Rogue Wounds: Playing ill or feigning madness has been a con for hundreds of years. But can a fake sickness become a real sickness? (Daniel Mason, Lapham’s Quarterly)
It is a wonderful turn of fate,” wrote the British psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers in 1922, “that just as Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the method of psychoanalysis founded upon it should be so hotly discussed, there should have occurred events which have produced on an enormous scale just those conditions of paralysis and contracture, phobia and obsession, which the theory was especially designed to explain.”
Social contagion is an old phenomenon.