Analysing Historical Mass Psychogenic Epidemics & Gender Dysphoria

[UtopiaPlanitia]

Mia Hughes, of the WPATH Files report, recently posted a tweet regarding a lecture she gave at Stanford University. I thought I'd post the link here for those who are interested in watching the seminar:

https://x.com/_CryMiaRiver/status/1850196070485176720

'On Thursday, I gave a seminar at Stanford on my favourite subject: the epidemic of gender dysphoria in historical context. Using Ian Hacking's framework of the ecological niche of transient mental illnesses, I examine epidemics of fugue, hysteria, multiple personality and trans.'

Delphinium, so many people are using gender identity as a chance for radically rebranding themselves and women like this are rebranding themselves as uber kind and trendy and better than others. As you said, social media is like crack to these people - excellent description.

Hormone treatments and surgery seem to be seen in a similar way, the "alchemical" mechanisms for changing sex or forcing the body into alignment with "gender identity"

That’s a very good point Rapid - both of these phenomena are a form of personal transubstantiation that arises from personal neuroses and societal influences expressed through the current symptom pool of our culture.

She mentioned that previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness lasted around 20 years and I'm hoping that this particular psychogenic epidemic will disperse in a similar amount of time (even sooner would be better).
If this is the case, we should be reaching the tail end of it soon. The social contagion at my university was already rife around 2010.

I hope your reckoning of time is correct @WomenShouldStillWinWomensSportsIsBack

Exactly!

Just one example of the very weird lack of dot-joining:

Paula Durlofsky, Ph.D., a psychologist in private practice in Bryn Mawr, Pa., told Psychiatric News the problems associated with teens’ screen time “really underscore the power that social media has to shape young minds, minds that are still developing and so vulnerable and impressionable.” She advises clinicians to routinely ask patients about their social media and technology use during initial consultations and how they think it’s affecting them. “Keep in mind that social media use may be a factor in their condition.”

Ps. I'd also like to thank you for posting the webinar Utopia.
Mia is always so good to listen to.

@UtopiaPlanitia so many people are using gender identity as a chance for radically rebranding themselves and women like this are rebranding themselves as uber kind and trendy and better than others.

Spot on. I know of this woman through social circles (tho her kids are younger, so I don't know her well) but your take absolutely fits if one looks through her past social. She was part-time pre-school teacher w/ power DH. She suddenly found politics at the same time her son found gender. Now, she's no longer in her DH shadow, she's in the cool women's club and leading the pack.

I'm from a family of teachers and respect the hell out of them...so no shade there, but it was obvious she was ambitious and this rebranding was easier than a slogging career that takes you away from your kids.

What I don't get is the number of psychologists promoting this stuff. Surely they must know about these past episodes? Do they not join the dots?

Delphinium, it seems obvious that these psychogenic illnesses can be a way for the person with the illness to control the people around them, it also allows them to evade responsibilities and gains them attention. These people are expressing their distress through a culturally-sanctioned symptom pool that changes as society changes.

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.

And now that we have social media, it allows parents who are inclined to gaining social standing to use this psychogenic epidemic to do so.

When we’re caught up in the mass phenomenon, too many people are invested in believing it to be, or promoting it as, a real thing.

I think it’s hubris. As a society we feel we can laugh at the lack of knowledge previous generations had but we forget to be aware that we can make the same mistakes that they did.

Not everyone that terms themselves a psychologist has any recognised form of scientific or clinical qualification and there is a strong undercurrent of pseudo-science on a range of topics. Even in the medically qualified field there is often considerable variation in opinion among professionals and they do have form for falling down diagnostic 'rabbit holes' as mentioned already. There is not even agreement on what is contained in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual [DSM] Although it is from the US it does have influence here in the UK.

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.

Ehrensaft is even more crazy in her thinking than most gender doctors, who see stereotypes as a reason to operate on and drug healthy bodies, and that’s saying something. I have no idea how anyone takes her seriously, particularly given her past support of MPD. She’s jumped from one fad to another.

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.

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.

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.

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.

@WarriorN I have been shocked at the amount of sex stereotyping that has come back into society in recent years, it’s made me realise that Feminism had a cultural effect for a while but Capitalism always seems to win - the aisles of pink and blue toys, the clothes with sexist slogans, the Disney channel pimping out young girls with risqué comedy, the music videos with sexual themes, the rise of ubiquitous pornography. Kids these days are getting sexist messaging from so many elements of culture.

@WomenShouldStillWinWomensSportsIsBack you make a good point - group belonging is so important to teenagers. Dr Az Hakeem has often called gender identity ‘Goth Mark II’ because of this aspect of it. His recent book Detrans is excellent in describing how young people are not exposed to ways of finding their tribe that used to exist in the past through music and hobbies and now they are finding their tribe via the internet which has resulted in gender identity being used by kids to self-diagnose their normal teenage angst as medical issues. Helen Joyce also points out that online activity without parental supervision has led to a Lord of the Flies situation where children and teenagers are creating their own societies and rules based on imperfect understandings of adult life.

Woman, I also agree that the commercialised aspect of medicine in America should not be discounted from the willingness of some practitioners in the US to push the medicalisation of teenage distress. It’s unethical and people like Ehrensaft and Olson-Kennedy really worry me in that they seem to have no ability to conceptualise that iatrogenic harms can be created by their preferred method of treating children with affirmation only.

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).

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?

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!

When I read about the havoc the multiple personality and recovered memories crazes caused, especially in the USA where people were put in prison on the basis of false memories generated by 'expert' psychiatrists and therapists, I wonder how society keeps falling for these psychogenic fads and why more people can’t recognise them at the time. Politicians, lawyers, doctors, patients, talk show hosts are all happy to ride the coattails of these social crazes and no-one takes responsibility when the whole thing is shown to be false.

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.

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.

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