dim.
- [22:05]
Alicia
I would have headphones on so that I wouldn't hear any of the outside world. I. Twilight had just come out. So I listened to Debussy a lot. I listened to a lot of Fergie and Lady Gaga. Anything that. Anything. Even Gloria Gaynor. I will survive. Yep. But it depended on what I was feeling at the moment. If I was having troubles with vocal tics, I would come out with the most vulgar 90s rap that you could think of. Just so that I could justify all the fucks, shits, cunts, motherfuckers coming out of my mouth.
- [23:04]
Dan Tabursky
Wow, you really had that's severe symptoms.
- [23:09]
Alicia
It looked like Tourette's. It really did. But you don't catch Tourette's.
- [23:23]
Dan Tabursky
Incidentally. Claude Debussy wrote this piece in Paris during the hysteria there. For 10 years he studied and performed on stage at the Paris Conservatory, just across the river from Salpetriere. 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.
- [24:04]
Alicia
Foreign.
- [24:12]
Marge
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Dan Tabursky
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- [24:39]
Marge
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- [24:41]
Dan Tabursky
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- [24:47]
Marge
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- [25:08]
Dan Tabursky
Your book club's annual trip can get chaotic. Self improvement Steve needs a hotel, gym and horror. Harriet ghosted the group chat about Budget, Collaborate. Vote on your favorites and book all in the app. Find your perfect somewhere with hotels.com Marge isn't the only new person to come forward with symptoms around this time. Not by a long shot. Puzzling medical condition that's affecting a dozen girls in Genesee county now has some similar cases near Albany. In fact, once the story of what was happening in Leroy blew up, people begin connecting dots left and right. Hey everybody.
- [25:50]
Emily
So I know I haven't done a.
- [25:51]
Dan Tabursky
Video hey in a while. Remember the girl who sent out those videos on YouTube? Someone who heard about Leroy gets in touch with her and she calls the news people and comes forward. They say their symptoms are similar to what 12 girls in Leroy have been dealing with. Here's her mom speaking to a reporter, trying valiantly to talk louder than her daughter's tics. She has four different narcotics that they have to try to help her control this.
- [26:16]
Alicia
Hey.
- [26:17]
Marge
Oh, still doesn't really hurt.
- [26:19]
Dan Tabursky
A friend of the YouTube girl also came forward. Her name is Alicia. Both girls play together on the softball team. There is something actually happening to their bodies. This is Alicia's dad on the local news. Something I believe is coming from the outside, the environment somehow. One big but though neither girl is from Leroy, they live in another town in New York, 250 miles away. So maybe not related. Right? Well, here's a counterbudd. Both girls did eat at a restaurant in Le Roy over the summer. Their softball team had recently passed through leroy and ate lunch at a cafe on Main Street. If it's just a coincidence, it'd be a huge one. So the outbreak in leroy is now the outbreak centered in Leroy. Which brings us to some more roleplay. This one here is a Sophie's Choice. You are having unexplainable neurological symptoms and you have to choose. You can either be evaluated on a stage by Dr. Jean Martin Charcot, risen from the dead from 19th century Paris, or you can be evaluated on a stage, on tv, in front of a live studio audience by a former contestant from the Bachelor. Doctor, Doctor, give me the news. This is the Doctors. Have you seen the doctors? It's canceled now. Anyway, sorry. It was a medical advice talk show and the main doctor on the Doctors had previously been the main bachelor on the Bachelor, season eight, Travis Stork. Hello and welcome to the Doctors. Today we're going viral and no, we're not talking about that kind of viral. Don't worry, he is an actual doctor and we can be sure of this because he's wearing blue scrubs while hosting a talk show. 16 year old Alicia and her dad Randy are here with us now. So glad you could come. Thank you. Good to see you. Thank you. Alicia, how long have you been dealing with these symptoms now?
- [28:17]
Emily
I've been dealing with these symptoms since May.
- [28:19]
Dan Tabursky
And let's talk about this Dr. Martin. Alicia had been pitching a softball game one day when she passed out on the mound in the middle of the first inning. Since then, her symptoms grew to include convulsions, tics and seizure like events, all with no clear source.
- [28:34]
Emily
No one wanted to listen to me. The doctors didn't. They thought it was all in my head and that I was making it up.
- [28:42]
Dan Tabursky
Here I am with Alicia today, 12 years later.
- [28:45]
Emily
It's all in your head, they're saying. And I'm saying it's not. I have physical symptoms and my mom would go to my appointments with me and a male doctor would dismiss everything we were both saying. It wasn't until my dad went into the meetings and then until we were heard.
