Mass Hysteria!

In psychology and sociology, mass hysteria also known as collective hysteria, group foreboding, or collective obsessional behavior is a phenomenon that transmits collective illusions of threats, whether real or imaginary, causing rumors and fear (memory acknowledgment) in society. The medical term illustrates the spontaneous manifestation (production in chemicals in the body) of the similar hysterical physical symptoms by more than one person. A common kind of mass hysteria occurs each and every time a group of men or women believes or imagine that they may be suffering from a similar disease, condition, disorder or health problem. Mass psychogenic illness or epidemic hysteria affects groups of persons, indicated by excitement, stress, panic, anxiousness, irrational behavior, values philosophy morals, or inexplicable indications of illness.

Several reasons for mass mania or mass delusions:

• Uncertainty and fear of the mystery
• Humans fear the unknown and they do their best to make everything expected. When humans fail to understand something, they are generally scared. This kind of fear can motivate them to leap to irrational conclusions to calm themselves. Studies have shown that at the times of great uncertainty mass foreboding is more likely to take place.
• Excessive stress
• When a person is subjected to excessive stress he is more likely to make irrational conclusions about things or get delusional. Humans are smart but their thoughts often prevents them from using the minds properly.
• Reception to suggestions
• Human brain is very receptive to suggestions. Found in a single case of mass hysteria children in a school developed the symptoms of a no disease right after a popular kid at college, institution, university developed those symptoms. Whenever this occurs the powerful ideas were absorbed by the minds of people, kids and because of this, they believed they got infected by that disease.
• Panic causes irrational thinking
• When humans experience panic they have a tendency to think irrationally. With the effect of panic a suggestion can certainly skip to the subconscious mind and turn into a perception.
• Attention seeking
• Sometimes people experience mass hysteria to draw focus or awareness of their conditions.
• India’s history of mass hysteria – monkey man to braid cutting

Forty-five-year-old kamlesh, who lives in delhi-ncr in gurgaon, became a victim of mass hysteria. Her brother, who stays in rewari where similar cases had taken place, had discussed this with her.

Several cases of mysterious braid chopping have been reported recently in from rewari, mahendergarh and mewat. It became an “epidemic” which was caused by mass foreboding. The far-flung parts of the location metropolis and surrounding areas were affected.

Some bizarre instances in india, which till date remain unexplained:

• Monkey man or kala bandar
• The “sweet water” on mahim creek
• The “muhnochwa” scare
• Ganesha’s milk miracle

Such incidents happen in india often, such as the black monkey, the statue of lord ganesh drinking milk in uttar pradesh, sweet water in mumbai and vampire sucking blood in tamil nadu. People in india easily affected because they were shown fear of superstition from childhood with statements like – if you did not do this work then god would be angry, feeding will make god happy. Never worrying about the fear of the people, there is no awareness among the people in this area.

Another example in which god krishna cursed a person named ashwathama in mahabharata. Even after 5000 years people have claimed that they have seen ashwathama, and anyone who looks at him, either goes crazy or paralyzed. Thus there is a fear of ashwathama in the entire village.

Similarly, there is story of the fort bhangarh. After 5 o’clock, there is no one is permitted to stay there, as the ghost comes after 5 o’clock. Therefore, there is reason to close because of fear, but some of my friends have claimed that they stopped and nothing else appeared.

The problem of braid cutting in the cities of uttar pradesh, haryana, delhi, gurgaon has been reported in signioficant number, but are mostly from the illiterate areas. No such case are reported from educated society of delhi or uttar pradesh. The braid cutting phenomena is a superstition, which spreads like an epidemic.

All this happens because of superstition and illiteracy. People easily believe because they do not have the ability to think, understand and rationalize. As there was an incident of appearing the black monkey in delhi, that incident also happened in the village, the person who was nervous, had trouble in the village, the incident of sweet water in mumbai was also in the village.

The only remedy is to improve education standards and making people aware of the facts.