Mass Hysteria Throughout History

[Music] hey kids if you've ever been Black Friday shopping or visited the Diablo subreddit recently chances are you've encountered mass hysteria at some point mass hysteria is known medically as mass psychogenic illness or mpi for short it's basically just when a bunch of people start acting a fool for no discernible reason other than maybe a stressful environment being that this sort of thing is naturally very noticeable there's loads of documented cases found all throughout history let's take a look at a few this first one is what made me make this video in the first place so one day sometime in the Middle Ages a group of nuns in a French convent or enjoying a quiet uneventful day until one of them decided to start meowing you know like a cat you'd think this would last all of four seconds before another nun was like excuse me sister Gertrude would you kindly cut the [ __ ] but instead another nun joined in and another until basically the entire nunnery was exchanging mouths like a group of Communists trading card enthusiasts this wasn't just a one-time thing either it basically became integrated into their way of life it said that on a given day they would stand there meowing in each other's faces for hours at a time could you imagine being the first outsider to witness this you might laugh now but as they say everybody gangsta til the nun start meowing I'd void my bowels and moved to Malaysia without even thinking miles more terrifying than this pile of garbage as you can imagine though after a while it stopped being scary and just got annoying leading to the neighbors calling in a band of soldiers to deal with the situation hey guys can we talk to you for a second bout oh yeah that all due respect but we have orders to literally beat the hell out of you with whips till you start acting like people again sorry sir it's just force of habit ha ha have it seriously though we would rather go to hell for throttling a gaggle of nuns than put up with another minute of your [ __ ] caprese our next event took place in the parish of Fatima Portugal in the year 1917 it all started with three Shepherd children ages 10 9 and 7 respectively they were like greetings fellow Portuguese Yeats we've been seeing visions of the Virgin Mary and she told us to tell you that some real crazy shit's gonna go in the sky on October 13th now if three random farm children started spouting out prophecies to the public today you'd say huh what tomfoolery go play in some dirty dirty little dirt baby but keep in mind the past is a different country and Portugal is a different country so that's like different countries squirty got to think about Plus this was during World War one a time where a lot of people were holding out for a miracle to begin with so the kids story was actually picked up and even spread by local newspapers to the point where when the day finally came at least 30,000 people gathered in Fatima to witness the alleged miracle lo and behold on that day the Sun began zooming around careening towards Earth and sending rays of multicolored light cascading across the sky creating a light show like nobody's ever seen keep in mind this happened in the 20th century way after the era where belief in divine jiggery and/or Pokkiri was considered mandatory so naturally there are plenty of skeptics and non-believers present and even they saw it all happen or so they thought how do we know the Sun didn't really whiz around haphazardly that day hmm well number one use your freaking brain and number two accounts differed wildly from person to person while some say the Sun zigged hither others say it's zagged thither and other still said it shined a brilliant yellow and stayed perfectly still as such it was eventually concluded that the event was just a combination of MPI and weird eye stuff from too much Sun staring although I'd like to believe it was real just that Jesus's illusion skill was way higher than his alteration at the time yep that's it Sam's going to hell why for blasphemy trust me that was the least offensive part of that joke our next tale took place in 1962 in Tanganyika which is basically just the beta version of Tanzania the nation had just declared its independence from Britain the previous year and with the future so uncertain tensions were naturally running high around this time one little girl in atanga Nick in school ended up handling the stress in a bit of an unusual way rather than overeating or staring at her ceiling for hours like a normal person she just started laughing and laughing and laughing pretty soon her classmates at the all-girls school she attended began to join in to the point where 95 of the 159 students called the giggle ease which lasted anywhere from a few hours to 16 days straight beyond just the unprovoked cackling other odd behavior included aimless running and occasional violence the problem got so severe that the school was forced to close down temporarily leading to the chortles roaming the streets spreading the affliction further thousands of people from all strata came to be affected with 13 additional schools being shut down in the progress over the course of the hysteria several other symptoms began to present themselves as well ranging from obvious ones such as breathing problems fainting random screaming to more anomalous things like rashes despite all this no physical cause could be found leaving MPI is the only explanation the epidemic finally died down after between 6 and 18 months of day-in day-out laughter depending on the village while this whole thing likely sucked for most people involved it probably could have been worse a lot of the time when I'm alone I'll think to myself man if I ever go full schizo I hope I'm one of the laughy ones not one of the screamy ones with this story in mind just maybe if I put my mind to it and believe hard enough I can be both flashback to the year 1518 did the city of Strasbourg at the time part of the H re a woman named mrs. trophy began fervently dancing in the streets for no discernible reason for hours then days all without music of course her only breaks consisted of occasional food intake and passing out from exhaustion when night came if you saw that today you just be like huh drugs but apparently people found it pretty inspiring because within a week 34 others had joined in and after a month there around 400 this wasn't your casual bobbing up and down needed this [ __ ] made Zumba look like Tai Chi here's the best modern day simulation I could find [Music] now imagine that both of those people were the same person and you got the dancing plague this would take a toll in any healthy person let alone a medieval city dweller but despite bleeding feet and aching bones they just kept going in fact they went so hard for so long that a good portion straight-up [ __ ] died from cardiac arrest it got to the point where around 15 dancers were kicking the bucket every day before the city decided they had to do something about it they managed to rule out any divine or supernatural causes which was necessary just cuz young back in medieval times I was [ __ ] stupid they eventually surmised that it was a natural diseased caused by too much hot blood as per that whole four humors thing that was popular at the time as for a cure their prescription was get this more dancing I can see where they were coming from it's pretty sound logic if you got a song stuck in your head you play it till you're sick of it same kind of thing but here's where they goofed the authorities actually went out of their way to facilitate the dancing setting up a big stage area and even hiring musicians to keep the afflicted moving all this achieved was attracting more passerby who are like man mass psychogenic illness looks freaking epic let's get in on that causing the contagion to become even more widespread seeing that their solution backfired the city then went the other way and completely banned any public dancing those who still showed signs of the mania were subsequently carted off to the shrine of Saint Vitas where an exorcism like ritual was performed on them this ended up being highly effective presumably for no other reason than that the dancers believed it would work and after nearly two months the plague was quelled well this whole thing was most likely a case of good old-fashioned MPI some historians believe it might have been egged on in part by arrghh 'it is amassed ate of psychosis brought on by eating tainted bread which i talked a little bit about in this video ding and hey while i'm shilling for my channel i might as well give a shout-out to another as well today's video was sponsored by cheddar a network focused on producing fascinating content covering topics like technology products businesses and the like through the lens of innovation here's one about desire paths you know like those lines of dead grass from people taking more convenient rousu places it's one of those things that plenty of us have thought about but never actually explored in depth like this video chair is full of intriguing stuff like that I highly recommend giving them a look if you're more science oriented they still got you covered with their cheddar Explorer series the all about how he can be sure if his species is really extinct or not they talk a bit about animals we thought were gone that suddenly reappeared out of nowhere super interesting go check it out anyway that's all for today until next time I'm salmonella and thank you for watching [Music]

Channel: Sam O'Nella Academy

Views: 11,950,969

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Id: YXy3emGbxHg

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/frazuri]

Great fucking video, thanks for sharing it