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| Dissenting View Whose hysteria? By Lesley Cooper and Martin Walker Note: The information on this website is presented for
educational purposes and This document was provided by In the last issue of Continuum, Alex Russell, AIDS activist and editor of Death Camp climbed into bed with Elaine Showalter, the populist post modern academic and author of Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics, Picador 1997. We think this was a big mistake. (Dissenting View: Communicable Disease. Continuum, vol 4, no 6, June/July 1997). Showalter is a member of a group of critics, historians and anthropologists informally known as the ‘New Hysterians’. The thesis of her most recent much publicized book, is that throughout history hysteria has served as a form of expression for people who are unable to give voice to their feelings. Whilst psychiatrists generally debunked the concept of hysteria in the post-freudian, feminist seventies and eighties, the New Hysterians of the nineties insist that the condition is still with us but like ‘HIV’ has cleverly taken on new forms. They argue that hysterics’ conversion symptoms differ across time because individuals collage together manifestations drawing from a contemporary ‘symptom pool’. According to Showalter, hysteria in the 1990s has coalesced psychological epidemics around contemporary archetypical themes, such as multiple personality syndrome, satanic ritual abuse, alien abduction, Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and such ‘new’ illnesses as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or ME. These cultural narratives of hysteria, Showalter says, have multiplied uncontrollably in the 1990s and, in the name of rationalism, must be stopped. A number of scientifically based, campaigning groups such as CSICOP (The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal) and the American National Council Against Health Fraud together with its British sibling, HealthWatch, have historically fought this corner, transforming scientifically and industrially unpalatable illnesses into psychiatric disorders. Although Showalter does not mention these groups in her book, she offers the same solutions for the ‘victim’ or ‘sufferer’; ‘good therapists’, the countering of ‘sensational news reports, rumour and fear’, and a stern dose of taking responsibility for your own inadequacies. In his dissenting voice article, Russell, like Schmidt in The AIDS Cult (Lauritsen & Young 1977, Asklepios, Ma. USA), argues that AIDS is an example of epidemic hysteria, or a psychogenic epidemic. He suggests that gay men are suffering from a ‘group fantasy of a poison threat’, of which the key poison, ‘HIV’ is posited as a ‘demon’ or irrational belief. Russell writes, ‘many gay men become ill because their mental and emotional resources are depleted. Recreational drugs ... lead to depression and alienation which in turn induces psychosomatic conditions which in the presence of the bogus HIV positive results are absurdly nominated as ‘AIDS’ – compounding their ‘condition’.’ It is wholly comprehensible that dissenting activists especially those who sail close to post modernism like Russell, in their desire to deconstruct the hysterical paradigm of HIV=AIDS = DEATH, would turn to Showalter. Showalter’s theories appear at first glance to assist lay activists in regaining power and knowledge from a deeply tainted biomedical scientific establishment. Indeed, we empathise when Russell takes up Showalter’s cry that ‘knowledge is the cure’ as a heartfelt response to the ‘HIV’ bone pointing of scientific medicine. The real and the illusory phenomena of AIDS, however, exist on many levels, from its possible bio-medical scientific cause to the socially constructed illusion of a single disease epidemic, which epidemiologists projected would wipe out heterosexual America. It is important to separate the hysterical from the real in the different levels of narrating AIDS. It may be the case that some gay men are tempted to take up AIDS as a tragic mask and act out a death wish choreographed by medical science. And it would be foolish to argue that psychological factors do not contribute to the overall outcome of those who suffer from AIDS-associated illnesses. It is also clearly the case that the medical model of HIV = AIDS = DEATH is a monster conjured up by the nightmares of virologists who have considerable vested interest in a chemotherapeutic solution to ‘AIDS’. None of these dissident themes can, however, take precedence over an organic basis to the very real nature of AIDS-associated illnesses, or make believe AIDS is a ‘psychogenic illness’ – an illness created and passed on through the mind. In reality the hysteria thesis ignores the complexity of the scientific and lay conflicts in ‘AIDS’ as it does in multiple chemical sensitivity, chronic fatigue syndrome and Gulf war syndrome. It disguises the multiple interaction of the political, industrial, ideological and psychological and throws a cloak over the interaction of the possible material, environmental, viral and psychological causes. The workings and the power of orthodox science are complex structural phenomena affected by a number of intrinsic and external factors. Political and social factors have heavily influenced the course of all AIDS research including claims about the origins, reality and causal nature of ‘HIV’. Irrationality and hysteria do clearly exist in the social perception of AIDS but belief in a vacuous ‘theory of hysteria’ is itself as hysterical as the unquestioned acceptance of ‘HIV’ as the cause of ‘AIDS’. While knowledge is undoubtedly the cure, we have to ask, what kind of knowledge, engendered by whom? And we have to admit that dissenting views are sometimes adopted in desperation with a lack of critical rigour. While intellectual and theoretical dissent is a virtue, in the world of strategy, we have to be careful with whom it leads us to lie. The hysteria thesis, just like the HIV hypothesis, disempowers rather than empowers those who wish to stay healthy: the only ‘cure’ for HIV is chemotherapy, while the only cure for a hysterical illness is a psychiatrist. Showalter treats all participants in her hysterical epidemics as ‘cultural dupes’. The subjects’ experience of illness and the insights of many sufferers into their own condition is ignored or belittled and its place taken by the condescending paternalism of the professional clinician, psychologist, psychiatrist or even academic. The latter live almost entirely in a perverted world of theory which never entertains its practical progenitors or casualties. Showalter’s theory is regarded by CFS and GWS activist-sufferers and multiple chemical sensitivity sufferers as a theory which de-legitimates their illness. Many activists who have chronic fatigue syndrome and ME feel that post modem psychiatrists, cultural historians and a number of leading physicians who associate with them have consistently misrepresented their illness, causing them anxiety, distress and sometimes financial suffering. Ironically, these activist-sufferers look to the biomedical sciences, which have so let down the gay community, to save them from this irrationality. Activist-sufferers in the field of ME, MCS and GWS seem to understand that interpretive theories such as Showalter’s are never free floating but always contextualised by political and social perspectives. Because he is himself an active AIDS dissident Alex should know that people with AIDS-associated illnesses are not just searching for any theory, but one which fits the social, political and scientific facts of their case. We have all to be aware of how science, medicine and psychiatry and their links to industry and government, control discourses and disempower sufferers. AIDS activists especially, need to leave their ‘one illness’ isolation, and engage with activists involved in other environmentally caused, immune compromising, iatrogenic and contentiously diagnosed illnesses. By now they should be identifying common enemies and common orthodoxies, understanding the role which professions and disciplines play in the matrix of power which controls us all, healthy and diseased. Rather than trying on New Hysteria like a new jacket, activists could develop a more comprehensive analysis so enabling dissidents to sustain a distance from both the actual hysteria around ‘HIV’, propagated by a biomedical professionals, and the illusory hysteria wrought in words by Showalter around chemical sensitivity. LESLEY COOPER is writing her Ph.D. thesis on the politics of representation of myalgic encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) at the University of Essex, where she holds an MA in Medical Sociology |