Wondery subscribers can binge all episodes of hysterical early and ad free. Join wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Previously on Hysterical. Why don't you think they believed you?

Honestly, I was the only guy.

Yeah.

How is this? And what happened to me, you know, psychogenic. That doesn't. How is it? Mass hysteria? No sense to me.

The human mind is a very powerful thing.

Hysteria is alive and well. About a year and a half ago, in December of 2022, a group of students at a school for girls suddenly came down with mysterious symptoms that no one could explain. It reportedly starts with an unusual gas smell. The girls begin experiencing shortness of breath, numbness in the arms and legs, difficulty walking. Over the course of a couple hours, 51 girls become ill and are sent to the hospital. The symptoms resolve themselves soon after. This isn't happening in Leroy or in any american high school. It's happening at a girls conservatory in the holy city of Qom in Iran. And it's just the beginning. Across the country today, 16 provinces reported dozens of students falling mysteriously ill. Dozens of outbreaks like this are reported in girls schools across Iran over the coming weeks. It's all happening on the heels of mass protests that had erupted after a young woman named Mahsa Amini died in police custody in Tehran. She had been detained for wearing her hijab. Ram. It's now suspected that girls are being poisoned in their schools in gas attacks as retaliation for the uprising. Parents are angry at what many see as a targeted attack on girls education, and they blame local officials for not doing enough to protect their children.

News reports flood the Internet showing young girls lying in hospital beds. This girl says, first we smelled gas in the classroom. And last week, this girl says her whole body was numb. She couldn't walk. Before it's over, the outbreak spreads to over 100 schools, with as many as 7000 girls and their teachers becoming ill.

And so it was kind of a war. It was a war between society and the state, and these schoolgirls were fighting it.

Azadeh Moveni is an iranian american journalist and covered the suspected poisonings on the ground there for the New Yorker.

And so the stakes felt like, bizarrely high for what a 14 year old or a 15 year old should be contemplating.

Azadeh says that the outbreak seemed minor to her at first, but then it spread so rapidly, and then a journalist friend of hers covering the story was detained by police.

You know, in Iran, when journalists start getting arrested for reporting on something, there's something there, something is happening, and it seemed very serious.

Azadeh is not new to this kind of reporting. She had been based in Tehran before, covering the Middle east with a special focus on women in militant groups. But still, this story in particular was a hornets nest. The possibility of state or state adjacent actors sabotaging girls education isnt just some scenario that someone plucked out of nowhere in this country with these politics, with the rights of women and girls under siege. It's more than just possible. Azadeh believed it was happening and it was bearing out in her reporting. But she also found herself bumping up against this other thing. Given the details of the outbreak. Mysterious symptoms, sudden onset, inconclusive testing, confined almost exclusively to one social group, some sort of psychogenic component seemed possible as well. Not for all or even most, but perhaps for some. She'd heard fragments of it in her reporting.

I spoke to teachers in schools who were clearly just very, very tense and frightened. And they would sort of say, like that day, I just. I was wearing three masks. I was hot. We were all frightened. It had happened at another school. Like, I don't even know if it was real. Like someone came and said, we smell something. And then we all started to feel fluttery and I don't know, in the end.

And she spoke to victims, of which there were thousands who were struggling with the fear of what was happening.

Because these were young girls, they were very emotive, they were all frightened. They were constantly on WhatsApp with each other at night. Don't go to school, we all have to stay home. You know, they were sort of whipping each other up into a frenzy. And, I mean, I know that this is a word that we can't use, but I don't. I mean, they were that h word. It seemed possible that there was a contagion effect.

I think it's so interesting that you. That you said the h word.

Oh, yes.

Why?

The h word takes us into this sort of victorian literature, gothic space that's super gendered. That is a word that comes with very heavy baggage. And I don't know how we can sort of decouple it from that, so we can use it in its sort of. In a more informed way.

