The razor-thin line between contagion and connection | Dan Taberski (re-release)

0:00Where I live, October means pumpkins on porches and fake cobwebs stretched across just about every bush. My family has been planning their Halloween costumes for weeks. It's a holiday with ancient roots, and plenty of cultures around the world have their own traditions for honoring the dead and the mysterious. But whether or not you celebrate, it's a fun time to lean into the strange and the spooky. For October's TED Talks Daily playlist, we have gathered five haunting talks covering everything from grieving crows to zombie roaches. They might give you a few chills, but they're also full of weird, wonderful discoveries that remind us just how fascinating our world is.

0:38Happy listening.

0:43You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas and conversations to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hume. Today, we start with a fascinating story about a group of high school girls in Leroy, New York, who in 2011 all suddenly developed tics, like those present with Tourette's syndrome. In his talk, documentary podcaster Dan Taberski shares his findings after investigating this case for the award-winning podcast, Hysterical, exploring what this disorder reveals about the power of stress and trauma and why the notion of mass hysteria isn't just for the history books.

1:22It still happens. Please note that this episode contains mature language. That's coming up right after a short break.

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3:53And now, our TED Talk of the day.

3:56Dan Taberski: 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 Junior 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.

4:39Dan Taberski: A 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. And 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?

5:18Like, 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? And 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?

5:43Dan Taberski: Within weeks, the case count hits double digits. All at the high school, all girls. An 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.

6:28Dan Taberski: The outbreak ripping through the high school is a mass psychogenic illness, otherwise known as mass hysteria. Emily 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, 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.

7:12Dan Taberski: Back in Leroy, this is how Jessica reacted to the diagnosis. I thought, that's bullshit. I don't believe that. Seeing all these girls, like, they're not making it up, and, like, I just don't believe that that's the thing. Like, after all of this, that's all it is. Like, 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.

7:50Dan Taberski: And 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.

8:26Dan Taberski: Or 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? 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.

9:14Dan Taberski: The 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.

9:50Dan Taberski: many epidemiologists now believe that the post-natalulin 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 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.

10:26Dan Taberski: Many 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. He said he's floating, his legs are tangled. Yeah, yeah, my toes are tangled. He had fentanyl! He had fentanyl! You're good, you're good.

11:04You're good for me. She's breathing. Hey, stay with me. Okay, it's for an officer, possible exposure to fentanyl or something.

11:11Dan Taberski: 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.

11:50Dan Taberski: At 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.

12:28Dan Taberski: The thing about mass hysteria is that it's a line-of-sight thing, right? Like, 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.

13:06Dan Taberski: Why 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.

13:50Dan Taberski: Almost. 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.

14:29Dan Taberski: So you can imagine, when 19 other girls are walking the halls ticcing, 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 like I And your chin, that was your tic My tic was literally to like 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.

15:07Wow. Yeah, 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.

15:18Dan Taberski: Does that feel good or bad? Oh, I love it.

15:23Dan Taberski: At 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.

16:06Like, it's the... But it's, like, the best feeling ever. It is the best feeling ever.

16:13Dan Taberski: The line between contagion and connection is a thin one. Sometimes it's hardly there at all. Thank you. Thank you.

16:27That was Dan Taberski at TED 2025. His talk was originally published in June of 2025. If you are curious about TED's curation, please visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Aspen Fitzgerald Dorsey, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Shu Han Hu, Debbie Rolfe, Emma Taubner, Connor Titsworth, Tonsika Sungmar Nivong, and Hannah Yu. Additional support from Isabella Aslarona, Daniela Balarezo, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Christopher Faze Bogan, Cinnamon Horn, Lainey Lott, Matthew Polis, and Yadi Vasquez.

17:16Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. Thanks for listening.

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