![]() ![]() Their symptoms ranged from subtle twitches to violent jerking of body parts and verbal outbursts. The fits began with a group of cheerleaders, before spreading to a “wider swath of the Le Roy high-school hierarchy,” as The New York Times Magazine thoroughly reported at the time.īaker described the symptoms displayed by the girls in Le Roy in A Storm of Witchcraft: Perhaps the most infamous modern case of suspected conversion disorder occurred in 2012 in the upstate New York town of Le Roy, where a group of high school girls suffered from uncontrollable spasms and twitching. He pointed out that after Parris’s daughter and niece began showing symptoms, the next two girls to become afflicted by the fits were the niece of the town’s doctor and the daughter of the wealthiest man in town. “And it tends to start out at the top of social order.” “The interesting thing about it is today mass conversion tends to be most common in teenagers, and overwhelmingly teenage girls,” Baker said. Of the cases studied by Bartholomew, he said 99 percent involved “a majority of females.” ![]() He noted that several of the afflicted girls were refugees who had lost their homes and family members in King William’s War. The afflictions in Salem ended in October 1692, around the same time the special court created to try witchcraft cases was dissolved.Īccording to Baker, examples of what could bring on conversion disorder include a repressive family life or post-traumatic stress disorder. “Your body goes haywire: twitching, shaking, facial tics, garbled speech, trance states.”īartholomew said that outbreaks appear slowly over weeks or months and take as much time to subside - but only “after the stressful agent is no longer believed to be a threat.” “It is very rare in the Western world and arises from long-term stress which results in disruptions to the nerves and neurons that send messages to the muscles and brain,” he said. “While the mechanism is poorly understood, there is no question that it happens,” Bartholomew told in an email, adding that what happened in Salem was likely an example of “motor-based hysteria,” one of the two main forms of conversion disorder. Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist in New Zealand who has collected more than 3,000 cases on conversion disorder dating back to 1566, says the Salem witch trials were “undoubtedly” a case of the psychogenic condition, in which “psychological conflict and distress are converted into aches and pains that have no physical origin.” ![]() “People are in such mental anguish, for a variety of reasons, that literally their minds convert their anxieties to physical symptoms,” Baker told .ĭr. ![]() However, he says that his ultimate conclusion after years of studying the events is that they were actually suffering from psychological ailments.įoremost among them is something called mass conversion disorder, a psychogenic disorder that - ironically - made a suspected return to the Salem area more than 300 years later. But most experts agree that these causes alone can’t be attributed to the girls’ anguish.īaker says it’s possible that a few of the accusers were purposefully faking their symptoms. Modern theories about what was afflicting the girls have ranged from epilepsy to boredom to ergot poisoning. “That’s one of the big questions of Salem,” said Emerson Baker, a history professor at Salem State University and expert on the witch trials. But it remains unclear today: Were those girls genuinely afflicted by something? Or were they faking it? ![]()
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