What is the difference between panic and mass hysteria

There is no real explanation for why they occur, it "just happens. People can start to have real symptoms just from stories they hear.

For example, in the year in New Delhi, the capital of India a "monkey man" stalked people who were sleeping on rooftops during the hot summer. Fear struck the capital. People would wake up screaming that the monkey man was after them, and some people jumped off two stories to escape him.

There never really was an ape-like killer. Mass hysteria is a phrase that is used so often and so imprecisely to refer to anything from giving in to fashion fads to participating in riots and raves that it has become something of a fluid concept, synonymous with anything with a negative connotation that involves the participation of a large group of people.

However, though sometimes contested as a useful, valid concept, mass hysteria — in its more restrictive sense — lives at the intersection of psychology and sociology. Physiological symptoms, however, are often not illusory but very much real.

Because mass hysteria, or collective obsessional behavior, can take so many different forms, it is very difficult to provide a clear definition for it, or to characterize it with confidence. In a seminal article he published on this topic, Prof. Still, he suggests that in characterizing a phenomenon as an instance of mass hysteria, we should aim to guide ourselves by five principles:.

In his article, Prof. The first kind, he says, is marked by physiological symptoms consistent with those experienced in the case of anxiety. These can include: abdominal pain, chest tightness, dizziness, fainting, headaches , hyperventilation, nausea, and heart palpitations. His research seems to indicate one thing: that instances of mass hysteria are most prominently experienced by groups of women. But why would that be the case?

Physical symptoms of disease could provide a nonconfrontational way out of an overwhelming situation. Bartholomew notes, for example, that in a stressful or even abusive work context, mass hysteria and its accompanying symptoms can provide a means of putting up resistance and forging a way out. As a consequence of this, any claims that mass hysteria could be a phenomenon that applies most prominently to women becomes questionable, especially considering the heterogeneous nature of such events and how difficult it is to categorize them.

Though occurrences of mass hysteria have been documented throughout history, they do not seem to have become less common with the passage of time and the advent of technology that supports the rapid flux of information. A number of intriguing events involving collective experiences of psychological and physiological symptoms have been referred to as instances of mass hysteria over the past 50 years or so. And some of the most recent occurrences have even been tied to the perils of social media.

In , in a village in Tanganyika — now Tanzania — a girl at a boarding school suddenly started laughing…and was unable to stop.

Upon sending all the girls home, the epidemic spread to the wider community, and it only began to fade after 2 years from the start of the outbreak. Notoriously, in Singapore in , hundreds of men became convinced that eating pork meat taken from a series of vaccinated pigs would lead to penis shrinkage or disappearance, and potentially death. In autumn , children in elementary and middle schools across the United States experienced a strange symptom: their skin would break out in rashes, but only while they were in school.

Szanto T. Collaborative irrationality, akrasia, and groupthink: Social disruptions of emotion regulation. Front Psychol. Boss LP. Epidemic hysteria: A review of the published literature. Epidemiol Rev. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data.

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