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previously on hysterical i was like i my locker and she came up to me and she is like stardering super bad my stop fucking around shes like a， a， a！
a a i cant so by the third one im having concerns we heard a lot of like a yipping sound！
a screeching sound i even heard like a cat now wing were you thinking that other people reflect in yeah but that like i figured out later on i was like oh im so sorry that i thought that about you because here i am and were in the same boat now girl？
where did you grow great here？
in tennessy couny i went to um baron burgin， which is a tiny combined school one town over from Leroy imainleave roi New York sitting in the living room of Cathy done and before explainwhocaffee is lets just get the white hot controversy out of the way how come some people say liberty um the the richarpeople call it Leroy because they want a sound class in elegant is almost like and then just regular working class blue color people are right！
and the fall of two eleven Cathy was a fulltime mom raising two kids two daughters both of whom were attending liberty junior senior highschool， her oldest gamy was a sophomore and played on the junior varsity socket team Kathy go to the games all the time yeah！
i mean you know the parent sitting on the sidelines you sitting your little folding chairs while the kids are planning your chat lately， though the sidelinechitchat was being consumed by one chitsinparticular that little you know parent talkenand is like whats going on with these girls you know whats going on with these girls was becoming the question of the season still kind of whispered but getting louder there was a lot going on with these girls having what we were saying is having outburst it was a what are you saying？
who are you a lot of verbal a lot of verable taking where things you know like maybe just a holler a yeah and you didnt think much of it if it was one girl remember there already was someone with territates in drumantheschool so till now the occasional tick was less a reason to freak out and more just like a well， there go so and so yeah was kind of like you know oh well that girl has blown hair well， this one has a verbal take once in a while but then that started to change so it didnt become anything noticeable until it was more than a couple girls then all the sudden its like wait a minute！
so after watching her daughter Amy playsocker week after week as her teamate symptoms worsen it was a surprise when it was cathies younger daughter Emily who eventually came down with the symptoms yeah was the schoolners called me and said that Emily had been in her office that day because they had noticed that she was starting to do some physical like head taken i didnt think that it was gonna affect me and then it did Emily youre remember her from last time just an eighgrater when her sympm started for her it was uncontrolled jerks of her headanarm do you start to even question yourself like is this real oh yeah i had moments i was like is this is this even a thing let me see if i can stop doing it let me see you see you would try to like sit still oh， yeah i try to sit there for like five minutes and sit still couldndo it here i am again with caffee her mom i feel like if if i had come home with ticks i feel like my mothers first instinct would have been like what are you up to like a little suspicious not because she isnt tridle i mean yeah of course。
i was a little bit because you know you kids are kids and you know you dont know she was always an odd girl anyway， she was already an odd one out so everybody in town hadns saying all a lot of these girls are faking it theyre doing it for attention so i just kind of thought maybe， maybe she could who knows Cathy asked her older daughter Amy what she thought？
i just said what do you think do you think shes fake in and shes like i dont know so that evening when Emily came home from class， Cathy played down i didnt say anything to were about it i didnsay hey！
its schoolcalled said youdoingthis i wanted to kind of see if she would still do it outside of school and she observed to seeveemily would take when she thought that no one was watching with no audience nothing to gain there sitting in front of the tv zoning out along with whatever rerunflickering in forever， Emily did it i dont howyou explain that a kind of turning her head a head jerk kind of thing and then she did it again and again plainas day whatever was causing these symptoms the Cathy had been watching spread from her folding chair on the sidelines headdown spread to her own kid OK！
so this is something this is for real this is happening！
ondantuburscheme from wondering pineapple street studios this is hysterical episode 2 all in your head， a few years ago i was walking my dog downerving place and then hatton Billy was an old geezer by then a great a as dragger and we come to a corner and he stiffing this trash can and i notice theyre smokcoming out of it probably a flick cigarette that didngo out but its becoming a property little fire i can see flames now and a couple other rubber neckers notice now to and little bit of trash fire or falling off the sides i look at the guy next to me and he looks the fire then back at me and i look at the fire and i look at Billy and Billy looks at me like dont look at me and all of us just kind of standing there wondering if someone should you know do something haddo you know and who decides when a scene goes from being just an oddity， a thing to gawk at an exchange glances about to the level where someone finally pulls the fire alarm， as a weathergroup holder and liberty that fall the symptoms continued to come to life a threshing junior one week a couple softwares the next an irregular heartbeat finding its rhythm but allstill on official the schools not talking about a publie the town isnacknowledging it parentare just kind of watching this thing happen i just kept thinking whats going on i didnt have any clue i just was like theres got to be an answer theres gotta be something at the root you know whats the common denominator was basically all like upthinking is whats the common denominator here？