My hope is to decouple it because I think it's. I think it explains things that are happening now. Psychogenic illness is not an all or nothing thing. It can explain some cases of a mystery illness without negating the rest. The problem is, once you start acknowledging possible psychological or sociological components to an outbreak, it immediately sounds like you're dismissing the whole thing like, you're making something seem like it was nothing. And when something is, whether or not thousands of girls are being poisoned in their schools, it can get gnarly very fast. In the end, Azade's story on the school poisonings had enough to deal with without dwelling too much on the possibility of the other thing. But now, with a little distance, she suspects that a lot of the cases she reported on were, in fact psychogenic, if only for one very simple, very powerful reason.

Because why would it not be? I mean, in the end, if you have so many young girls so fearful of the state that they think their state is making them ill like that, in and of itself, is an illness, that to me, as a reporter and as a citizen of that country, is really fascinating and important. And it doesn't mean that it's any less significant or momentous, if psychologically some part of the spectrum of what we saw was fear. Because to be fearful of your state is a very profound and terrible thing.

The amount of stress that must have created.

But this summer, when I was back in the life of a teenager, time is really fluid, right? So I was like, so what is it like now? And they're like, oh, it's totally changed, and we're fine, and we're onto new things. Like now we've moved on.

It's not lost on me that some people find the word hysterical so insulting that they're hesitant to even say the title of this show out loud. It is an old, creaky word, and it does have very heavy baggage. But dancing around it also means dancing around our ability to take it seriously and understand better the conditions that might give rise to it. On today's episode, one more stop before we head back to Leroy. This time it's Ohio. To look at something that's been going on there for years and is still going on. And whatever this thing is, it sits right in that uncomfortable sweet spot between your willingness to accept that mass hysteria is alive and well and your absolute certainty that it could never happen to you. I'm Dan Tabirsky from Wondery and Pineapple street studios. This is hysterical. Episode six into the multiverse.

Everything to play for has taken on its biggest challenge yet. We've had two parters. We've even had three parters. This is a four parter. And the reason why we're giving it four podcasts is it's probably the greatest individual rivalry in Premier League history. Yes, arse and Wenger versus Alex Ferguson. We've bitten off more than we can chew what it reminds me of, I saw a video on social media the other day of a python having swallowed a duvet, and the vets were trying to get the duvet out of the python. I thought, that is like me and Colin having to skip over FA cup finals because there's so much to talk about when it comes to Wenger and Ferguson. Doubles, trebles, pizza, round a face. It has everything. If you want to listen to the podcast equivalent of a python swallowing a duvet, follow everything to play for on the onetree app or wherever you get your podcasts, you can binge seasons early and ad free right now on one tree. Plus.

I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan, and in our podcast legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are revisiting the life of Cecil Rhodes. From sickly child to diamond tycoon to leading colonialist in South Africa, he was a bastion of british imperialism. Over the past few years, campuses around the world have been met with students chanting, Rhodes must fall. His legacy has been completely transformed. Follow legacy now, wherever you get your podcasts. Annika Collins is partial to the word dope.

I say dope for everything, and most people do not.

Not dope as in, that's dope. She means dope as in drugs.

Most people call dope, like, dope is marijuana. Meth is meth. Heroin's heroin. Fentanyl is fatty, but I call everything dope.

Annika was raised in Highland County, Ohio, and for the past 13 years, she's been the county prosecutor here and here. Dope is ever present. Ohio has one of the highest overdose rates in the country. Annika says drug trafficking cases make up more than half of her caseload in Highland county, and she's clearly good at it.

We were trying to remember. I don't know that I've ever lost a drug trafficking case.

Wow.

In the. I've been in the prosecutor's office, so I was super confident with our case.

Confident that when the trial began of two meth traffickers in March of 2022, she was expecting to keep the streak going. All right, good morning. Good to see everybody back all the time. But something happens on trial day three to make her less concerned about keeping the streak and more concerned about keeping her shit together, period.

May I approach the witness?

It happens as she is questioning a witness on the stand, exhibit after exhibit, building her case.

Can you go ahead and open space exhibit 92?

