Hysterical Stares Into the Abyss

Photo: Wondery

In the fall of 2011, a high-school girl in Le Roy started to display motor tics initially resembling Tourette’s syndrome. Her face twitched. Her arms flailed. She experienced difficulties with speech and became prone to verbal outbursts. But then a second girl at the school began to display the same behavior. After the second, another. Two makes for a curiosity; three a concern. By the time the tally metastasized past a dozen girls, it looked like a contagion. “As the weather grew colder in Le Roy that fall, the symptoms continued to come to life,” narrates Dan Taberski in Hysterical, an audio docuseries that revisits the medical mystery more than a decade later. “An irregular heartbeat finding rhythm.”

Competing theories emerged. Some unaffected students suspected that their peers were faking the malady for attention. Later, the specter of environmental pollution came into play, a natural hypothesis for the industrial town about an hour from Niagara Falls, where the Love Canal disaster, in which toxic-chemical dumping was discovered in the late 1970s to have harmed residents over decades, still looms large. In the case of these girls, state authorities, the media, and large swathes of the community coalesced on a more striking explanation: “conversion disorder,” or the condition in which a person exhibits physiological responses to emotional trauma or extreme stress. In other words, the girls were deemed to be suffering from mass hysteria. The mystery was the stuff of media frenzies, perfect fodder for cable news and daytime shows as it played out.

Taberski, a son of Western New York, grew up not far from Le Roy. He says that he spent a lot of his life there “wearing giant winter coats with giant knit hats with giant pom-poms on top.” Balancing a strong adoration for his old stomping grounds with a sense of moral clarity, the seven-part Hysterical, which he makes with longtime collaborator Henry Molofsky and a team of producers, sees him mounting an interrogation of the “mass hysteria” diagnosis with an explicit intent to keep the girls’ experience front and center.

In this, the series carries some spiritual connection to The Retrievals, the Serial Productions–New York Times audio project from last year that grappled with the failure of key American systems to seriously consider women’s pain. When Taberski asks Emily, who was in eighth grade when she contracted symptoms, whether she experienced any undisclosed trauma at the time, the response feels deflating. “Not anything that would’ve made it into something like this,” she says. “Typical eighth-grade trauma.” Taberski is a preternaturally empathetic documentarian, approaching the story with care where it’s dearly needed and skepticism where it’s sorely deserved. He’s also a seasoned hand who knows the culture of the medium he works in — sadly, podcasting is increasingly home to salacious Investigation Discovery–style storytelling — and so he follows Emily’s response by cutting off any Galaxy Brain suggestions. “There’s no subtext here, by the way, no suggestion that anyone is hiding something or in denial about what’s really going on,” he cuts in over narration. “For a lot of the girls and the parents in Le Roy, it just didn’t feel true.”

Taberski also cuts off any indication that Hysterical will drive toward a clear answer to the mystery. He chases down many of the case’s hypotheses and oddities, but the human brain remains a black box of mysteries through the end. This does not mean that Hysterical does not arrive at an outcome. The natural human desire to scramble for meaning, even if the explanation harms individuals, emerges as the real subject. Late in the series, we learn about how a student who actually suffered from Tourette’s was treated by the school and the community as a kind of scapegoat for the outbreak. “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, and you are the few,” she recounts being told, an absolutely horrible thing for a high-school child to hear. But as easy as it might have been for Hysterical to paint the scene in simple terms of persecutors and the persecuted, Taberski practices a remarkable empathy for where the broader community was coming from. Everyone just wants their own child to be safe, even if they ultimately have to turn on each other; therein lies the tragedy.

Taberski is one of the finest audio documentarians working today, yet he still seems underappreciated. Part of this likely has to do with the waning power of narrative audio, which has become displaced in recent years by aggressively corporate celebrity–centric chat podcasts. But even during the so-called golden age of narrative podcasting (2014 to 2022-ish), his work was never fêted as widely and as often as, say, This American Life and its widening diaspora of producers. This could be owed to the nature of his breakout hit, 2017’s Missing Richard Simmons, an impish jaunt that sought to track down the titular reclusive fitness star (who died earlier this summer) while doubling as an adoring biography that drew pearl-clutching condemnation from the Times, which called it “morally suspect” for what it deemed to be excessively invasive tactics. I never quite shared that assessment. In any case, Taberski has gone on to produce a body of work that’s as striking for its humanism as its formalistic diversity. Among his projects: Running From COPS, an extended critique of the copaganda reality show; The Line, a vigorous investigation into a war crime in Iraq; and 9/12, an essayistic series taking stock of the manifold experiences processing the long tail of the September 11 attacks.

What happened to the girls in Le Roy is ripe territory for narrative podcasting — far enough in the past to sort through the mess undisturbed, close enough to the present to feel urgent, and inconclusive enough to beg for more investigation. Conversion disorder is a tricky and fundamentally gendered diagnosis. When social media was inevitably fingered as a suspected disease vector, the situation firmly resembled a case of ancient prejudices against young girls being adapted to fit contemporary freak-outs.

All the traits that make Taberski’s work so distinct — a sobriety over the material, a gloriously wry writing voice, a strong knack for compassionate interviewing — are very much present in the series. But Hysterical sees Taberski taking a step further into philosophical territory with a greater, quiet willingness to sit with the abyss. This series explores our constant failure to deal with uncertainty and how fear of the unknown often turns us into monsters. To be hysterical is to be human, and this is a truth that’s both depressing to live with and liberating to learn.