Interview: The razor-thin line between contagion and connection | Dan Taberski

0:01This is Ted Health, a podcast from Ted, and I'm your host Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider. I've spent enough time in hospitals to know that not every mystery ends up with a diagnosis, and not every symptom fits neatly into a chart. That's where Dan Taberski comes in. You might know him as the sharp, funny mind behind some of the most unexpected podcasts out there, like Missing Richard Simmons and Running From Cops. His latest series, Hysterical, dives into one of the most perplexing medical stories in recent history. In 2011, in Leroy, New York, a group of girls began showing concerning symptoms, but no one could figure out why.

0:44What starts in a high school becomes a case study in stress, stigma, and the very real ways our bodies respond to the world around us. In his 2025 TED Talk, Dan draws on extensive research and intimate interviews with the people involved to explore the root of mass hysteria. and what it reveals about the line between illness and belonging. What happens when the very thing that makes us sick is also what connects us. Then stick around after the talk for my conversation with Dan, where we explore what happens when medicine runs up against emotion, and why telling better stories about health might be one of the most powerful tools we have.

1:28But first, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

1:36And now, Dan Taberski takes the TED stage. I make audio documentaries. And I recently spent some time in a town called Leroy, New York. It's a town about 50 miles outside of Buffalo. It's a small town. Its claim to fame is that it's the birthplace of Jell-O. There's a museum and everything. Anyway, in 2011, at the beginning of the school year, something strange happened in Leroy. A student at Leroy Jr. Senior High School, a cheerleader, she wakes up from a nap with a stutter, like a severe stammer, trouble speaking. And pretty soon that turns into head tics and facial twitches, and then blurting out sounds and words, symptoms that you'd associate with something like Tourette's syndrome.

2:22A couple weeks later, while she's dealing with that, another student at the school comes down with the same symptoms. Tics, spasms, barks. blurting out sounds and words. It happens from zero to 60 overnight, out of nowhere. Then it happens to another student. And then two more. This is Rose. Rose was in eighth grade at the time of the outbreak. At first, it was whispers. It was like, oh, it's this one girl. Like, we don't know what's going on. Like, blah, blah, blah. And the next thing I know, it's like doubling and tripling. And it's all these girls. Jessica was a senior at the time. And I remember thinking, like, were they making it up?

3:01Like, what is going on? People thought they were faking it. Yeah, everybody thought they might be faking it. And then my friend came to school the one day, and I was, like, at my locker, and she came up to me, and she was, like, stuttering super bad. I'm like, what are you doing? Like, stop fucking around. Like, why are you talking like that? She's like, I can't. She's, like, twitching. She's, like, crying at that point, like, just trying to get out her words. And I'm like, holy shit, this is real. Like, what happened? Within weeks, the case count hits double digits. All at the high school, all girls.

3:32An investigation begins. They test for Lyme disease. They test for heavy metals in the blood. Back at the school, they test for the water safety. They test for the air quality. They test for mold. And the only thing spreading faster than the contagion are the theories about what's causing it. I remember hearing at some point, since it was all girls, it must be a bad batch of tampons. The tampon theory does not pan out. In fact, none of them do. After a month-long investigation, the state and the school board and the doctors involved, they come up with what they think is the answer. The outbreak ripping through the high school is a mass psychogenic illness, otherwise known as mass hysteria.

4:19Emily was in eighth grade when she came down with the symptoms herself. This is what her doctor told her. She basically said, oh, well, it's all in your head, you're fine. How are you as a medical professional going to look your patient in the eye and be like, you're fine, stop thinking about it, you're fine, you're fine? And she should be skeptical, right? Especially because she's a woman. Even the word hysteria has its roots in the Greek for uterus. For centuries, doctors would blame the wandering womb for all sorts of problems that women were having with their bodies without really understanding what it was medically.

