Analysing Historical Mass Psychogenic Epidemics & Gender Dysphoria

The problem with all this is doctors look at teenage girls and think anxiety/social contagion/hysteria when it can be a neurological disorder or endocrine disorder. If a middle age man goes to the doctor they sit up and take notice. A girl however is dismissed. Several doctors thought Dd was ‘just anxious’ when she was actually having seizures. It was very stressful for her to be not believed by professionals, and dangerous.

If she’s starting many paragraphs with a “so” it’s unlikely she’s reading from a script and what you’ve read must be a transcript of what she said I.e. created automatically post hoc. The high rising terminal is an unfortunate modern tic, probably caused in this case by nerves and lack of practise

It is interesting, isn't.

I wonder if it is all humans or if it hits certain types of people, or ordinary people in extraordinary times, materially or emotionally.

As a teen, when trying to find myself, I would worry that I could be this or that, picked up from a headline, overheard in conversation and so on.

In so doing I had many secret fears and worries.

Gradually each one was exposed for what it was and 17/18 I was more formed and had found some humour!

I’m fascinated by the fact that he says the emerging version of MPD flew in the face of everything that had gone before in psychiatry.

I’ve heard the same words used about the change from psychiatrists never agreeing with patients with false beliefs or delusions to them affirming the false beliefs of those who feel they are the opposite sex.

Thanks to the OP and PPs for links to Mia's talks - I ams looking forward to watching them!

This is another very good one:

2010 lecture by Paul McHugh (who closed the transsexual clinic at John Hopkins) ends his timeline with the fad for "Multiple Personality Disorders" (Dissociative Identity Syndrome). Now we know what came next:

"Abuses of the Public by Psychiatry"
(should starts where McHugh begins his presentation, omitting lengthy introduction)

Thankfully for our understanding of human nature, Milgram's experiments do not show quite what he claimed.

Behind the Shock Machine
The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments
Gina Perry 2013
The true story—and revealing legacy—of the controversial experiments on obedience to authority figures, based on previously unpublished material.
https://thenewpress.com/books/behind-shock-machine

"“There may be no studies of the twentieth century more haunting—or more revealing of human beings at their best and worst—than Stanley Milgram’s work. And here, finally, is a book that illuminates Milgram and his research subjects in riveting, compassionate detail.” —Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park

When social psychologist Stanley Milgram invited volunteers to take part in an experiment at Yale in the summer of 1961, none of the participants could have foreseen the worldwide sensation the results would cause. Milgram reported that fully 65 percent of the volunteers had repeatedly administered electric shocks of increasing strength to a man they believed to be in severe pain, even suffering from a life-threatening heart condition, simply because an authority figure had told them to do so. Such behavior was linked to atrocities committed by ordinary people under the Nazi regime and immediately gripped the public imagination. The experiments remain a source of controversy and fascination more than fifty years later.

In Behind the Shock Machine, author and psychologist Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of these flawed experiments and their startling, long-lasting repercussions. Interviewing the original participants—many of whom remain haunted to this day about what they did—and delving deep into Milgram’s personal archive, she pieces together a more complex and much more troubling picture of these experiments than was originally presented by Milgram. Uncovering the details of the experiments leads her to question the validity of that 65 percent statistic and the claims that it revealed something essential about human nature. Fleshed out with dramatic transcripts of the tests, the book puts a human face on the unwitting people who confronted the moral test of the shock machine and offers a gripping, unforgettable tale of one man’s ambition and an experiment that defined a generation."

Social psychology textbooks ignore all modern criticisms of Milgram’s "obedience experiments"
The usual, disturbing interpretation is that Milgram showed how readily most people will harm others if they are told to do so by authority.
BPS Journal - 13 October 2015
https://www.bps.org.uk/research-digest/social-psychology-textbooks-ignore-all-modern-criticisms-milgrams-obedience

Why (almost) everything you know about Milgram is wrong
Ella Rhodes reports from a Stephen Reicher keynote at the Society's Annual Conference in Nottingham.
BPS Journal - 15 May 2018
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/why-almost-everything-you-know-about-milgram-wrong

"Standing in front of a keen psychology audience, Stephen Reicher (University of St Andrews) said he felt like he was at a primary school to tell children why Santa wasn't real. But, in fact, his and Alexander Haslam's extensive research on the 60s researcher Stanley Milgram has only made the man, and his electric shock box, ever-more interesting.