But things go south for Annika just as she is presenting exhibit 92. The exhibit inside a manila evidence pouch are two digital scales, which we always.

Find in traffickers houses, because that's how they weigh the dope.

So she says to the investigator on the stand, do you recognize these? And he takes the scales out of the bag, and he says, yes. And she says, what are they? And he says, they're digital scales. That's how they weigh the dope. It's all pretty standard.

But then he put them back into the bag, and I took the bag and kind of squeezed it, folded it up, laid it down on the table, and that's the last thing that I remember.

The next part, she only knows from watching the courtroom video, same as we are. We see her introducing another exhibit.

I'm next. Going to hand you what's previously been marked as dates. Exhibit 96. Do you recognize this?

I do. And all of a sudden, she looks kind of wobbly, almost like someone had snuck a pair of roller skates on her feet.

And then I leaned on the judge's bench, which is something I would never do. It's completely disrespectful. I just would never do that. And the judge looked at me and said, are you okay? And I said, yeah, I think I just need a minute. You have a minute.

Take a break.

Down goes Collins. The witness jumps off the stand and catches her just before she hits the floor.

It will take about ten minutes right there. You can leave the room if you wish.

Just remember to have addition. When the medics arrive, Annika is barely alert. And one of the medics says to.

Her, dollface, you've got to tell me how you're feeling. And I remember looking at her and saying, I don't feel anything at all. Like, I don't feel my fingers. I don't feel my toes. I feel nothing at all.

Wow.

And Chris Sexton was the other paramedic, and he said, oh, my gosh. Let's give her another dose. By this time, they had put an iv in me, and they started giving me Narcan through the iv.

Narcan? She says they had already given her one dose, administered through the nose, like nasal spray. Now they were giving her more intravenously. Why Narcan?

So Narcan is only used for one thing, and that is to treat an opioid overdose.

Annika is rushed to the hospital, where she stabilized.

At the hospital, I know that I was loopy, like when my daughters came in, I guess I said, hey, girl, hey. When they came in, which is not something I would do.

Annika says that her doctors tell her she most likely had experienced an overdose of the synthetic opioid fentanyl, or rather on a variant called paraflurofenhe. How? Annika believes there was residue of the drug in that evidence bag with the scales in it, exhibit 92, that she had introduced at trial. According to the CDC, fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin.

So even a very, very small amount ingested would have had an impact on me. The hospital, they said, there's no doubt that's what's happened to you. There's absolutely no doubt.

So that was in 2022. Let's back it up a few years now to 2016.

I'm Jack Riley, deputy administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and I want to take a minute today to talk to you about something very important. As a matter of fact, it could kill you. And that's fentanyl.

In 2016, the DEA released this safety alert video to all the country's police departments. But how fentanyl was so potent that even touching it, just being exposed to it at all, could kill you.

But don't just listen to me. Listen to these two hardworking cops in which fentanyl almost got the best of.

In the process of sealing the bag. And then these two cops detail their own experience of what even just incidental contact with fentanyl did to them. Just out of force of habit, I grabbed the bag and I closed it up, forcing the air out of it, so I get a good seal. And when I did that, a bunch of it poofed up into the air, right into our face, and we ended up inhaling it.

I felt like my body was shutting down.

The video is only a couple minutes long.

That was it. I thought I was dying.

But it's more than enough time to hit the major theme double hard again.

Fentanyl can kill you. The DEA report came out. It went to every police department in the United States. I even had a copy of it.

Tom Sinan is a police chief in Newtown, Ohio, outside Cincinnati. The fentanyl wave was just beginning to crash down hard in their community when Signin saw that DEA video and the report that went along with it.

The DEA said if you were exposed, which meant if it got on your skin or it got airborne, you could overdose.

Chief Steinen calls a press conference to discuss how they would proceed. Given the concerning news about fentanyl.

I was one of the officers who repeated it. I stood up in a press conference and said, we will no longer field test fentanyl. Because, look, the DEA put out this report. This is how dangerous this stuff is. I stood up and repeated that report because that's what I believed.