4:55Back in Leroy, this is how Jessica reacted to the diagnosis. I thought, that's bullshit. I don't believe that. Seeing all these girls, they're not making it up, and I just don't believe that that's a thing. After all of this, that's all it is? I just don't know how to believe that. I love that. I don't know how to believe that. Not just I don't believe that, I don't know how to believe it. Here's what I've come to believe. I think we all need to start learning how to believe in mass hysteria. Because while it is very rare, it is also very real. So say neurologists, psychoanalysts, sociologists, so says the NIH.

5:33And it's a very specific type of contagion that says a lot about how we're connected as people. Mass psychogenic illness is the rapid spread of real physical symptoms from one person to the other. But those symptoms don't seem to have any organic cause. So you've got a lymph, but your x-ray is normal. Or you've got neurological symptoms, but your MRI doesn't show anything. Medically, these symptoms shouldn't be happening. But then they begin to spread from person to person. But it's not random. The spread of the contagion tends to be a function of how connected the victims are to each other. So students at a small-town high school.

6:09Or workers on a factory floor. Or even nuns in a convent. In the Middle Ages, there were several cases reported in Europe in convents, including one extended case in France where a nun supposedly began meowing uncontrollably, only to have that symptom spread to the rest of the nuns in the convent. And then, of course, there's the witches of Salem, right? Perhaps the archtypical women being hysterical. Many now believe that that was a mass psychogenic illness. Why does it happen? again, there's usually some sort of underlying stress or trauma affecting the people involved. Like, for example, in the fall of 2001, when a mystery rash broke out in grade schools around the country, at least dozens and dozens of schools, hundreds of students affected.

6:57The rash would pass from student to student during the day in the school, but then often disappear when the kid went home at night. And then it would reappear the next day and begin spreading all over again. Tests showed no bacteria, no virus, no toxic exposure that would explain it. Turns out what may have been happening is that it was fear of toxic exposure that caused the contagion. In fact, the mystery rash began on the very day that the news reported that a man in Florida had been diagnosed with anthrax. Just weeks after they began appearing in envelopes after September 11th in people's mailboxes.

7:33Many epidemiologists now believe that the post-natalone rash was a mass psychogenic illness, a real physical expression of the collective anxiety those kids were feeling at the time. It's actually why I don't even care for the phrase mass psychogenic illness. It's more polite, perhaps, but it's mass hysteria that really gets the messiness of it. It's not just medical, it's not just psychological, it's social, it's cultural. It's about all of us. And it's not just women. You may have heard of Havana syndrome. That's the neurological medical mystery affecting foreign workers in the United States and in Canada.

8:09Many people believe that that is a mass psychogenic illness. And these things don't just happen anywhere. They tend to happen at the stress points in the culture. Or as one expert put it to me, they tend to happen in the fissures of society. I want to play you some more tape. These are all taken from police body cams of police officers in the field. In each instance, the police officer has just come into contact with the street drug fentanyl. I feel weird, man. Because he said he's floating and his legs are tingling. Yeah, yeah. My toes are tingling. He had fentanyl. He had fentanyl. You're good.

8:46You're good. She's breathing. Hey, stay with me. Okay. For an officer, possible exposure to fentanyl or something. I'm getting my, you got yours out? All right, relax. You may have seen or heard footage like this in the news. It pops up all the time. Local news loves it. It makes great tape. We were able to track 332 cases of accidental fentanyl poisoning among police officers in the field. Passing out, tingling, rapid heart rate, all just because of proximity to the drug fentanyl, sometimes even just knowing its presence on the scene. But of those 332 cases that we were able to track, The number of actual toxicology reports that showed fentanyl in those police officers' system at the time, as far as we can tell, one.

9:33At a state prison in Alaska. And even that one hasn't been independently confirmed. In fact, the American Society of Medical Toxicology says it is near impossible to overdose on fentanyl in this way. And yet it keeps happening. But it doesn't happen to doctors and nurses who handle fentanyl in hospital settings. It doesn't even really happen to fentanyl abusers, who are obviously handling the drug all the time. It's only in this one specific pre-existing social group. Police officers, male police officers, incidentally. A phenomenon that many people believe is a mass psychogenic illness. With a particularly modern twist.