Milgram's 1961 experiments into obedience set out to answer a question that we've been asking for centuries – what makes normal individuals do monstrous things? Milgram's participants were told the experiments were a study of punishment and its effects on learning – they acted as 'teachers' giving electric shocks to 'learners' when they misremembered the second word from a list of word pairs.

Participants were in a separate room to the learners – who, in reality, were confederates of Milgram and received no shocks – but could overhear their shouts of pain as the shocks increased in power. These sessions were overseen by a white-coated experimenter who would coax any struggling participants to continue with the experiment.

Prior to this work Milgram asked colleagues how many people would give a shock of 300 volts or more, and many said only true psychopaths would do so. But in his first baseline study of 40 people, 26 went all the way to 450 volts and beyond – in other words two out of three people would kill someone for making an error in a learning experiment.

From this work Milgram developed a theory that, during obedience, people adopt an agentic state seeing themselves as instruments to carry out the will of another and feel little or no responsibility for their actions. However – and it's a rather big however – there are some key elements from Milgram's studies which undermine the theories he developed from them.

First, while his baseline study would back up the agentic state theory he actually did around 30 studies and obedience varied between 0 and 100 per cent… overall 58 per cent of people actually disobeyed the pushy experimenter. How can we understand this variability, Reicher asked, if the agentic state is true?

Second, when we consider the goings-on during the actual experiment and look at the experimenter's four prods to encourage participants to continue, they reveal that people really do not like following orders. The four prods used were: 'please continue', 'the experiment requires you to continue', 'It's essential you continue' and 'you have no other choice – you must go on'. Reicher pointed out that only the final one of these phrases is a direct order, and in fact none of Milgram's participants continued with the study after hearing this order. As Reicher said – Milgram's own research here is emphatically not showing that people have a tendency to obey orders.

Finally, Milgram's work did not account for the role of participants hearing the learner's voice shouting in pain. While agentic state theory would suggest we are bound into the voice of the experimenter, deferentially following orders, this is not revealed in Milgram's own archived materials – Reicher and Haslam found 40 per cent of participants dropped out when the learner spoke for the first time and mentioned the pain he was in.

All of this flies in the face of the overriding narrative Milgram established after his experiments of obedient people in agentic states blindly following orders. While his findings are in no way artificial, Reicher said, he could have reached the conclusion that people aren't programmed to take orders but rather make choices over which 'voice' to listen to in a given situation, which can vary depending on an individual's relative identification.

Find much more about Milgram and his studies in our archive, including this from Reicher and Haslam, and an exploration of rhetoric and resistance in the studies.

--

Note that Ella Rhodes does not report Stephen Reicher giving credit to Gina Perry's 2013 book. I do not know whether this is true or not but the blurb for her book does say, "In Behind the Shock Machine, author and psychologist Gina Perry unearths for the first time the full story of these flawed experiments and their startling, long-lasting repercussions."

Listened to a really good podcast series recently about one of the schools that experienced a number of students who developed tics in 2011. What I found most interesting was that there was a student there with tourettes who had tics before everyone else started devleoping them and shes the only one this many years on who still tics.

https://open.spotify.com/show/3AolMVaJgKVScNIsmoMkB4
https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/hysterical/id1753789609

In my experience, there are a heck of a lot of people with psychology degrees who I would never want to see practicing.

One woman I've known for years who was in fact working in gender medicine. We were in a book group together.

A nice lady, desperate to be a good person. I'm not sure I've ever met anyone with poorer insight though - discussing books gives you a window into people's thinking, and she massively and regularly misunderstood what was going on in stories. She was also very uncomfortable when people in the group expressed ideas that were the wrong" sorts of ideas - she couldn't seem to understand how nice people could think wrong things.