- [29:00]
Dan Tabursky
But then the doctors called. Well, in a doctor's exclusive militia came all the way to Los Angeles 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're about to get the results. But first, why did you decide to go on?
- [29:19]
Emily
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. And so obviously my parents are like, oh, we can get some answers from them. They're smart, they know what they're doing.
- [29:36]
Dan Tabursky
It's the worst idea.
- [29:37]
Emily
And they sent a list of all the tests they were going to run. We're going to run this, this, this and this, all these different tests. And my dad's like, okay, that sounds great, let's do it. Maybe we'll get some answers. Then we get there and they don't do half the tests.
- [29:50]
Marge
Good morning, how are you?
- [29:52]
Dan Tabursky
So let me just examine a couple things here. On the show they play video of the doctor's examination of Alicia. Okay. I'M going to ask you touch my finger and then your nose like this.
- [30:02]
Emily
It was more like, well, if we get a shot of this, that'll look really good. Oh, I didn't like how you said hi. Can you say it a different way and then we'll talk to you. I didn't know what happened behind the scenes. This was all new to me and to my dad. It was a bunch of hooey.
- [30:19]
Dan Tabursky
And that is followed by this scene in the studio. Alicia and her dad are sitting on stage looking like nervous Jerry Springer guests, waiting for the other shoe to drop. This is a functional MRI scan and fiber tracking in the brain, just as we do in a tumor patient. Then the TV doctors reveal Alicia's brain. A video wall full of her MRI scans writ giant. And then we, the folks at home, watch the live studio audience watch Alicia and her dad get her diagnosis. Define the entire wired diagram of Alicia's 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?
- [31:03]
Emily
I think that's when they said conversion disorder.
- [31:08]
Dan Tabursky
In the final edit that we see on tv. They actually never say it to her face, but when all her other tests come back normal, the implication is pretty clear. So by ruling out a lot of these scary things, is that reassuring?
- [31:22]
Emily
That's really reassuring. It makes me feel a lot better and it makes me a lot happier, too.
- [31:26]
Dan Tabursky
And that's why why we went ahead and put you through all these battery tests then. At least, you know, back then on stage, Alicia was quiet and polite and doesn't say much. Now, as an adult, she can express with a bit more clarity her feelings about conversion disorder.
- [31:52]
Emily
I hate that phrase. 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, it's used when doctors don't know the diagnosis. There's just a history in the US of women being dismissed by doctors. You know, it's hysteria. It's all in your head. It's not physical. Oh, my gosh, you're exaggerating that kind of stuff.
- [32:18]
Dan Tabursky
Wow.
- [32:19]
Emily
And it just didn't sit with me. It did not make sense. Like, then how does this explain everything else that's happening to me?
- [32:27]
Dan Tabursky
Did you feel like they were telling you with conversion disorder that there's something that you have, that there's something big in your head that you're not Talking about that's making you do this.
- [32:35]
Emily
Yeah. And I think that's a lot of times the connotation behind conversion disorder is that there's some trauma that you're not willing to talk about, which I understand a lot of people don't want to talk about. Trauma. It's a hard thing. Like this was traumatizing this whole experience, but that wasn't it for me. I had a really good childhood, a supportive family. I could talk to people I felt supported and loved, and I was very fortunate. That just does not fit. That doesn't land with me. That is not it. It just doesn't. No, that's just. That's not it. I know it's not.
- [33:12]
Dan Tabursky
And that, it seems to me, became the unspoken assumption for all the girls who went public. If this is conversion disorder, and conversion disorder is very often associated with stress and trauma, then 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.
- [33:42]
Marge
So what are the doctors telling you.
- [33:44]
Dan Tabursky
About what is happening to you?
- [33:45]
Marge
Uh, mostly that it's stress induced. Um, when. Ugh.
- [33:52]
Dan Tabursky
Here's how one of the girls addressed it on the Today show. When these started, I was fine. I was perfectly fine. I felt good about everything.
- [34:02]
Marge
I was on honor roll.
- [34:03]
Dan Tabursky
There was nothing going wrong. You can answer this question any way you want to, but. But I. But I do. I want to ask it. I'm talking with Emily. She was in eighth 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 or trauma that people didn't know about or that you were having a hard time talking about at the time that may have contributed to something? Not anything that would have made it into something like this.
- [34:40]
Emily
You know what I mean?
- [34:41]
Dan Tabursky
Like typical normal 8th grade drama and stuff between friends, but, like, nothing wild.