But then a colleague gently points something out to Chief Sinana.

And as soon as I stepped off, the health commissioner goes, man, I'm not too sure about this. He goes, think about it. Nurses and doctors deal with fentanyl every day. That's not happening to them. And I was like, huh.

It kind of makes sense, right? Fentanyl is an incredibly dangerous drug when abused, but it is also one of the most useful drugs in medicine, in surgery, for managing pain. And medical teams come in contact with it constantly, using just basic precautions, and it doesn't seem to be an issue.

And I thought, well, that's really weird, but maybe it's just because it's in a controlled environment. So then I started talking to people that use fentanyl, and I'm like, hey, are you guys wearing gloves and masks? And they're going, what is wrong with you? How could I use it if I'm wearing gloves and masks? They carry fentanyl in their pocket, prep it without gloves or touching it. And they would say the only time I get any reaction from it is if I inject it or snort it.

But then things get really wild, because just as toxicologists and other medical experts begin questioning the facts in that DEA video, something else begins to happen. How are you feeling right now? I feel weird, man.

Because he said he's floating. His legs are tinged.

Yeah, yeah. Videos of cops overdosing on fentanyl after just accidental exposure come rolling in. It happens in Jefferson County, Alabama. It happens in Kansas City. Dozens of videos of collapsing copse passing out, shaking, heart palpitations, just from being near the drug.

I'm San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore. What you're about to see is traumatic body worn camera footage involving one of our deputies who was exposed to fentanyl during his patrol shift.

You're okay.

Don't be sorry.

There isn't a lot of great data on how often this is happening, so we gathered it ourselves. By our account, the number of reactions to accidental fentanyl exposure reported by the media since the DEA report came out in 2016. 332 and counting.

You don't see it with dealers. You don't see it with nurses, doctors. This is really a phenomenon isolated to the criminal justice system.

It's happening to police, to prison guards, to court officers. And now, as we've heard, a criminal prosecutor, Annika Collins in Ohio, who collapsed after touching drug evidence in court. Mysterious symptoms, sudden onsets, confined almost exclusively to one social group. And a suspected cause for which there seems to be little to no proof, except a DEA warning video from 2016 that now seems highly dubious.

And there was no science or studies or research done behind it. It was just his belief that if you were exposed to it, you could overdose and die.

Belief is really powerful.

I mean, no belief is more powerful than truth.

What if your partner developed 21 new identities? Or you discovered that your friend who helped you through the darkest times was actually a conniving con artist? Or what if you began seeing demons everywhere, inhabiting people around you, including your son? What would you do? I'm Whit Missledine, the creator of this is actually happening, a podcast that brings you extraordinary true stories of life changing events told by the people who lived them. In our newest season, you'll hear even more intimate first person accounts of how regular people have overcome remarkable circumstances, like the man who went to jail for 17 years for accidentally shooting the person who tried to save his life. To a close friend of the infamous scam artist Amanda Riley, these haunting accounts sound like Hollywood movies, but I assure you, this is actually happening. Follow this is actually happening on the wondry app or wherever you get your podcasts and you can listen to this is actually happening ad free on wonder a plus.

This fear of fentanyl being so potent that it could cause overdose through kind of accidental contact has been around for a while.

Brian Marino is an ER doctor in Ohio. Actually, he's a doctor three times over, triple board certified in addiction medicine, emergency medicine, and medical toxicology. By his count, he has treated hundreds of overdose victims, the majority from fentanyl. He could hardly be more front and center to the fentanyl disaster that has ravaged communities for years. So it's oddly ironic that he, of all people, has become the public voice of fentanyl. Not that scary. A couple months ago, you put out a challenge that said, if any doc filmmakers can get the funding and enough legal representation that you would roll around naked in a giant martini glass full of fentanyl on camera just to prove it was said yes. What are you trying to say, Ryan?

I mean, this myth is just won't die. So whatever I could do to stop that. And I mean, I think that would be funny, too. So.