10:11The thing about mass hysteria is that it's a line of sight thing, right? Part of the reason you get the symptoms is because you see somebody having the symptoms themselves. But with the advent of police body cams, Each psychogenic overdose also creates a video. And that video then gets seen by other police officers, which potentially creates more psychogenic overdoses, which creates more videos. You see the problem. Creating perhaps the perfect vector for spread. Back in Leroy, the outbreak there followed the pattern of many mass psychogenic illnesses. It came on strong, it wreaked havoc, and it faded away.

10:49Why there? It's impossible to say for sure, but we do now know that some of the girls were experiencing their own personal, private traumatic situations that may have contributed to their susceptibility. And of course, once mass hysteria sets in, it kind of brings its own stress and trauma. As does just being an American teenage girl today. Before it was over, 19 girls at the high school came down with symptoms. All of them somehow connected to the others. Several of them were on the soccer team together. several of them shared a very specific art class, and two of them were best friends. By the time summer break arrived, the symptoms were all but gone from the high school.

11:33Almost. Remember Rose? She was the one with the tampon theory. Rose never caught those Tourette's-like symptoms that ripped through the high school so severely, because Rose already had Tourette's. She has since she was three. I mean, I had always had very prominent tics from the time I was diagnosed. Like, I had facial twitches. I would go through spurts where I would be throwing things. I was always very loud. Like, I always have very loud vocal tics. You will always hear me. Everybody always knows who I am. Unfortunately for Rose, when people with tic disorders are around other people who tic, both people tend to tic more severely.

12:11So you can imagine, when 19 other girls are walking the halls ticking, Rose's tics got worse. Much, much worse. So I had a tic where I would punch myself right here in the face over and over and over. And your chin, that was your tic. My tic was literally to cold cock myself. I have permanent damage in my right eye because my other tic was to punch myself in the eye. I was literally beating the shit out of myself. Rose had a really difficult year, to say the least. But it was something she told me about her life now that struck me, about this idea of contagion and connection. So like I volunteer at Tourette's Syndrome Camp every summer, right?

12:51Yeah. And I love it. It is one of the best things I do with my life every year. It's so amazing. But we all tick so much more because we're all ticking. Does that feel good or bad? Oh, I love it.

13:06At Rose's Tourette's Camp, when the contagion comes on, they let it happen. They don't hold back. It is so worth every second of it because you are having the best time and you are around your people. And the other thing is there's something called tick shopping. That's the actual name for it. And you can pick up other people's ticks. They're literally sharing in their symptoms. They're passing them back and forth unconsciously. And even if just for one weird, humid, buggy weekend in the summer, they're able to revel in those symptoms and really appreciate the connection that it gives them. So I always have to take, like, the day after camp off because I'll come home with God knows what takes doing what.

13:49Like, it's the, but it's like the best feeling ever. It is the best feeling ever. The line between contagion and connection is a thin one. Sometimes it's hardly there at all. Thank you.

14:12That was Dan Taberski at the TED Conference in 2025 in Vancouver. Now I'm excited to share my interview with Dan about the making of hysterical and how the stories we tell about illness matter just as much as the data. Beyond a strange illness, we talk about how listening with empathy might be the most important diagnostic tool of all. Dan Taberski, welcome to TED Health. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Yeah. So as a filmmaker and a journalist, what drew you to the story of the girls in Leroy, New York? And did you realize at the time that you were stepping into something with such deep cultural and health implications?

14:53I mean, originally, I was interested in the idea of Havana syndrome. I was reading a lot about Havana syndrome and how people were coming down with this mystery illness and nobody sort of knew the cause. And a lot of people were suggesting or speculating that it was some sort of attack by a weapon from Russia that was infecting these people's minds. But people were very, very uncomfortable even countenancing the idea that it might be a mass psychogenic illness, that it might be what they used to call mass hysteria. And I just thought it was very interesting that people just didn't want to talk about that.