A very anxious person.

I don't like to tar everyone with the same brush, but I've met enough people like this to believe it's no bar to practicing psychiatry.

I'd suggest that the Milgram experiments illustrate this beautifully, even if they're dated, and I often wonder if we'd get the same results today (not that the second one would ever get past an ethics panel, now).

First, there's the one where he walks onto a subway train and just goes up to random people and asks, "May I take your seat?" and they just get up and let him sit down.

Then there was the more well-known one, which I'll detail for anyone who doesn't know. In this experiment, people believed they were "punishing" another participant (who was really an actor) in the experiment by pressing a button that apparently (but not really) gave an actor an electric shock when they gave a wrong answer to something. When encouraged by the "researcher", the participant with the button pressed it up to 400V, even when the actor screamed, and even after the actor stopped responding.

This has often been used to explain just how Nazis were en-masse participants in war crimes, but it can also explain low-level "following" of very dubious "leaders" such as "thought leaders" and "influencers" (and MLM hunbots). There are so many of these on places like TikTok and Twitter who are peddling the trans narrative.

People's deference to authority and belief in authority are powerful and dangerous things. This is what organisations like Stonewall and Mermaids are exploiting. They put themselves in a position of authority, they get lots of "big names" behind them (like the Civil Service... it doesn't get much more authoritative than that) and then they push their agenda from a platform of power. People might not recognise them, but they'll recognise who they are associated with and that authority then extends to Stonewall/Mermaids, giving them a false aura of legitimacy.

As women have pushed back and gained legitimacy with their own associations with "authority figures" such as JKR, they have gained ground. I think it helps that for a lot of people, the GC movement sense-checks/confirms what they already thought, and unearths those little niggles they had in the back of their mind about the official-sounding false narrative that keeps being pushed on them.

I used to work in a psychiatric hospital and it was common knowledge that if a mental health disorder was prominently featured on say, Eastenders, we would soon have patients absolutely convinced they had it. So yes, humans are very suggestible!

I listened to the lecture and found it fascinating. I think she is a clear and compelling speaker. Perhaps a little too colloquial at times, but she is speaking as a guest lecturer so it probably doesn't matter.

I was interested the part about fugue - which struck me as being somewhat similar to the earlier phenomenon of St Vitus Dance - but the part that most struck me was the account of the symptoms of hysteria being described in medical journals, then the symptoms appearing in other women as the journals gradually circulated throughout Europe.

Then there's religion! Look at the Toronto Blessing - very peculiar how it 'spread' from place to place as people learned what was happening, rather than appearing everywhere at the same time as you might expect God to operate!

There's always some form of advantage for those who experience it - attention (hysteria), freedom (fugue), exhilaration (St Vitus Dance).

Perhaps we just need to accept that human beings are highly suggestible and be ready for the next contagion to come along, so that we can hopefully counter it?

There's a direct conflict between the well-observed phenomenon of mass psychogenic illness and some of the basic principles of Western (esp. US and UK) Liberal Democracy, and this is particularly true for those who class themselves as "progressive".

1. Liberalism / Libertarianism - the moral principle that the State should have a limited influence over the private life of the individual.
2. The rational consumer - the economics idea that an individual will make rational choices to act in their own best interests.
3. Listening to the voices of victims - the progressive principle that anyone who believes they are a victim of oppression must be treated as though they have a legitimate grievance, that their wishes reflect what is best for them, and that they should always be treated as a truthful and reliable witnesses of their own experience.

The idea that individuals are not always (often?) rational, do not always have legitimate grievances and sometimes need protecting from making bad choices; or that they may be manipulating other people and exploiting liberal, progressive ideals; or that they may not be able to behave as individuals in certain situations, is hard for many people in our type of society to accept, at least in public. Or if they do accept it, they see the price being paid by some people (or groups of people) as a necessary evil.

