Last fall, something peculiar began to happen at more than two dozen elementary and middle schools scattered across the country. Suddenly, groups of children started breaking out with itchy red rashes that seemed to fade away when the children went home — and to pop up again when they returned to school. Frustratingly for the federal, state and county health officials who were working to explain this ailment, it did not conform to any known patterns of viral or bacterial illness.
The children had no other symptoms: no fever, no runny noses, no headaches or joint pain or respiratory complaints. Moreover, they were not passing their rashes on to parents or siblings outside school. Large groups (a dozen here, several dozen there) came down with it simultaneously, or within hours, rather than over the course of days or weeks, as you would expect with person-to-person transmission of a contagious illness. Then there was the nagging fact that in many of the outbreaks, girls accounted for a majority of the cases. Since neither germs nor the other likely culprit, environmental poisons, make a habit of discriminating by sex, this was puzzling news indeed.
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This year, rashes — or any unexplained physical symptom — made people nervous in a way they did not before 9/11. Or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe it was nervousness that helped create the unexplained symptoms. And maybe children were more likely to somaticize a lingering, inchoate anxiety about 9/11. Studies completed on New York schoolchildren this spring, for example, showed that months after the terrorist attacks, many of them still suffered from recurrent nightmares and trouble sleeping. Kids in other parts of the country surely experienced similar anxieties. And maybe, just maybe, this latent disquiet sometimes manifested itself in a curious, corporeal way — in the form of an itch.
NY Times Magazine
Apart from the question of a relationship to 9-11, the article raises fascinating issues about the status of the notion of ‘epidemic hysteria’ or ‘mass psychogenic illness’, difficult to accept but certainly real, with many documented outbreaks in the medical literature, which often affect the skin. (As any dermatologist will confirm, this organ is extremely psychologically sensitive.) It is both conceptually difficult to accept and considered pejorative by most of the public to suggest that a bodily reaction can be caused solely by, and be the sole observable manifestation of, one’s psychological state. More ‘loaded’ has been the political incorrectness of the concept of hysteria from a feminist perspective. The article suggests — and I agree — that there ought to be ways to accept both that this is “all in the head” and that a preponderence of those affected were female, without pejorative connotations.
