Salem, student pressures inspire Howe's 'Conversion'

In early 2012, a group of students at a high school in Le Roy, New York, suffered from a strange illness with similar involuntary physical symptoms including tics and stuttering. Eventually 18 students (mostly girls) were affected, and media attention – and speculation about causes including “mass hysteria” – ran wild.

“I watched it unfold when it kind of started,” says fiction writer Katherine Howe, an American studies lecturer at Cornell. “There’d been all these hypotheses.”

Howe was at an Ithaca garage awaiting a car repair that spring when a cable news story came on attributing the illnesses in Le Roy to conversion disorder – a diagnosis indicating physical manifestations of psychological stress.

http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2014/07/salem-student-pressures-inspire-howes-conversion