15:20So in the process of researching that, I came across what happened to the girls in Leroy, New York. I liked the combination there of taking one story of mass hysteria that's all girls, all young girls, the sort of traditional thing that women have been called hysterical for centuries, and then sort of pairing that with Havana syndrome, which is happening to mostly men. I just thought that was an interesting thing. Yeah. So, Dan, you've said that events like the story at the heart of hysterical tend to emerge during times of intense stress or pressure. Based on what you uncovered, how do stories like this reflect the emotional and psychological strain that people, especially young people, are living with today?

15:59For the most part, when a mass psychogenic illness happens, there's very often an underlying stress or trauma that's impacting the people who are experiencing the symptoms. Very often, it's something that everybody is sharing. It can also be something that's very private and that somebody is experiencing themselves personally. But when something like these symptoms and this contagion comes along, their stress or trauma sort of makes them more susceptible to it, for sure. I want to ask you about something you mentioned before about historical patterns. You mentioned Havana syndrome. Maybe you can share a little bit more about Havana syndrome for people who don't know.

16:33Havana syndrome is something that is impacting American foreign workers. It has been since about 2016. It involves symptoms like ringing the ears, neurological symptoms, nausea, vomiting, just general illness, vertigo, like neurological symptoms. And it began in Cuba and at the Cuban embassy when it was reopened in 2016. And there was a belief or a feeling that it may be coming from the Russians, which have a habit of harassing foreign workers in countries like Cuba. And as more people kept getting it, the contagion, the sort of theory of that it was a Russian weapon just grew and grew. And yet there's no evidence of it.

17:12It's just a theory. Nobody's been able to prove anything that has anything to do with some sort of weapon. It doesn't mean it's not, but I just think it's worth considering that it could be a mass psychogenic illness as well. Yeah. So there's also the fascinating case of the fentanyl panic in the series. And to me, this panic among police officers was one of the more startling points of hysterical. What do you think it says about fear and misinformation and the ability to shape the way our bodies respond, even when there's no actual physical threat? The story behind fentanyl overdoses among criminal justice workers, mostly police officers, is that when police officers are finding fentanyl on the scene, the existence of it on the scene is causing people to have an overdose reaction.

17:58Tingling, rapid heart rate, passing out. And it happens over and over to police officers and there's police body cams that show this happening. We were actually able to track 332 cases of police officers overdosing with just incidental contact to fentanyl. However, it's almost impossible to overdose that way. And so it begs the question, what are these police officers reacting to? And it raises the question of if it's part of the fear and stress of the fentanyl crisis right now that's helping create this sort of contagion among them. Yeah. So this made me think about who gets taken seriously when they say something is wrong.

18:34One of the most powerful threads in your series is how gender plays into these stories. You touched on that, especially in how symptoms in women and girls are often dismissed, misunderstood, and sometimes even mocked. What did you come to understand about how gender influences the way illness is perceived and talked about? I mean, well, that's the root of hysteria. Hysteria, the root of the word is Greek for uterus. For centuries, doctors or physicians or what they called physicians at the time would blame the wandering womb, like literally the womb wandering out of a woman's body that was causing all these medical problems.

19:06That's how they would explain things they basically didn't understand. I mean, hysteria has been targeted at women for centuries, and it's obviously still a huge problem in terms of being taken seriously in medical situations. I think what I came to understand is that there are ways of looking at how women tend to be more susceptible to mass psychogenic illness, which is a fact. It is true. Nobody knows why. That you look at it less as an issue of gender and more just as something that's happening to humans, and it just happens to be happening to mostly women at the time. And so that the women are actually standing in for the larger world and what impacts both women and men.

19:44So actually, what we were trying to do is look at it in a less gendered way and use the experiences of women, not just to helping explain the experiences of other women, but to use those experiences of those women to explain everybody's experience, if that makes any sense. For me, connected to this is how the health care system responds or sometimes doesn't. Many of the people that you spoke with felt brushed off or dismissed by the medical system when their symptoms didn't have these clear cut explanations. And what did their experiences teach you about the challenges that patients face? And how, as a storyteller, do you approach sharing these kinds of complex and often uncomfortable narratives with nuance and with the dignity they deserve?

