On Mass Hysteria

This artist’s book, which combines photographs, text and personal accounts, explores the theme of the societal oppression of women by focusing on thousands of cases of what has long been called ‘mass hysteria’.

This phenomenon, triggered by severe trauma, strikes close-knit communities faced with situations of major stress. These groups develop sudden symptoms that have no physiological cause, and can last for months: fainting, trembling, unquenchable laughter, trances… As usual, the artist has worked upstream with anthropologists, sociologists and psychiatrists to try to understand the origins of these crises. Using a wide range of archives, Laia Abril shows how widespread they are, both geographically and over time. From the witches of Salem in the 15th century to convulsing possessed nuns, from schoolgirls at a Mexican boarding school who suddenly lose their ability to walk to Cambodian factory workers who simultaneously faint, Laia Abril studies the circumstances that lead to these states. These psychogenic mass illnesses, as they are now called, appear to be a common response to collective suffering that, for various reasons, cannot be verbalised, embodying transgenerational traumas that are often ignored or minimised by society. Some scientists interpret them as a protolanguage that women have used to resist since the dawn of time, without being aware of it.

Laia Abril questions the Western conception, in particular the hyper-medicalisation that ignores women’s suffering and tends to neglect explanations based on spiritual beliefs and spiritual forces. The artist seeks to shift the analysis from a narrative that blames the victims to an examination of the role of the political and social oppression of women in the manifestation of a collective illness.