Well, apparently podcast insurance doesn't cover giant martini glass stunts, but we get the point. A big part of Marino's life now is spent ballyhooing the scientific facts of fentanyl. Starting with, you will not accidentally overdose on fentanyl just by touching it.

Fentanyl on the street that is, in drugs. This is fentanyl that comes in a solid form, usually sold as a powder when it's being sold or pressed into pills. And so that solid powder does not cross through your skin very easily. You would have to take large quantities of it, mix it into some sort of liquid solution, and hold it against your skin for a very long period of time.

Like how long?

Like, hours.

I actually spoke to one pharmacist who accidentally doused his hands in 40 liquid fentanyl. No overdose. Another fact, you will not overdose on fentanyl, he says, by accidentally breathing it in. Well, is that not true?

No, it's not true.

You can't accidentally breathe one in.

Not accidentally, no. If you were snorting fentanyl or snorting.

Up powder, you could possibly overdose and even unintentionally, like if a cloud of it poofed into the air. According to the American association of Medical Toxicologists, you would have to be standing in that cloud for over 3 hours to inhale even 100 micrograms of fentanyl.

Again, fentanyl that's in street drugs is a solid. Solid doesn't just turn into gas. And we do know, too, that through another law of physics, we have this concept of vapor pressure, which is kind of the ability of something to transition into, like, a gaseous state or aerosolize spontaneously, and fentanyl has a very low vapor pressure. And so under, like, any sort of normal conditions on the planet Earth, fentanyl in a powder form sitting somewhere is not going to aerosolize.

Is it theoretically possible for a person to inhale enough aerosolized fentanyl to overdose?

You could walk out in the street and Wile E. Coyote could drop a piano on your head. Like, that is, I guess, something that could happen. But we have enough actual evidence and data and understanding of fentanyl to say that this is not a real risk. Like, sure, you could fall down into a wind tunnel and have millions of dollars of fentanyl blown directly into your face, your nose, your mouth, your lungs. I guess that's always a possibility, but it's not something that I worry about.

Are you familiar with the multiverse? You would be if you read as many comic books as I did when I was a kid or if you'd seen a Marvel movie in the past 15 years. The multiverse began appearing in Marvel comics in the 1970s to help make sense of all the contradictory storylines involving the same superheroes. So regular Earth, the Earth we live on is technically known as Earth 616. I don't know why that's our number? It just is. And on Earth 616, Spider man under that mask is really unassuming Queen's native Peter Parker. Right? But there are other earths in the multiverse. Alternate realities. Earth 1610, for example, is exactly the same as ours. Except in that one Peter Parker diese in a fight with a green goblin. On Earth 982, it's exactly the same as ours. Except here, Peter Parker lives, and he gets married, too. So that's nice. On Earth 21 49, Spider man is still Peter Parker, but no joke. This is true. Captain America gets promoted, so he's known as Colonel America. But then they're both infected by a zombie virus. Stay away from Earth 21 49. What am I prattling on about multiverses for?

Because I think that is the situation we're in here with fentanyl and a lot of potentially hysterical situations that we're dealing with. Two worlds where everything is exactly the same except for one thing, a small difference, but one that has knock on effects that grow. Until one day you realize we are no longer even on the same planet.

I don't believe for a minute I touched it, and then I don't believe that's what happened. But I do believe that I ingested it somehow.

Annika Collins, the ohio prosecutor, believes that she picked up that evidence bag with the digital scales in it, and some trace amount of fentanyl got into her system. And she odd right there in court.

When I squeezed that evidence bag, I didn't have gloves on. But if I would have touched, you know, my mouth, my nose, my eyes, or inhaled it when I did that, when I shut that bag up and inhaled it, that's probably what happened because I squeezed the bag together.

Because you're doing the things. When you close the bag, you, like, squeeze it to get the air out. Like when you're putting a sandwich in a bag, right?

That's exactly right. I squeezed that bag together to get the air out. And that's probably when it happened. But I have no doubt that I inhaled it, ingested it somehow.

I don't fault anybody for believing it at the time. Everyone believed it. I was one of them.