The same sort of conflict is seen with smoking bans, where liberal progressives who theoretically oppose the systematic exploitation of people by Big Business will oppose any State intervention that reduces smoking by limiting freedoms (i.e. ban on smoking in pub gardens, total ban on smoking starting from 16 and rolling up). To them, the fact that many hundreds of thousands of poor people are spending all their available money on cigarettes, living for many years in very poor health and then dying early, and by doing so feather the beds of wealthy shareholders, is a necessary sacrifice to oppose an authoritarian "slippery slope" that will inevitably lead us to a fascist state (or so they believe).

And doctors and psychiatrists who feel they are toiling in obscurity can ride the wave of the epidemic to public recognition. One of the American doctors who was part of the multiple personality craze is also a huge part of the current gender identity epidemic.
I think this needs repeating. Some clinicians seem to be hanging onto the latest craze to get relevance and clients. I think they don't know how to get clients without doing this, and it raises serious doubts about their competency.

About 15 years ago there was a small craze amongst teens for "Otherkin" and as far as I understand it, it was basically telling young people that they were actually mythical creatures. The descriptors of the mythical creatures were just Barnum statements aimed at young people who wished they were something else. It wasn't medicalised but it definitely was toxic AF.

The "identifying as a cat/man/woman" in young people seems very closely linked to this same need that young people have, where they feel like they don't "fit in" and they want to be something other than who they are instead of coming to terms with who they are. And then a group centred around a "thing" comes along that they identify with and they feel like they're not on the outside anymore. Unfortunately, anything medicalised is absolutely not harmless.

This is probably old news to spell it all out but I'm not sure.

She may not be using the word sexism as I've just seen that term being included in woke academic backlash. She may be deliberately avoiding it. Who knows.

But the tv media of the early 2010s, Disney cartoons, dress, clothes etc, was extremely sexist.

The 1990s and 80s allowed for more gender non conformity in my experience.

I've watched all of it bar some of the last q and a. I found it extremely interesting and informative.

The central idea of a mental health crisis that leads to re invention of a person (or sometimes invention - many who succumb to all the things she describe appear to be those who are averagely normal) is really stark and pulls a lot of it together.

What is perhaps different with trans, that she didn't really touch on, bar wanting to "escape womanhood" is the driving force of sexual abuse/ assault. She mentioned teens and young vulnerable people seeking a "help" but I do think that this is a significant area that must be addressed within her theory. And is why it's so much bigger. It's at odds with the repressed memory scandal. Some of these kids are being told to suppress it by transitioning.

The other word she didn't mention was sexism and gender stereotypes, hyped by visual media, specifically as the cultural backdrop to which these trans identified people are reacting against. Also cultural conservatism which perpetuates sexism, linked to religion (I'm thinking particularly of large swathes of America.)

non binary identities were the logical conclusion or consequence of transgender becoming more of 'a thing' as trans perpetuated these stereotypes.

And then her description of the pressures of privilege theories, pushing those postulated oppressors to become the non oppressor and then the oppressed.

First time I heard of non binary was watching a clip of a young woman angrily asking Obama when he was in office when he would be recognising non binary identities. Basically demanding it. So that was pre 2017.

Ultimately, as Mia illustrates, it's a mental health condition that is stoked by the internet and TV and the money has followed.

Agree that the idea of mass delusion seems to map better than 'cult', although there are some cultish groups operating within genderism.

Cultish behaviours are pretty common - standard group behaviour has some similarities, like 'in' group reinforcement and 'out' group othering.

But a 'cult' generally revolves around a figurehead - genderism is broader than that.

One of the American doctors who was part of the multiple personality craze is also a huge part of the current gender identity epidemic.

Diane Ehrensaft.
'How to tell if babies are transgender':

Clive Simpson did a video series on YouTube covering Ehrensaft's practice in both the childhood transition and recovered memory areas, but it looks like they are no longer available?
(Be great if someone can find then as fascinating!)
from a quick look, at least of her research papers on ritual satanic abuse are still online though.