Hysteria and the Teenage Girl
By CAITLIN FLANAGAN
NYT
LOS ANGELES
CHEERLEADERS with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week. I kept thinking I should take a minute to track down the Onion piece from which this kooky phrase surely emanated, but finally committed some desultory Googling, and discovered that the buzzing idea correlated (more or less) to an actual event. A break in the case — and the appearance of two of the girls in a television interview — brought the story to national attention.
One afternoon last October in a small town about 50 miles from Buffalo, a high school cheerleader lay down for a nap, and woke up changed. She had been struck not with Tourette’s but with a host of symptoms that resembled it: facial tics, uncontrollable movement, stuttering, verbal outbursts. Several other schoolmates have been afflicted, for a total of 14 girls. One boy reported symptoms.
Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event, and serially ruled out potential suspects, from vaccine reactions to environmental hazards. (Erin Brockovich is looking into possible toxic causes.) The girls continued to suffer, dropped out of school and gave television interviews in which their arms looped around wildly and their voices broke and warbled.
Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought, until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.
(More here.)
NYT
LOS ANGELES
CHEERLEADERS with Tourette’s syndrome. Like a fly buzzing against the window, this weird arrangement of words flitted across the edge of my consciousness last week. I kept thinking I should take a minute to track down the Onion piece from which this kooky phrase surely emanated, but finally committed some desultory Googling, and discovered that the buzzing idea correlated (more or less) to an actual event. A break in the case — and the appearance of two of the girls in a television interview — brought the story to national attention.
One afternoon last October in a small town about 50 miles from Buffalo, a high school cheerleader lay down for a nap, and woke up changed. She had been struck not with Tourette’s but with a host of symptoms that resembled it: facial tics, uncontrollable movement, stuttering, verbal outbursts. Several other schoolmates have been afflicted, for a total of 14 girls. One boy reported symptoms.
Parents, school officials and doctors investigated possible organic causes of this troubling event, and serially ruled out potential suspects, from vaccine reactions to environmental hazards. (Erin Brockovich is looking into possible toxic causes.) The girls continued to suffer, dropped out of school and gave television interviews in which their arms looped around wildly and their voices broke and warbled.
Well, that’s the kind of nutty story that only happens once, or so I briefly thought, until more focused Googling quickly led me to an almost identical episode, this one in 2002, in a high school in rural North Carolina. Once again, a cheerleader was first to manifest the strange symptoms, and once again other girls, some of them cheerleaders, were struck with the same condition.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home