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- Conversion disorder is somewhat better understood now than it was when the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot displayed his patients’ fainting fits to hundreds of dazzled audience members in the 1870s. Fainting and nonepileptic seizures are common symptoms, as are seemingly paralyzed limbs; less common, but still well represented, are certain types of tics and twitches. Recent research has confirmed some of Freud’s early theorizing on the subject, finding that a history of trauma is higher in patients with conversion disorder than in other kinds of psychiatric patients.
So very strange.
Oddly, this made me wonder if an ant colony or a bee hive can have a mental illness.
I read this the other day and thought it was fascinating. I remember when it first hit the news and was wondering what kind of environmental contaminant they were going to unearth. I would not have expected something like this, especially because the symptoms seemed so severe.
Oh, and as an interesting side note trichloroethylene (TCE) contamination is more common than you might thing. It was (still is?) a common solvent used in dry cleaning, and is very stable if it makes it underground so any unscrupulous dry cleaner could create a plume simply by throwing their waste solvent in a ditch out back.