Chief Signan, the Ohio police chief, he believed accidental overdose was possible once, too.

She did experience something, Dan. I don't know how you quantify this into a documentary, podcast, or whatever it is that to her was real.

Real, but just not a fentanyl overdose happening right now.

Highland county attorneys are recovering in the hospital after handling drug evidence while in court.

In fact, authorities say Narcan had to be used on that attorney. So when Annika's overdose in court hit the news, and the news station was looking for an expert to give his two cent, Chief Steinen, bless his heart, raised his hand. Here he is in the 05:00 news.

You can't just touch fentanyl and it's, you're very unlikely to overdose from just touching fentanyl.

They went and got somebody that self identified as an expert in overdose.

I like the self identified part. He was a police. He was a police chief, a local police chief. Am I wrong?

Right? Of like a town of like 3000.

Oof.

Burn.

Well, first he obviously, I mean, he doesn't know me at all and basically called me a liar and a faker on national television, or not national, but Ohio television, it infuriated me.

But just being mad, just stewing about it, not doing something about it, it felt on Annika.

I actually called him on the phone the next day cause I was so furious.

I understand why she was upset. I understand why she was upset at me.

Annika gives Chief Signan a friendly jingle.

And we had a lengthy. It was pretty much a one sided conversation with a lot of loud voices. But I was not personally offended by it because I didn't understand her position. In the video, Collins is seen grabbing her chest and her breathing rate is very rapid.

From Seinen's point of view, her symptoms were not consistent with fentanyl. Here's what he said in that news report.

It's actually the exact opposite. It's very slow heart rate, very slow breathing. Again, you often hear people snore or gurgling. That is actually the breathing in the lungs kind of shutting down. So it's the exact opposite. Collins was given Narcan.

Here's doctor Marino, the toxicologist, on what a fentanyl overdose would actually look like.

If you were having a fentanyl overdose, your heart rate would slow down. You would not know you were overdosing, you would not feel scared. We give opioids, including fentanyl, to people who have serious medical issues, people who are dying to help with fear, with suffering, with all of those things. And so they actually do the literal opposite.

But what he usually sees in these accidental overdose videos, I feel my heart.

Racing, I feel anxious, I feel terrified. And the symptoms are much more consistent with anxiety, fear, panic, and even something called the nocebo effect.

The nocebo effect. If you really, truly believe strongly enough that something bad is happening, that something is making you sick, you can have actual physical symptoms in your body. But Annika says that what they show on the news was only a small part of what happened to her. If the whole thing had been shown, she says, you'd see the kind of shutting down that he was looking for.

You lose total control. I told my husband the next day that if they would have told me, I would have peed myself on the floor in the courtroom. I would not have been surprised.

Wow.

I could feel nothing. Like, you know, at other times, I was freaking out. I mean, with no, no question that I was freaking out. Panic mode. Because in fighting that off.

I can't dispute that you had some reaction. I am only disputing, or I'm asking you to question, was it actually an overdose?

There's another reason the chief sign in is skeptical.

Because in like I've told people so far, if it was real and we were able to confirm it, you would be the first one in the United States to actually confirm it. And if that was confirmed, that's important information.

Has there ever been a blood test that confirmed that somebody overdosed, had a secondhand fentanyl overdose?

I am not aware of any.

The hospital standard is usually a urine tox screen. Blood tests at a lab, even better. But in all the cases of accidental fentanyl overdose that we have been able to track, 332 and counting the number of tox screens or blood tests that came back positive for fentanyl. So the blood test that they ran at the hospital did not test for fentanyl.

We now know that the blood test was not performed on the deputy, so we don't truly know if he had fentanyl in his system.

As far as we can tell, one at a state prison in Alaska. And even that one wasn't independently confirmed. But no positive tox screen in the original case of those two cops featured in that DEA video, not in any of the other 331 cases we tracked around the country, and not in the case of Annika Collins. Her toxcreen, she says, was negative.

I immediately was like, I don't understand why nothing's showing up. If you're saying you have no doubt.

