By Anastasia Aleiferi,
It was January 30th 1962, in an all-girls classroom in a village of Kashasha, Tanzania, when suddenly, after something was said among the girls, they started laughing. One by one and all the girls of the school started laughing and the laughter spread throughout the school. This contagious laughing seemed to last for a long time, and it spread to the village and to nearby villages. It was the beginning of ‘’the laughing plague’’, which might seem as a crazy, weird part of history, but it is a true fact and was a serious problem. The girls that were infected with the —let’s say— laughing sickness, couldn’t stop, no matter how hard they tried, couldn’t study or do anything besides laughing. No one understood what was wrong with them.
When the girls returned to their villages, the laughter continued, and it spread there and thus ‘’infecting’’ the people from their villages too. The laughter went on for days, even weeks and months and didn’t end for almost 1.5 years. In the end, almost 1.000 people were down with this plague. It wasn’t a laughing matter. Some people started to faint because of the laughter, some couldn’t breathe, some cried, some screamed, and some had problems controlling their body. This plague wasn’t something easy because the people couldn’t even enjoy laughing, since it was causing them pain and problems in their day to day lives. It is important to note that the people weren’t laughing uncontrollably for 1.5 years, that’s not possible. The laughing was more like laughing fits, that started without notice and couldn’t stop. The laughter, even though it would stop at some point, didn’t end, because they always relapsed, and that cycle went on again and again. Some laughing fits lasted for hours, while others seemed to be going for days without stopping, having some breaks for a few days and then coming back again. The first school where it started had to close, because teachers couldn’t work with children that couldn’t stop laughing. In total, 14 schools were infected.
But what was the cause of the illness of laughing that only infected a small area of Africa?
The short answer is hysteria, and when hysteria happens to a lot of people at the same time it is called mass hysteria or Mass Psychogenic Illness (MPI). MPI means that a lot of people come down with the same illness or condition without an external cause to be found. Those girls and the villagers hadn’t breathed in some toxin or gas that could cause the laughing, nor was such a thing found in their environment. This had to be a psychological source. Even today, there isn’t any conclusive evidence that can prove or find the source of the problem, there are only theories. The leading theory is that stress was the root of the problem. The area of Tanganyika, where these people lived, used to be under the rule of the United Kingdom and as the laughter had broken out, it got its independence from it. Before the laughter, the kids complained that they felt stressed from all the changes that were happening around them and being away from home. The school, where the laughter first appeared, used to be a Christian school and some experts say that when the girls were faced with the new values of that school, it was hard, given the fact that in their villages they were taught quite different traditional values.
Maybe the laughter came from the stress, or it may have come from some form of people coming together, cohesion in an unconscious way. In psychology, this type of cohesion is called conversion. Conversion is when some kind of anxiety is converted into something physical. That doesn’t have to be a mass thing. There have been some cases where anxiety can paralyze a person’s limb, rare but it can happen.
It should be noted that the laughing disease wasn’t the result of crowd theory, where people are hypnotized, and they show some type of behavior. People weren’t mimicking each other, they were sick. Some psychiatrists explained it this way: “The symptoms experienced are real (fainting, nausea, headaches, shaking, palpitation, fits) and are attributed to some biomedical condition, but none can be found”.
Some scientists also think that the laughing disease was the result of some virus found in the brain, because they thought it almost impossible that something purely psychological could last so long and could be so wide spread. This laughing case was special because it lasted so long, and it was so widespread. Another example of a similar case happened in a textual factory in the USA in 1962. Workers were working in the dress-making department, when suddenly 60 workers came down with a serious bug, that later was known as the “June Bug”. These workers started fainting, being dizzy, vomiting and some were sent to the hospital. It was again a mystery how so many people could get infected with the same virus so fast and so suddenly. The CDC got involved with the case and couldn’t find out the cause of it and the conclusion was that it was hysterical contagion, and it was the result of stress.
Historically, most cases of this have happened in schools. A psychologist, named Robert Bartholomew, wrote a book about it and concluded that schools that are religiously devout or very conservative are mostly infected. When students are told there are rigid rules, the students could become anxious, frustrated, mentally drained and powerless, and the hysteria can be the result of that. They can explode unexpectedly, and it can be contagious.
References
- The mystery of screaming schoolgirls in Malaysia. BBC. Available here
- The 1962 Laughter Epidemic of Tanganyika Was No Joke. Atlas Obscura. Available here
- The Many Theories Behind The Strange Tanganyika Laughter Epidemic. URBO. Available here
- 22 Phuket schoolkids in mass hysteria outbreak. The Phuket News. Available here
- Hysteria. The Straits Times. Available here
- Here’s What’s Causing Outbreaks of Mass Hysteria in Schools. Vice. Available here
- 5 Potential Health Benefits of Hypnotherapy. Everyday Health. Available here
