IT IS an odd contradiction in human thought as we approach a new millennium, that while we're eager to accept the possibility that the mind can cure the body through means such as faith healing and mental imagery, we are loath to accept that the mind can also cause powerful physical symptoms.
There is such hostility to the idea that one of its proponents, Elaine Showalter, author of Hystories: Hysterica/ Epidemics And Modern Culture, sometimes requires bodyguards for her public appearances in the US.
Showalter is a historian of psychiatry, as well as professor of English at Princeton University and the author of nine highly regarded academic books encompassing various themes in women's literature, criticism and feminism.
Her argument is that there is a an interrelationship between the six "psychogenic syndromes" or "plagues" flourishing in late 20th century US culture chronic fatigue syndrome (known here as ME, or myalgic encephalitis); Gulf War syndrome; repressed memory of child sexual abuse; multiple personality disorder, satanic ritual abuse; and alien abduction. With the exception of Gulf War syndrome, between 70 and 90 per cent of sufferers in these epidemics are women.
Showalter's thesis is that these syndromes, which seem to be approaching a crescendo as we approach a new millennium, are actually "hysterical epidemics", part of a "hysterical hot zone" which has already produced millions of victims in the US. These would include a young female ME sufferer who committed suicide with the help of Dr Jack Kevorkian, and a Californian father whose adult daughter's therapist dug up false memories which led the woman to wrongly accuse her father of sexual abuse. He was later awarded half a million dollars in damages.
Meanwhile, in Oklahoma the bomber Timothy McVeigh has been claiming the US government planted a surveillance microchip in his buttocks during the Gulf War; and in Montana right wing militias claim a government conspiracy is altering the blood of US citizens as part of a conspiracy to create a new world order. And in their erosion of reason, the flood of these disorders may even be proving a huge throat to the social order.
The six psychogenic syndromes of the 1990s are linked and overlapping, Showalter argues: "Some doctors attribute Gulf War syndrome to chronic fatigue syndrome. Some, therapists regard anorexia and bulimia as symptoms of childhood sexual abuse that must be remembered in therapy. Recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse can lead to cases of multiple personality disorder and satanic ritual abuse. Traumatologists believe stories of alien abduction are screen memories for child sexual abuse, while urologists maintain that narratives of child sexual abuse often shield experiences of alien abduction. All these syndromes move toward suspicion, conspiracy theories, witchhunts and mass panics." ME sufferers may resent being pulled in under the same umbrella as paranoid conspiracy theorists, but it is worth hearing Showalter out. People with ME - the majority of them women - feel tired, achy and ill but apart from sporadic fevers and swollen lymph nodes have few clinical signs of disease. Compassionately, Showalter argues that sufferers of chronic fatigue syndrome are not imagining their symptoms.
THEIR symptoms are very real, even if they are created by the mind. The tragedy is that a handful of highly publicised medical authorities have encouraged sufferers to believe their symptoms are caused by some undiscovered medical cause.
"Patients with chronic fatigue live in a culture that still looks down on psychogenic illness, that does not recognise or respect its reality," Showalter writes. "The self esteem of the patient depends on having the physiological nature of the illness accepted. The culture forces people to, deny the psychological, circumstantial, or emotional sources of their symptoms and to insist they must be biological and beyond their control in order for them to view themselves as legitimately ill and entitled to the privileges of the sick role." Sensing that only a lab test will get them taken seriously, sufferers rush to practitioners who will document their illness.
Showalter says a hysterical plague needs three key elements to spread: a respected authority figure to endorse it; potential sufferers whose emotional needs are met or explained by defining themselves as victims of the plague; and an uncritical media willing to spread the word about the plague. The TV chat show, above all, is a virtual university of hysteria, showing vulnerable viewers by example how to become sufferers of a variety of syndromes, by parading sufferers only too willing to publicly demonstrate their symptoms.
To show how contagious this can be, Roseanne Barr, a highly successful comedian and powerful TV producer, developed multiple: personality disorder (MPD) and claimed to have been sexually abused as a child a charge her parents have strenuously denied. In the 1950s to 1970s, only a handful of cases of MPD - famously that of Sibyl, made into a film - existed. Today there are millions. "Multiple personality . . . has provided a new way to be an unhappy person and unhappiness is not just an American problem.
Certainly, we are not immune to psychogenic phenomena on this side of the Atlantic. In this country recently, we saw first hand how Showalter's theory works. A few weeks ago, three priests one an exorcist - appeared on The Late Late Show to talk about ghosts, spirits and exorcism. Within two weeks, RTE radio chat shows began following on a daily basis the experiences of a family in Co Gal way which told of being tormented by a poltergeist. The events were very real for this family and for the outsiders who also witnessed them.
For the first time in living memory, RTE news actually covered the events and reported that a psychic had been brought in to rid the house of the poltergeist. We have also seen moving statues, bleeding statues, stigmata and other occurrences here.
Showalter sees real danger here for society if we do not begin to understand why we are seeing such a rash of odd phenomena and unexplained diseases and if we do not begin to challenge the terrifyingly convincing "experts" who use the media to spread their hysterical beliefs. She challenges the reader to think differently about the word "hysteria" - which most of us associate with arrogant male doctors dismissing female maladies in the 19th and first - half of the 20th centuries when so much was explained away as "women's problems" hysteria having its root in the Greek word for uterus.
The "New Hysterians", as Showalter describes a growing body of scholars in the broad area of social history, philosophy and literary criticism, are taking a term long ago dismissed by physicians and psychiatrists and giving it a new lease of life. In Approaching Hysteria, Mark Micale, who teaches at Yale and the University of Manchester, writes that hysteria is "not a disease; rather, it is an alternative physical, verbal, and gestural language, an iconic social communication".
While she often uses other scholars to back up her own insights, it is Showalter herself who is the standard bearer. Her insights into feminism and its willingness to turn women into victims of mass plagues such as repressed memory of child abuse are certainly courageous. She outlines the work of therapists who admit to seeing themselves as collaborators in assisting female clients to discover within themselves narratives of abuse. She dares to suggest that some women's support groups and women's studies departments in universities have become hotbeds of increasingly assertive incest "survivors" who actually find comfort in being able to explain away disappointments in their professional and personal lives by defining themselves as incest victims.
A SIMILAR psychological process may be at work in alien abduction, an experience claimed by about one million Americans. Just watch the popular TV series The X Files for an update on the latest CIA conspiracy theories, the black men in black Cadillacs who follow abductees, the tiny implants in nasal cavities and so on. It becomes alarming when serious academics start taking it seriously too.
Showalter finds welcome sanity in the sceptical European reaction and quotes Irish novelist Anne Enright's comment in the London review of Books in the summer of 1985, when she said of the Irish: "We don't need aliens; we already have a race of higher beings who gaze deep into our, eyes and force us to have babies against our will. We call them priests.
There are millions of vulnerable people out there who, however, are unable to keep such a humorous perspective. Comparing the "current hysterical crucible" to the Salem witch trials, portrayed by Arthur Miller in the play and more recently the film version of The Crucible, Showalter warns that it may ultimately be to our cost that we have yet failed to understand the "human propensity for paranoia". "Hysteria is neither the sign of a higher consciousness nor the badge of a shameful weakness. Women still suffer from hysterical symptoms, not because we are essentially irrational or because we are all victims of abuse but because, like men, we are human beings who will convent feelings into symptoms when we are unable to speak when, for example, we feel overwhelmed by shame, guilt, or helplessness." Showalter believes that "if we begin to understand, accept, pity and forgive ourselves for the psychological dynamics of hysteria, perhaps we can begin to work together to avert the coming hysterical plague."