This is what happened, here's how she says her doctor explained it, and he.

Said, there are two very simple explanations for that. First, it's something that we're not testing for yet. And I know that paraflurofentyol was brand new at the time. The other reason is, is that it was such that they only test, drug tests only have a certain threshold where they show up. And if it was below that threshold, that would have been the other reason that it would not have shown up in a drug screen.

Right. But still not below the threshold of impacting somebody if it were ingested.

That's exactly right.

Does it drive you a little nuts that the tox report came back negative?

No, no. It happens. I understand. I understand it happens. It is what it is. If it was something that I ingested that they weren't testing for, that's not on anybody. It just is what it is.

Besides, says Annika, they gave her Narcan. What does that tell you?

Narcan only works on an opiate. It doesn't work on anything else. And the Narcan brought me out of it. It didn't last for very long, but it would bring me out of it. Like, I would snap to and know what was going on for a few seconds.

But that could be chalked up to another psychological phenomenon. The thing about Narcan is that it's made to treat suspected overdose. So if you're not overdosing, Narcan won't hurt you. It won't really do anything. And if it does do something, if it does help revive you, that could be the placebo effect. It only works because you believe it will. Belief gets you out of the psychogenic illness, just like belief is what got you there in the first place. But Annika maintains its real, and it's happening all the time.

Mm hmm. And I've heard about cases like that all over the place.

Just recently, she says it happened in their local jail to a deputy and a couple corrections officers. But that case didn't make the news.

I mean, I think it probably happens more than we even hear about. People are just so tired of being called liars that they don't want to. You know, they don't want to talk about it anymore.

And as far as whether we believe her about what happened to her in.

Court that day, it makes no difference to me. I mean, it really doesn't. I know that that seems unbelievable, but it doesn't. I know what happened. Everybody that was in that courtroom that day knows what happened. And, I mean, honestly, it makes no difference what people think. I know what happened, and that's it.

You know, I got into a fight with my producers about this episode. I mean, not a physical fight, but I'm not afraid of those chumps. We argue because they think I'm chicken shit, that after laying out all this information, they wonder why I just don't come out and say that. I think Annika Collins was a victim of mass psychogenic illness. And that this example seems particularly clear cut. Frankly, it's harder than I thought it'd be, especially when she rejects it so strongly, when she is so sure of her own experience. But here's what I've also learned. When Annika Collins says, I know what happened, and that's it. Or when someone in the CIA with Havana syndrome says that he has absolutely zero doubt, or when a girl suffering in Leroy, New York, says, I know myself. I know that's not it. The truth here is mass psychogenic illness doesn't care what you know. This isn't about the known anything. This is about the unknown, that place where our understanding of neurology and psychology can't quite get, at least not yet. Was Annika Collins hysterical? I can't say for sure, but I don't think she can either.

And as respectful as we might want to be to let a person define their own medical experience without someone like me yipping up their leg like a chihuahua, we also can't do the other thing. We can't all go on living in different worlds that seem the same, but where different facts apply, because this is about more than just the people experiencing the symptoms.

So, look, man, I get the human aspect of this. I get the human side of it. I get they're experiencing something. But here's the problem, is when this starts causing the potential for more people to die, then I think it's important to tell the truth.

The fear of getting near fentanyl can slow first responders from helping people who are actually overdosing. Fear of fentanyl means hospitals sometimes separate overdose victims and could delay treatment for safety protocols that take time. In situations where there is no time, there's more, and it's not hypothetical.

People are literally serving jail time because they exposed a police officer to fentanyl.

Some municipalities have begun charging drug users with assault. The crime. Simply exposing police officers to fentanyl in the course of a police stop or.

An arrest to spend months or years in prison as these people have because of something that is scientifically impossible, is deeply disturbing to me. I don't think people should be in jail for crimes that are not real.

And to make this perfect storm even more perfect every time it happens to a police officer. Come on. Come on, Courtney. Chances are it all happens on body cam. Okay, it's foreign officer, possible exposure to membrane.