20:23First of all, I'm a middle-aged man telling a story of teenage women. And so I don't have access to that interiority and to what the experience is that they were going through of being female and enduring what they were enduring. But I actually kind of liked that, treating them just as people who are having an experience and trying to figure out how their experience reflects what happens to the rest of us, not just women. The idea of not taking women's medical issues seriously or blaming them on some sort of unseen hysteria is still a problem for women when they go and just talk to doctors and feel like they're not quite being heard.

20:57Oh, absolutely. As you know, tons of data to support that, and especially for women of color. Sure. But I will also say that, you know, the doctors in Leroy, the main doctor was a woman. In general, it's hard to hear when somebody tells you that something you're experiencing is not just medical, that it also might be psychological or social. It's a hard thing to hear from a woman or a man. So, Dan, part of what makes this series so compelling to me is how it challenges the idea that the mind and body are separate. Through your reporting, how did you see that line blur? And why do you think we're still so uncomfortable with the idea that our minds and our bodies are deeply connected?

21:32Because you can't see what's going on in your mind. And that's really frustrating to have to take some things on. It feels a little bit more like faith when somebody tells you, like, some of this is happening in your head. And some of this is not just what's happening physically or organically in your body. It's a relationship between what you're thinking and what you're feeling and your unconscious and your body. And that's just it feels like magic. It's just a really hard thing to wrap your mind around. So I get why it's really challenging to sort of acknowledge it. I totally get that. And I do think some of the things that we believe originate in the mind then manifest right in the body.

22:05And so there's certainly that deep connection. But we're just, I think, scratching the surface in science and medicine of like exactly what that is. Yeah, for sure. For sure. And for the girls in Leroy, the mind-body connection seemed to ripple through the group. They weren't just dealing with a medical mystery. They were also navigating. You mentioned personal trauma and shared stress. What did you learn about how anxiety or emotional pain can spread within a group, not just within one person? I learned that it can spread within a group and not just one person. And that the sort of contagion of it, it's also helpful to see it as a form of connection because it doesn't just spread randomly.

22:43It spreads among people who are already in a preexisting social group. So you wouldn't just randomly catch it. You catch it because you sort of know the person and you see the symptoms and you're sort of internalizing yourself. It's complicated. It really is. Now, I'm curious, were there any other instances of this kind of mass anxiety or emotional pain that you uncovered or came to mind when you saw this playing out, either in your own life or, you know, in, I know we talked about Havana syndrome, but anything else? Yeah, I mean, big or small. I mean, there's, you know, even just smaller things like there was a mystery rash among grade schoolers in America.

23:18It was hundreds of cases over dozens of schools in I think at least 15 states. This is in the fall of 2001. There was a mystery rash and the kids would go to school. They would get this rash on their arms or face or legs and it would spread from student to student. But very often they would go home and the rash would disappear. And then they would go back to school and very often the rash would reappear and begin spreading all over again. They tested for the toxins. They tested the water. They tested for viruses, for bacteria, trying to figure out what would be causing this rash. And in fact, it sounds like many epidemiologists believe now that it was basically a fear of toxic exposure that they were worried about.

23:54And the first case of this mystery rash happened on the same day that the news announced a man in Florida had been diagnosed with anthrax because they had been showing up in mailboxes around the country as sort of terrorism a few weeks after 9-11. And so the belief is that these students were reacting to the sort of fear of the toxic exposure. And that was the sort of genesis of the mystery rash. So it's amazing in the big and small ways that psychogenic illness can really just pop up and just like break out. Wild. And with something so complex, it sounds like experts have had struggles trying to make sense of it.