the socker moms and dads would hash out theories on the sideline and i remember us very casual conversation 哼！
whats the coach doing it？
these girls are they stressed out！
whats going on one of the first students to fall ill was on the socker team so at first， there was some suspicion that maybe the coach was pushing them too hard！
but then maybe a few weeks later than its another girl well， shes not on the sock or team whats going on with her？
in fact that first girl was also on a cheerleading squad in three weeks later her best friend on the squad came down with symptoms you know it was almost like making it this little spreadshee OK well， this girls in this grade and she does this activity and as the sound of ticks and barcs grew louder in the school some began to see patterns i felt like kids in marching band， a some socker players and kids in track Mr holic the band teacher was a lot of the same kids were involved in those same activities i thought had to be something to do with the school or the schoolgrounds only because that was the only thing everybody had in comment is they went to the same school yeah and they were female the focus for some turned to the athleticfields where the kids played in practiced the fieldto become notorious for being repeatedly soaked with flootward from heavy rains they would even be complaints from students about an orange ews coming up from the grass there that stuck to their sneakers in close then there was the question of why just girls so far it first it was whispers it was like oh whats this one girl like we dont know whats going on like blah blah and then next thing i know its like doubling and tripling and its all these girls this is rose another eighth grader at Leroy that year i remember hearing it somepoint since it was all girls it must be a bad batch of tan bonds just like what Jessica a senior was also like what because like if it was like the tamponsonlike the the things that school like nobody even used so so like i dont think that one makes sense really the the school give you sort of marching orders by how to deal with this yeah， yeah they said like you know were handling it and they basically just wanted everybody to keep quiet theres a mystery in Leroy that no oneseems to be able to solve in November one of the girls finally goes public with her symptoms on local news but she hideher identity sheesbacklit by the settings on so you just see her sillliwet this is my eithernine day straight taking him doesnt stop for 17 year old Macella as wechosen to call her sleeping is the only former beliefshe has from the uncontrollable ticks that constantlyshakerhead meanwhile addentnerologic as dartonmcveg triceto narrowen on the sourceof it all her waiting room is starting to become unmanagable flash to when i have patience that im seeing theyre having the same symptoms and Ive got to get them all into the office and i probably shouldnt have him。
the waiting room or in the back at the same time again patient privacy becomes an issue because we have the same vocalizations and barking and things like that and so you know they can identify each other。
because they know the sound and they also accessorbate each other bringing two or more patience together it seemed was making the symptoms of each patien worse。
so as soon as somebody starts you know vocalizing the other person starts vocalizing that i have patience with my grain that are sitting there like oh my lord！
on November 421， about 7 weeks after the symptoms first appeared the superintendent posts a letter on the schooldistrict website quote we had some questions about a group of students in our district that a developed what appears to be terredlike symptoms we are taking this issue seriously and you get the just the fire alarm had finely been pulled， so they came the me because they knew i was a practicing docs they knew i knew the area they knew i was comfortable and thats just thats just our clock OK let me just wait till its done so we can use when state healthificials were alerted as to what was happening and how was multiplying doctor Greg young was dropped into the center of the growingstorm！
t collex cooku clocks look right up there over the fireplace oh！
that able place yeah！
the New York state department of health put doctor young in charge of finding the source of the mysterious illness so when something like this happens and youre at the department of health is there like a binder that you flip to and be like OK herewhat we do we think wedealing with this like it whats the protocol well？
the protocol is we know we need to do in a disease outbreak and thats what we call the line list the linelist they created with step one agreid of every patien。
every symptom when they started， when they got worse， looking for patterns？
a formal version of the slew things some of the parents had already been doing in their heads and doctor young had as i out for a few possible culprits i was looking for something physical you were looking for i was looking for either disease or environmental those are the things that have me worried and and i thought i said with other things， drugs disease， environmental prox。
and those are my three top now the numbers fluctuate depending on who you ask and when but by December， doctor younganist team are clocking twelve students at the school with symptoms most have been seen by doctor mcvig addant who gave them a series of tests for line disease， a talkscreen， etc some were tested for heavy metals in the blood i healfcontractors hired who interviews the studentstofind any common talks on exposures and to root possible drugues on campus they test for mold they review recent watertesting data and takes some new samples they test the lighting levels， which are sometimes linked to neurological problems they also do airquality tests focusing specifically on a few spots inside the school that seemed to be coming up again and again the library， a biology classroom， the girls locker room and art room， three sixty to the first afflicted girls， the chew leaders they shared a class in this room by new years doctor。