I'm getting ma. You got yours out.

Mastect illness, you'll remember, is a line of sight illness. When others see it happening, that's how it spreads. And police body cams, the tools that were intended to stop police brutality, have unwittingly become the perfect built in vector for spread.

It is powerful to see a police officer go down. When you see an officer that believes they have been exposed, whether it's real or not, it is a powerful image.

The psychogenic overdose creates a video. The video sparks more psychogenic overdoses, which creates more videos. And the longer it goes on, the harder it is going to be for everyone to just make it back to earth. 616 a world in common with shared experience. So the next episode is our last episode, and were going to head back to Leroy, New York, to see how that outbreak there finally came to an end. But first, one more quick story to get you in the mood, and I swear to God, this is the last time youre going to hear a sentence like this next one coming out of me, I promise. But shortly after the outbreak in Leroy ended, the girls at another high school begin to experience mysterious symptoms that no one could explain. This school is in Danvers, Massachusetts. 18 girls there came down with what they were calling hiccups, tics, grunts and yelps. As in Leroy. Almost all the affected girls in Danvers played on the school sports teams. But unlike in Leroy, there were no giant town meetings, no catastrophizing in the media, no Emren Brockovich, no affected girls in their families come forward in the press, no acknowledgement from the school or the state that this might be an h word thing.

Unlike in Leroy, the hysteria around the possible hysteria in Danvers never materialized. Eventually, the symptoms appear to have resolved themselves. In the end, the state quietly released a report saying there was no environmental or infectious cause of the outbreak, no mention of mass psychogenic illness. However, an internal memo from a state health official would later be uncovered that said they couldn't rule in or out that possibility. But you know what's really interesting? We shouldn't be surprised that Danvers, Massachusetts was able to keep a lid on their outbreak. In fact, Danvers is a place that knows a thing or two about how to cover the tracks of a suspected mass psychogenic illness. They had done it before, in 1752. That is when they changed the name of the village to Danvers. A fresh start from what it had originally been known as Salem, Massachusetts. Goosebumps. Right, here's my takeaway. You can call it Salem or you can call it Danvers. We're still dealing with the same old phenomenon. You can call it mass hysteria or a mass psychogenic illness, or the h word. It's still real, and it's part of the human experience. And you can call it Leroy, or you can call it Leroy, but this outbreak is still going to end one way or the other.

And somehow, remarkably, the people in Leroy find a way to pick one way and the other. That's next time on the series finale of hysterical number one, I don't have conversion disorder. I never did.

Tonight we have some news. Some of the girls apparently have gotten better over the past three weeks.

How are you doing?

Yeah, better.

And I understand conversion disorder worked. It was accurate for those other girls that it worked for.

As soon as I was like, I.

Have a real answer for you. They were like, no, we're done.

We're good.

Follow hysterical on the Wondery app, Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge all episodes early and ad free right now by joining Wondery in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey@wondery.com. survey. And if you have a tip about a story that you think we should investigate, please write to us@wondery.com. tips Hysterical is a production of wondery and Pineapple street studios. Our lead producer is Henry Milovsky. Our associate producer is Marie Alexa Kavanaugh, producer Sophie Bridges, managing producer Erin Kelly, senior producer Lena Mastiz. Additional production by Zandra Ellen. Diane Hansen is our editor. Our executive editor is Joel Lovella. Fact checking by Natsume Ajisaka. Mixing by Hannah Brown. Our head of sound and engineering is Raj Makhija. Original music composed and performed by Dina Maccabee. Legal services for Pineapple street from Crystal Tupia for wondery. Our senior producers are Lizzie Bassett and Claire Chambers. Coordinating producer Mariah Gossett. Senior managing producer Callum Plews. Hysterical is written and executive produced by me. I'm Dan Taberski. Our executive producers for Pineapple street are Max Linsky, Henry Milowski, Asha Saluja, and Jenna Weiss Berman.

Executive producers for Wondery are Morgan Jones, Marshall Louie and Jen Sargent. Thanks for listening.