24:35Were there moments in your reporting where even experts weren't quite sure what to make of what was happening? No one's ever quite sure, which is what's so interesting about it, because even when it's happening, it's really hard to make a diagnosis of mass psychogenic illness as it's happening. Because, first of all, you're diagnosing a group. So you're already reducing people to not just a person but to a group, and that can be dicey when you're diagnosing. But also everybody's experience is different. So some people do have comorbidities that can increase their chances of having these symptoms.

25:04or some people are having specific traumas that are making their susceptibility worse. And so it works as a diagnosis on a group and it works as a diagnosis in a whole. It gets more complicated when you get from person to person to look somebody in the face and say, what you're having is a mass psychogenic illness because you can never be sure. And not being sure is important because what you do need to make sure is that it's not something else organic that's happening that you're just ignoring because you say, oh, it's all in your head. Yes, this is a diagnosis of exclusion is what we call that in medicine.

25:32It's hard to make and it's not necessarily advised. to make it until it's almost over, until after the fact, so that you're not sort of reducing anybody's experience to just like it's all in your head. Did you as a journalist navigate that uncertainty without jumping to conclusions? Or like, how did that play out for you? I'm comfortable with just hearing what people think happened to them without me having to say that's right or wrong. All the people involved in what happened in Leroy has their own opinion about what it was. And not everybody thinks it was a mastogenetic illness, not by a long shot.

26:04But it's not for me to say that they're right or wrong. It's just when we're looking at from a 30 ,000 foot level to sort of acknowledge that it's among the possibilities and that it's not necessarily a bad thing. It's kind of a beautiful mystery. Once you can step away from the immediacy of the actual symptoms, like it's wild that we're so connected. So I want to zoom out a bit. As someone who works in media, how do you think storytelling can help reshape how we talk about complicated or misunderstood health experiences? I just think sitting down and talking to people with empathy and an open heart and an open mind to find out what they think happened to them and hear why, I feel like is enough of a reason.

26:42And I actually don't really go into it trying to sort of change this policy or make people think a certain way. I'm just trying to present the complexity that I think exists and have that be enough. I think no answer or a complicated answer is the most interesting answer. It's so cool how you are able to show up with so much curiosity. I try. I try. It's hard. I'm not looking for an answer. I'm not looking for somebody to tell me what their experience was and fill a hole that I've already carved out in my head for what I think happened to them. Like, if you really let people say what they experienced and like tell it to you as an experience and just say, what was that like?

27:19Like, people really will tell you a lot. And that's very often enough. And me having to make larger meaning and results out of it, I don't take that upon myself. I like when it happens, but it's not my responsibility. And finally, for our listeners who might be grappling with their own uncertainty or fear, hysterical is about so much more than one small town or one diagnosis. What do you hope people take away about how we respond to things we don't fully understand, especially when it comes to our health, fear, and the stories that we tell ourselves? In the process of talking about mass hysteria, there's a lot of different definitions for hysterical.

27:57But of course, my favorite one is hysterical laughter. It's the kind of hysterical that you see somebody laughing and you can't help but laugh yourself. And it's fun to think about, but it's uncontrollable. You are having a contagious experience, and that contagion is really a reflection of your connection to other people. And to just be able to sit in that and just be wowed by it, I think is part of the point. I love that. Good. I think it's so interesting. Just that I don't know what's happening, but we're connected, and it's a wild place to look at the world from. Yeah. Dan Tversky, thank you so much for this conversation.

28:36Thank you so much. Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

28:43That was my conversation with Dan Taberski at the TED conference in 2025. Dan's award-winning podcast, Hysterical, is available wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it for today's episode. Thank you so much for listening. TED Health is a podcast from TED, and I'd love to hear your thoughts about this episode. Send me a message on Instagram at ShoshanaMD. This episode was produced by me, Shoshana Ungerleiter, and Jess Shane. Edited by Alejandra Salazar and fact-checked by Vanessa Garcia-Woodworth. Special thanks to Maria Lages, Farrah Degrange, Daniela Balarezo, Constanza Gallardo, Tansika Sangmarniwang, and Roxanne Highlash.