Anxious Projections: Mass Hysteria and the Problem of Interpretation.

Summary

Stories of 'mass hysteria' among teenage girls in Nepal are reported in local and national newspapers, treated with shamanic rituals and psychosocial interventions. The article argues that these collective afflictions reflect societal anxieties about moral rupture, shamanic knowledge, gender, and emotion management. Due to ambiguous causes, dramatic symptom displays, and the absence of an experiencing subject, such cases become a blank screen for projecting and debating broader collective anxieties in a changing society.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Stories of "mass hysteria" among teenage girls have often graced the headlines of Nepal's local and national newspapers, creating a public spectacle of a strange and mysterious form of affliction. Treatments include both shamanic rituals and psychosocial interventions, a new therapeutic modality that has gained prominence over the past two decades following the rise of global mental health. This article shows how the discourse around the collective affliction of teenage girls reveals a number of anxieties at the heart of Nepali society regarding the moral rupture of community, the status of shamanic knowledge, and gender and the management of emotion. I argue that due to the ambiguity of cause, the dramatic public display of symptoms, and the absence of the experiencing subject of affliction, cases of "mass hysteria" offer a blank screen onto which the broader collective anxieties of a society in flux are projected and debated.