All not well in the psyche of the baby gloomers

MEDICAL MATTERS:When a nation is under collective stress, it can lead to some odd occurrences writes MUIRIS HOUSTON

AS THE dire economic situation shows no sign of abating, much has been written of what it was like to live through the last major recession in the 1980s.

My memories are of going to college with little in the way of money and emerging in 1985 with a medical degree in even more impecunious circumstances. The health service was targeted for deep cut backs in my first few years as a junior hospital doctor.

Personally, the nadir was 1988 when the then Eastern Health Board said it would be unable to pay our wages as general practice trainees. Plans to emigrate were well advanced before the decision was reversed.

Although a difficult time for all concerned, it never felt quite like the precipitous drop of recent months. Not having had a recent boom seems to have made it easier for people to cope with psychologically.

But perhaps a sign that all was not well in the national psyche was the plethora of “moving statues” reported in the 1980s. Ballinspittle, Co Cork and other places drew huge crowds who firmly believed they could see Our Lady move at certain times of the day. Might this phenomenon have been a manifestation of collective psychological distress?

The notion may not be as far fetched as it sounds. Chronicles from medieval times describe several outbreaks of “compulsive dancing” in France, Germany and the Low countries. Writing recently in the Lancet, US medical historian John Waller describes episodes of unstoppable dancing in the streets in what seems to have been mass hysteria.

The largest recorded outbreak was in Strasbourg in 1518. Involving about 400 people, at one point the fevered dancing claimed the lives of some 15 people a day, such was the intensity of their dancing in high summer temperatures.

Perhaps dancing is too refined a description. Those afflicted writhed in pain, screamed for help and begged for mercy in a clearly involuntary act of mass movement.

Thanks to the records of the Renaissance physician, Paracelsus, we can be almost certain the victims of dancing epidemics were experiencing altered states of consciousness. In a trance state, they would have been far less aware of their physical exhaustion and the pain of swollen feet; compared to other possible causes, the extraordinary levels of endurance required to sustain days of dancing points to an involuntary trance.

According to Waller, the people of the Strasbourg area were experiencing acute stress in 1518, “after a succession of appalling harvests, the highest grain prices for over a generation, the advent of syphilis, and the recurrence of old killers such as leprosy and the plague”.

But why dance when you are miserable? Why did the afflicted not scream, riot or cry uncontrollably?

The answer can be gleaned from contemporary paintings and books. Those living in the Rhine and Moselle valleys shared a profound fear of river spirits with the capacity to inflict a dancing curse. And almost all outbreaks of dancing mania occurred in or close to cities affected by earlier dancing epidemics.

It seems that only where there was a pre-existing belief in a dancing curse could psychological distress be converted into an epidemic of dancing and writhing. When the extreme physical and mental stress of contagion and food shortages made people more than usually suggestible, it simply took the spark of one or two people, believing themselves to have been the subject of the curse, to slip into a spontaneous trance that spread like wildfire.

Pious fear both drove the epidemics and provided a solution. Once the victims prayed at certain shrines or were formally exorcised, the dancing outbreaks faded.

While a dancing epidemic seems unlikely in 21st century Ireland – unless de Valera’s vision of comely maidens at crossroads was to take root in vulnerable psyches – the extreme elements of a deep and prolonged economic recession could well produce some new expression of psychological distress.

Symptoms of mental illness are not fixed but can be modified by changing cultural circumstances. What price an outbreak of “bankers brain” or “social partner paralysis” in the coming months? Reader suggestions for alternative contemporary afflictions and their symptoms welcomed.

Dr Houston is pleased to hear from readers at mhouston@irishtimes.com, but regrets he is unable to reply to individual medical queries