Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-35911608-20180823132725/@comment-35911608-20180823230043

DrBobSmith wrote: RedNovaTyrant wrote:

Have you ever heard of the dancing plague of 1518? It’s the earliest recorded instance of mass hysteria. One day in a small French village, a woman started dancing in the street to no music and for no reason. Over time, more and more people suddenly joined in, and they didn’t stop. This went on for an entire month, resulting in a few deaths from exhaustion, until one day they all suddenly stopped.

My aim with this story was to create the idea of a disease that spread by idea, not through any physical means. As rumours and suspicions grow, people begin to believe the disease has become deadlier. With the media hypercharging reports, it spreads faster and becomes more serious. I very carefully wrote “a possible symptom” when referring to the leg paralysis - the old lady could have just fallen down. But word spread. And if a lie is a believable enough lie, the brain may interpret it as a truth - much like a placebo/nocebo effect.

I hope this helped in some way

Yes, I have heard of it. It was blamed on ergotamine tartrate from mold on rye. There was a physical cause for THAT sort of behavior. Basically, the whole town was stoned out of their mind on acid.

That doesn't mean that an already mentally vulnerable person would blame themselves for something that is unrelated to what they did. People do get sick in mass waves. Look at the water in Flint, Michigan. That's been deadly stuff for YEARS. Something could (just for example as a plot device) leak into a town's water supply and make a bunch of people sick. Even though there is no connection, a lot of people think the universe revolves around them and if something goes wrong it's their fault. An exploration of those emotions may be very interesting. I think that would work well in another story. In this case, it is Ben’a fault for starting the idea, but the media and gossip add to the list of causes here.

If I gave it the illness a physical cause, yes it’d be more realistic, but then it’d just be “some epidemic story”, which can be scary sure, but I think a thought disease is more terrifying and conveys the mass hysteria theme better.