- [34:47]
Emily
You know what I mean?
- [34:49]
Dan Tabursky
Here's Emily's mom, Kathy. Nothing outside a typical teenage middle school. I mean, she was a middle schooler. She was eighth grade. She was 13. You know, I wasn't like. Gives me the shivers. That is such a terrible year.
- [35:02]
Alicia
Right?
- [35:03]
Dan Tabursky
There's no subtext here, by the way. There's no suggestion that anyone is hiding something or in denial about what's really going on. For a lot of the girls and the parents in Leroy, it just didn't feel true. Was it shocking to hear conversion disorder or.
- [35:20]
Alicia
I Mean, I didn't even really understand. I knew it's a psychological disorder.
- [35:25]
Dan Tabursky
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. Marge, the 36 year old mom.
- [35:37]
Alicia
And I was like, okay, I can deal with mental illness. So I take some psych meds. I can. People do it all the time. If Valium's going to do it, give me the Valium. Well, Valium didn't do it. Give me the Xanax.
- [35:51]
Dan Tabursky
She doesn't shut it down completely. To her, it just doesn't seem impossible. One of her doctors uses a metaphor.
- [35:58]
Alicia
They described 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 deal with feelings. Nobody wanted to be around somebody who was crying all the time. So I didn't deal with the abuses and stuff. I didn't deal with the aftermaths of all that. So everything that I had been pushing down and not wanting to deal with.
- [36:37]
Dan Tabursky
Started bubbling up into the physical symptoms that were erupting a volcano. March has good reason to give conversion disorder a chance, because to her, it's a lot less scary than the alternatives. Cause Marge isn't just looking for the right answer. She needs it to be an answer she can actually live with.
- [37:00]
Alicia
My gosh, I could live with conversion disorder. I could not live with. The environment did it to me.
- [37:06]
Dan Tabursky
Yeah. As mass psychogenic illness proponents were lining up, so too 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 toxin in the air that was to blame.
- [37:20]
Alicia
I mean, I couldn't work with that. I couldn't work with that because when it's an environmental thing, it's like it's a cancer. Because I'm like again thinking, I have a three year old. So I was like, no, the environmental to me was terminal.
- [37:48]
Dan Tabursky
But the state said everything was okay on that front. Right. They did all those tests at the school. They checked the old water records. It all seemed fine. But let's say you don't trust the state at this point in Leroy, a lot of people don't. Let's say you think it's some sort of toxin 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'd need is a fresh clue pointing you in the right direction. You'd need, say, someone to walk up to the home of one of the affected families and anonymously slip some documents and a note under a door, or drop it in a mailbox or place it under the doormat, 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 Hysterical. You are not doing your job. You are not doing your job at all when the medical mystery in leroy has its top blown off. In our big story this morning, nationally known environmentalist Erin Broncovich sent a team to leroy yesterday to dig for answers about about a mysterious medical condition there. I mean, everybody knew what cyanide was. Nobody knew what trichloroethane was. Oh shit. Having those natural gas wells on my football field's not a really fucking smart thing to do now is it? Follow Hysterical on the Wondery app, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by computer completing a short survey@wondery.com survey and if you have a tip about a story that you think we should investigate, please write to us@wondery.com tips. Hysterical is a production of Wondery and Pineapple Street Studios. Our lead producer is Henry Malofsky. Our associate producer is Marie Alexa Kavanagh. Producer, Sophie Bridges. Managing producer, Erin Kelly. Senior producer Lena Masitzis. Additional production by Zandra Ellen. Diane Hodson is our editor. Our executive editor is Joel Lovell. Fact checking by Natsumi Ajisaka. Mixing by Hannis Brown. Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Original music composed and performed by Dina Maccabee Legal Services for Pineapple street from Crystal Tupia for Wondery our Our senior producers are Lizzie Bassett and Claire Chambers. Coordinating producer, Mariah Gossett. Senior managing producer, Callum Plews. Hysterical is written and executive produced by me. I'm Dan Taburski. Our executive producers for Pineapple street are Max Linsky, Henry Maloski, Asha Saludja and Jenna Weiss Berman. Executive producers for Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marsha Louie and Jen Sargent. Thanks for listening. Find yourself looking for a new job or change in career? Monster.com is here to help. We are not only here to bring you job postings but also AI interview prep and salary tools, expert career advice and top notch resume services. We've got everything you need to land your perfect job fit. Discover the magic of finding the ideal job with monster.com your future starts now. Visit monster.com today. Your next job opportunity is just a click away.