How the State Spreads Mass Hysteria
https://mises.org/wire/how-state-spreads...01cce-228925724

Tags Media and CulturePolitical Theory



12/17/2020Philipp Bagus

The history of mass hysteria, or mass sociogenic illness is fascinating. Cases of mass hysteria have been documented since the Middle Ages. Let me just mention a few of the more recent cases.

When a radio play by Orson Welles, War of the Worlds, was broadcasted in 1938 shortly after the suspension of the Munich agreement, the play allegedly caused panic among listeners, who thought that they were under attack by Martians.
Another intriguing case is an episode of a Portuguese TV show called Strawberries with Sugar. In the episode, the characters were infected by a life-threatening virus. After the show, more than three hundred students reported similar symptoms as the ones experienced by the TV show characters such as rashes and difficulty breathing. Some schools even closed. The Portuguese National Institute for Medical Emergency concluded that the virus did not exist in reality and that the symptoms were caused by mass hysteria.

Similarly, on Emirates flight 203 in September 2018, dozens of passengers started to believe they were sick after observing other passengers with flu-like symptoms. As a consequence of the panic, the whole flight was quarantined. In the end only a few passengers had a common cold or the seasonal flu.

It is well known that there exist nocebo effects, which are the opposite of placebo effects. Due the placebo effect, a person recovers from an illness because she expects to do so. When we suffer a nocebo effect, on the other hand, we get ill just because we expect to become ill.1 In a self-fulfilling prophecy, the expectation can cause the symptoms. Anxiety and fear exacerbate this process.2

Mass hysteria can cause people to have symptoms. Moreover, hysteria, be it collective or not, makes people behave in ways that prudent persons not affected by the hysteria would likely consider absurd. It is open for empirical research to investigate if and to what extent the world has been suffering from mass hysteria during the covid-19 epidemic.3 We all have seen people hoarding toilet paper, wearing masks while driving alone in cars, or have heard stories of people virtually not leaving their houses for months. We also know people who are scared by the virus even though their own risk of death is minuscule.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

Scaring Ourselves to Death
Keith Gandal
https://www.aier.org/article/scaring-our...-to-death/?s=09
– December 7, 2020 Reading Time: 6 minutes

AIER >> Daily Economy >> Healthcare >> Government >> Crisis


As a child, I was hospitalized for a month with the “Hong Kong Flu.” The doctors couldn’t cure me; I was discharged still sick. They were surprised I recovered. From my early brush with illness, I developed a long-standing interest in why some people with possibly fatal illnesses die and others recover.

As an academic who’s studied the history of medicine, I’ve come to realize that my survival stemmed, in part, from the fact that I wasn’t panicked about dying. An early case of the 1968 flu, mine preceded the hysteria that came later, with epidemic and reported deaths. The doctors didn’t even have a name for the flu yet. Also, quarantine hadn’t yet begun: my mother could stay with me in the hospital; her company cushioned me from the terror patients often experience when isolated in unfamiliar surroundings.

There is progress on the roll out of COVID-19 vaccines, but, meanwhile, cases soar. Until we achieve herd immunity with vaccines, our best defenses against serious COVID-related illness and death are infection avoidance and, if we are infected, our disease-fighting immune systems. Public policy has focused on the former (masks, social distancing, lockdowns), and relatively little attention has been paid to natural immunities and what we can do to keep ours in fighting trim. Worse still, policy may well have worked, recklessly, to undermine immune health, and this has had lethal consequences, including particularly high mortality among African Americans, who have greater exposure to the virus.

Doctors know that many COVID-related fatalities are not caused by the virus itself, but by immune system overreaction, in which virus-fighting cells mistakenly attack healthy organs. This is commonly observed in mortality cases of healthy or younger patients. Doctors do not know what causes such overreactions. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

Two very good, explanatory articles.