Mass Hysteria in Schools

After learning about a couple of instances of mass hysteria in school, I began looking into more cases. One commonality I found was that most of the reported cases in the past two decades took place in schools, more specifically, high schools. In 2002 at a high school in North Carolina, ten girls had seizures and other symptoms that all occurred around noon. In 2007 at a high school in Vinton, Virginia, nine girls had symptoms like twitching and dizziness. In 2010 at two high schools in Brunei, many girls were said to have been possessed and showed symptoms like shaking, screaming, and fainting. A similarity among the affected individuals was that they are all teenage girls. In all cases, doctors, researchers, and local health departments were only able to come up with possible causes without any concrete evidence. Many theories exist but the most plausible one seems to be stress and anxiety. In a school setting, stress may come from the pressure to maintain good grades, parents' expectations, and peers' opinions. With no way to release their stress or resolve any problems within the school, it is theorized that the strain on their mental health manifested itself in physical symptoms like twitching and fainting. However, recent updates on a few of the mass hysteria cases provide actual diagnoses. For the girls in Brunei, they were thought to have a histrionic personality disorder. Although some incidents have provided with answers, most health professionals agree that the stress caused the first appearance of symptoms and mass hysteria caused the spread of those symptoms.