young felt like they come up with the answer so we did a thermal investigation and you read the report you got the same one that i do uh we really want to review and i knew what the dignosis was？
on January eleventth 22 about three months into the sickness now parents are called to a town meeting in the high school auditorium its a wedsday evening mygoal is to calm the fear that have been building you were this box person yeah！
i want to bring the spokesperson and i does not job you want yeah well， it was a job someone had to do it does not go great i told them two things i said weve looked at the infectious disease side of it and there is no infection among these children the second thing wedone in environmental review the water quality came from my role couny water i mean it was great water its tested regularly there was nothing in the water to be concerned about。
its not infectious its not environmental thats all you need to know and that was pretty much it doctor young said what the state thought it wasnt not infectious， not environmental， but he refused to say what the statethought it was thats i was so angry heres just gagm she was there that night because ilike youre saying youdoing all this testing。
but youre not telling us what youre doing youre saying you have come to this conclusion。
but you wont tell us what of this and you thats suspicious yeah yeah！
thats one i want up like all the now like i think thats full shit like youjust gonna withhold all this information was like what is actually going on theres clearly something going on that youcoveringup theres this girl in her throwing questions of my high school kid Jessica that that is she had us so phone Bob she starts reading the stuff i got her brother a young kid people were looking for an answer they wanted something simple disease， environmental， and they were getting what they wanted so by then everybody thought i was holding something back but you were holding something back intentionally yeah yeah well！
it yeah doctor young was in kind of an impossible position here he felt like he had the answer to what was happening to the kids as a group but revealing that dignosis in public would violate each individual kids right to medical privacy i i took a hypercriticalls into me ethics we far more than my job or anything else even if i have been ordered to tell the share the diagnosis i would not have done it it might be ethical but it is also a great way to scare the hell out of a crowd of freaked out parents heres doctor young during that meeting we will share as much as we can without sharing the diagnosis we cant do that its not right he bombed and weaved for three hours after a while a parent whose daughter had already gotten her diagnosis in private gotcicadancing around it so he just walks to the Mike and set it for him the dignosis was something called conversion disorder and you know what that means well neither did most of the people in that auditorium？
in January 1692， several younggirlslivinginsaleenvillagemastitusedsstarted behavingstrangellyascreamed barked and ridedin pain there elders concluded that， whichcraft was to blame and girls began accusing local women of bewitchingthem soon， whichcrafhistaria swept through their small puredin community highamlinsigram the host of one response americanhistorytellers we takeyoutotheevents times and people that shaped America and Americans our values are struggles in our dreams in our latest series we explore the history of the salemwhichtrials， themostlethelwhichhuntanamericanhistory， followamericanhistorytellersonthewondereapporwherever yougetrpontcastsyoucanbingthisseasonearlyanadfreeghtnowonwondereplus！
on January third 2012， theres an item in the Batavian， thats the newspaper in the next big town over the headline snowball throwers sot and liberty， a group of kids throwing snowballs a cars were now evating police and ileft behind two major clues footprints in the snow and one orpin glove founder the scene im a status of the manhunt and officer is quoted as saying someones gonna have a cold hand when a reader routing the comments how is this news？
the papersresponds was economical and to the point because i say it is my name is Howard Owens， ipublisher of the batavian serving gency couny Howard Owens process it is so weve become for a lot of people the primary news or slogline and it you whats me and i have two employees but now just one week later the snowball story somehow seemed small as a couple hundred leroions packed the school auditorium looking for an answer to a new er scarier mystery， a ones was sitting in the front row when the states diagnosis。
the one they were trying not to say was finally revealed and thats the first time in my life i heard the term conversion disorder so as frankly out of my depth， but i sit there you know googlesyourbest friends sometimes right？
sometimes is your worst anime he actually just googled it in the meeting in the first article。
i sit in the audience pops up on conversion disorder is like a total you know， this is a fraguent kind of diagnosis in fact。
