The web site Slate is echoing the Castro regime’s excuse for the injuries sustained by American and Canadian diplomats.
There are no real injuries, they say. It’s all psychological, the result of “stress” and social factors.
And… don’t you dare use the term “mass hysteria.”
Senator Marco Rubio got blasted by Slate for using that term.
The correct term is “psychogenic illness.”
So, speaking of psychogenic illnesses: why is it that Castrophiles are so eager to dismiss the possibility of a direct attack from the Castro regime, even though it is well known — and documented with solid evidence — that the Castro regime has a long history of engaging in such behavior?
Well…. maybe Slate is suffering from mass hysteria, along with all other leftist Castrophiles… oh, excuse me… I used the wrong term.
It’s a psychogenic illness at work over there…. We beg your pardon…
Epidemics of this sort [psychogenic illnesses] are well-known in the scientific literature. Robert Bartholomew, a New Zealand–based medical sociologist and the co-author of Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior, Mass Hysteria in Schools: A Worldwide History Since 1566, and other books on the subject, has collected a database of some 3,500 cases. While the precise mechanisms are difficult to pinpoint, and the diagnosis is always controversial, there is increasing recognition that these epidemics of hysteria, which usually mirror prominent social concerns, present real individual and public health problems.
Yet many people still assume victims of such phenomena are simply faking or imagining their symptoms. In the Senate hearings on the attacks, Sen. Rubio asked Rosenfarb whether he thought this was, “a case of mass hysteria, that a bunch of people are just being hypochondriacs and making it up?”
This was a loaded question, with Rubio deploying the term mass hysteria as a means of dismissing this possibility altogether. But Rubio’s assumption—that a mass psychogenic illness is the same as faking or hypochondria—is wrong, as was his dismissal of the idea that this might explain the illnesses in Cuba. Indeed, mass psychogenic illness is likely the best explanation for these illnesses. According to Bartholomew, if you removed the word concussionfrom discussion of what happened there (but left the “white matter tract” changes in its place), you’d have a “textbook case” of mass psychogenic illness, in everything from its symptoms to its spread.
“There’s no evidence whatsoever that this was caused by a sonic device,” Bartholomew says. “It is physically impossible to have brain damage caused by an acoustical device. And most of those symptoms are not symptoms of sonic weaponry.” Anxiety and nausea, he notes, can be caused by both mass psychogenic illness and acoustic weapons, but the noise would have to be incapacitating and high volume. None of the other symptoms reported in Cuba are associated with an acoustic assault.
Read the whole fekakte thing HERE
