Responding to Mass Psychogenic Illness

Abstract

In this issue of the Journal, Jones and colleagues report on an episode of mass psychogenic illness that had a devastating impact on a high school in McMinnville, Tennessee.¹ They provide an elegant description of the outbreak. Such outbreaks, unfortunately, are not novel. In 1787, St. Clare ended a similar epidemic among mill workers in Lancashire, England, by declaring the episode “merely nervous, easily cured and not introduced by the cotton.”² Since then, there have been many reports in the medical literature of similar outbreaks, most often in closely congregated groups in enclosed settings, such as schools, factories, hospitals, and . . .