conversion disorder is real but it can be a bearer to wrap your mind around now the definition is constantly evolving but in 2012， the running definition for conversion disorder is psychological stress or trama that boils over into physical symptoms the symptoms are very often neural logical troublewalking a limp that wont go away numness seizers motortics from the mild like a twitch to the extreme often violent a conversionreaction can last for an afternoon and a can also crypl you for a lifetime but in general you know its conversion disorder because there is no organic cause theres no clear physical explanation for wiads happening so you have a limp but x rays are normal and you have seizure smotable times a day， but mris show nothing the symptoms in conversiondisorder are real they are actually happening it is not faking it its not looking for attention but all the tests the eegs， the bloodworkthe tockscreens normal but thats just the first part of it because whathappening in liberty isnt happening to one person its happening to at last count twelve persons in spreading your startumcvig she agrees with the states diagnosis each case uniquelis a conversion disorder independently。
but when you push them all together and they all have the same symptoms and they all know each other then its a mask agonicalness， mass psycagenic illness otherwise known as massisteria may as psycagenic illness is not like oh what happened here it happened here having us weak here has these are rare occurrences and have this many people have an accurrents thats this well， publicize that is not only that but tikdisorder so motor disorders are much more rare so most the time there um you know gi issues are passing out theyre not motordisorders like tikdisorders。
in 1692 in Salem massachuseits when a state of unexplainable behavior broke Adam on girls in women， the people there blained the devil and the girls themselves but many historians now believe that that was a caseof mass psycagenic illness mass illness happens overwomanly to girls no onesquitsurey will get to that it involves bizarre physical symptoms with no clear physical cause but then its breads from person to person usually intense social groups like a content or a small village were high school so when Elizabeth pares and Abagel Williams first had symptoms and Salem massachusets， vocal， outburst and strangecontortions it wasnt the devil it wasneven conscious it was some psychological stress or even trama overflowing into physical symptoms and then spreading among the other girls in the settlement who knew Abigail in Elizabeth， who unconsciously caught the symptoms themselves how its a line of sight thing that is the vector for contagionhere its not saliva or sneezing or not washing your hands its seeing and hearing someonesuffering with the symptoms they could cause you to catch it as well now thats all finegood for 300 years ago and longon girls and bonds and buckleshoes but has a diagnosis today and not autotorium and liberty now that is a big pillar to swallow it was very tense it was a nobody was buying conversion disorder was i think strange for all of us towered owns again the reporter you know your line to us this can be real you guys dont know what youre about and sitting there facing the crowd and taking the heat doctor young the guy working for the state who thought theyd solve the mystery why are you so confident？
are you always in this confident？
no！
i wasnt it what i？
i would this way why are we show confident in dealing with something that you had never seen before and then in terms of massic agenic illness pre rare it is rare thats first when i never seen actually！
but dont forget i had a big army behind me i had the nerellogies i decided i had the movement disorder people i had the nih people so yes！
i was comfortable and isorry but this its just it is what it is so you heard conversion disorder and you thought i thought thats a bullshit heres just again i dont i donbelieve believe that because after all sing i was like theres no way i dont believe that like so seeing all these girls like theyre not making it off and like i just dont believe that the thing i i just couldnt and like my mom and me were just so outraged to hear everybody just like say thats what it was like after all of this thats all it is like i just dont know how to believe that im not a doctor and i dont care about hip i care about getting these kids better this is a parent talking to reporters after the townhaul i mean is is a whole lot of common sense here that i think is being dismissed his gidemissed almost a month a school so far her symptoms were that severe i think all teenagers have a certain amount of stressed the deal within their lives you know these days with the broken homes and the boyfriends and all of that sort of thing im talking about something that just comes on within a couple of weeks and these kids are just totally normal and then next thing you know theygoing but there arms are swinging and so you were thinking conversion sorderers bullshit were yes！
that was my initial impression yes， tower doins did you ask yourself why they would say that uh yeah i hate to think myself somebody buys into conspiracy theories or whatever but certainly you know， you cant you cant we should have some healthy skepticism of the government and uh that they might lie to us its not like its never happened and they would have motivational life it was environmental cause right the school district resurvey well， if they if why ability？
ifits moldmaking these girls sick or badwater or that orange eos on the athleticfields the school in the town could be labeled on the hook for gazillions and they might fear liability if it was some sort of viral disease that they had failed to control。
so you know that might be reasonfor a government agency to lie that to make big to a lesson degree myself are are unable to get specifics were not doing that to hide anything for to uh we here to be responsible uh physitions the guy saying i swear not having anything thats doctor last little neckler doctor my fix boss a dent Nero logic neckler goes on the news a few days layer to try and comthings down we know， exactly what has what is going on？
we know， exactly how we should treat it part of it its natural course of the illness。
that was the funny thing to me that gave me that you know that feeling in the pitch your stomach of something isnt right fores mom caffee it began to feel like the school wasnt just cooperating with the neologist dent but almost coluding with them， she says the schoolnerscallethen told her do not take Emily to your family doctor？
