Mass panics
Fortean Times never fails to provide me with something to think about, but rarely as much as the assertion that mass panics like Havana syndrome and transdermal fentanyl overdoses have become “endemic and long term” [FT430:7].
I’d previously assumed that the difference between mass psychogenic illnesses and more conventional illnesses is that the former fade away. There are mental disorders that produce a feeling of being stalked or threatened; there are also many instances of communities suddenly becoming fearful of a phantom attacker. The difference is that the former conditions may require a lifetime of treatment and medication, whereas victims of the ‘Halifax Slasher’ and others returned to their ordinary life once the panic subsided.
The idea that a mass panic could become endemic seems to me to be a challenge to our ideas of mental illness and mass panics. How long would something like Havana syndrome have to persist before it stops being a mass panic and starts to be considered a mental illness? Conversely, how many things we think of as mental illness were originally mass panics that escaped into the wild, as it were?
Graham Williamson
Middlesbrough, North Yorkshire
Community building
The detail that the 2011 Mothman reports came from one address, added to the news that the entire Mexican community is providing reports [FT429:42-47] suggests to me that the entire thing is an exercise in community-building. Remember that Chicago gave the USA a community organiser as President. Persons in that community might have been inspired by his success at getting elected. It could be that the first burst of reports is the starting point of an attempt to build a Spanish-speaking community even though a percentage of them are in the USA illegally. They would be acting as a single entity. As a coherent society, they would be a political power locally.
Or maybe I’ve been an American too long.
Michael Holt
By email