she said were dealing through the school were dealing with dent thats who she says the school wanted them to see doctor is mcvigan mickler than a role just a 男 one OK where are you suggesting even to a parent of a child where they should take them to be seen yeah， really unusual， i just felt like why are we funneling these girls all of them to one doctor just didnt seem to make sense why dont we all go to different doctors and then if you all say the same thing okay that makes sense to me but with one doctors looking at twenty people and saying the same thing over and over i just i dont i didnt feel authentic to me Cathy never did call the dockersadent she says it didnmatter though i remember getting a phone call from dent and them asking me did i want a setup an appointment such anised like how did you get my number how did you get my information kind of thing Cathy takes Emily to their family doctor instead， but even then its the same old song and shes getting sick of hearing it the doctor walked into that examining room and said its conversion disorder to me face to face never even turned her head to look at Emily or examine her anything and i said how do you know just thinking do you have an even you know your adoctor so you know and im not so how do you know this and she said well。
shegoes delivery these girls ill have it so shes got it she basically said i will tell in your head your fine heres Emily how are you as a medical professional？
gonna look your patien in the eye and be like youfine stop thinking about youre fine youfine so what youre saying is i have these symptoms but you dont why either？
youre not gonna do any test and shes like no i dont need to like okay and we left and she didnt any part of it so i was like okay well， find another opinion it felt like she didnt want any part of it yeah well， yeah it kind of did it kind of felt like its terrible to say this but my childan individual and i dont want her grouped in with i dont want you to tell me that shes exactly like all the other ones and this is it i dont know it just i was like i know my kid inwhether it was called conversiondisorder or mass packagenic illness everyone knew what it meant it meant mass hysteria they was all on their heads， it started to feel like people were kind of picking sides on conversion disorder or question mark。
in 176 a new theory emerged about sale a massachusetst and what had happened to the girls there in the 16S， the theory was that the women and girls in Salem had not been possessed by the devil nor did they experience a mass psycagenagillness the paper suggestion that what they had experienced was something called urgit poisoning urgit yoube interested to hear often grows on rigrass and uncertain witherconditions rainy damp cool rygrassit should be noted is a common grasstype to plant on athleticfields but the ones in liberty， the samefields that students complained had a habit of flooding after rainfall that had reportedly been using a weird orange substance sticking to the clothes and sneakers of students students on the socket team students on the cheerleading squad im not saying whathappiting in liberty is urgid poison im not even saying what happened in Salem was urgit poisman， but the thing that makes a conversion dissorter or a mastigagenic illness diagnosis viable is that there is no other explanation and forcathy done and the parentat liyouri high school who were trying to weiadignosis of master on one hand and questionmark on the other questionmark is starting to look pretty good， especially because now it seemed like whatever was making the girls in the high school sick was starting to evolve the swening the mystery appears to be growing to name national carspon name robocs here with the latest on that and the sickness that till now had been confined to the high school to the girls that were seeing each other in the halls everyday it was about to jump the tracks good morning and is webinreporting more than a dozen girls at the Roy high school say they have an illness that causes of your ticks and verbal outburst now a 36 woman says she has those same symptoms！
next time on hysterical say youstill not groovy yourself in with that no because it was all teenagers and i was spark from a teenager someone was like do theres theres a newspan outside i took off so fast like is there really something bigger than we think going on here some people you know would go as fair to say theres a cover up！
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Marty markets had a share of problems troubles at work a failing relationship his parents had recently died and so marnie decided to get some professional help in the summer of nineteen eighty one he walked into the office of a psychiatrice name ike herscoff at the end of the first session he said im gonna take you one as a patient anything you know i dont do that with everybody but this therapist wasnt like other therapist he cut me off from everybody so the only person i could turn to was doctor ike and from the moment Marty started seeing him he began to change we didnt see him i mean he lived around the corner and like suddenly we didngo there anymore like he wasncoming over anymore its sifsomebody died it was obious it was obvised that i had the power and Marty followed the rules if Marty market had known what he was walking into and he first visited that office he probably would have walk right out the door and never come back this is a story about power control and turning to the wrong person for help for more than 29 years from Bluebergen wondering。
the company behind dirty John doctor dead and over my dead body im Joe Nosera ecolumis for Bloomberg opinion follow the shrinknext door on the wonderyouget podcasts you can binge all episode to the string next dooradd free exclusively on wonderplus join wanderyplus on the wonderpodcasts。
