Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  Before he was born, my wife and I visited child care facilities all over town, scoping them out as we had college campuses for ourselves years earlier. We asked questions of each center with the thoroughness of inexperienced parents who knew so very little about why we were asking these questions at all, only that it seemed somehow right to carefully inspect the infant rooms for signs of neglect. To search out the reassuring smell of talcum. To learn the composition of the chemicals they used to clean the surfaces. To know the rate they were going to change diapers and how often they were going to feed him.

  The Google children’s center was one of the most impressive we’d seen. To get in, we put our names on a years-long waiting list with hundreds of other families vying for a space. We only managed to get a spot on a technicality. The center was opening a new infant room, and to secure our admission we agreed to pay tuition for ninety days before our son was old enough to actually attend. As painful as this was on our wallet, we agreed the price for admission was worth avoiding the emotional cost of letting this opportunity slip away.

  Our son has been at the children’s center for a couple of weeks, when one of the infant/toddler teachers hesitantly approaches me during pickup one afternoon. She’s wondering if I have a few minutes to talk privately with the center’s director. I feel that hot, loose wire of worry start to vibrate in my chest. I leave my son on a blue mat in the middle of the playroom, the loop of his collar damp from the drool of teething.

  Outside, I meet up with a short woman with red hair and raw red nostrils from a cold she’s had all winter. We move away from the rooms to an empty playground, out of earshot of anyone else, and she smiles timidly.

  A couple of days before we started dropping off our son, she says, another child in his room went home with mouth herpes.

  “This sounds like a common cold sore,” my wife later reasons, always the rational party in our two-person congress. “What’s to worry about?”

  True, I say, but the director thought it was important to tell us for some reason, and she’s provided me with just enough information for me to be concerned. Exposure to herpes before the age of one, I’ve now learned, puts children at risk for developing painful sores all over their bodies. The virus also causes outbreaks throughout the child’s life and can scar. The cycle of an occurrence is reliably two weeks, a sequence that begins with the formation of a blister and ends when the virus goes dormant. During that time, the center bans an infected child from attending. Yet the real problem is that a person is most contagious right before a blemish appears. There’s no way to know that a baby is passing the virus along until it is too late to do anything about it. Meanwhile, the child can now mouth any toy and drool on every kid in the nursery.

  “We can’t just leave him here,” I argue. Undoubtedly, we have a responsibility to protect our son. I feel an urge to throw my body over his like a force field. True, none of the other parents are pulling their children from the room. Maybe they aren’t aware of how dire this situation is. Or perhaps, I reason, they are just waiting for one family to make the first move. I weigh the option of yanking my son out of the program against the worry that doing so might be a clear overreaction. By fleeing, we might start some kind of stampede, a revolt that finds parents perhaps needlessly transferring their children to other programs. I certainly don’t want to humiliate or isolate the infected baby, either. Still, if it will mean sparing other children from the risk of catching this virus, maybe I have an obligation to ignite this frenzy.

  The children’s center has procedures in place to mitigate the risk and keep children healthy. They clean the nursery with extra care, doubling down on wiping the surfaces with biodegradable, USDA-certified plant-based cleaners and a volatile organic compound‒free water-based agent infused with lime and cypress oils. They dip the toys in baths of lemon juice and hydrogen peroxide. They replace the mattress covers with fresh linens and wear rubber gloves when handling toys that the child, whoever he or she is, has mouthed. Since the staff isn’t at liberty to identify the carrier by name, this just means I’m going to have to spend the next few weeks eyeballing the playroom until I notice the pox. Then I’ll know whom to avoid; then I can make my baby safe.

  It isn’t difficult to figure out who the carrier is. About two weeks later, a baby girl in the room develops a small lesion on her upper right cheek. Knowing the source does little except rile my anxiety.

  I’m going to protect our son.

  He’s at risk.

  I’m acting ridiculous.

  I’m conflicted.

  Even in the heat of the herpes outbreak, I’m aware that ours is a problem of privilege. We are lucky to have my wife’s job, and equally fortunate to have access to the kind of services living in Silicon Valley provides. And, yes, it is unapologetically an upper-class problem, the choice between leaving our son at this dazzling center and transferring him to another. This much I do know: rich or poor, we are collectively responsible for the well-being of these children, yet the right thing to do remains elusive.

  One afternoon as I pick up my baby from the nursery it occurs to me that another child, a little girl, has been suspiciously absent all week. I ask one of the teachers about it. She flashes a look that tells me everything I need to know. Despite the center’s best efforts, the virus has claimed its second victim.

  Do I feel horrible and guilty and ashamed for my inaction? I do, because on some level I know there are things I might have done differently to influence others, to sway them even on an unconscious level. Wielding the power of fear-based hysteria might have prompted parents to pull their children, sparing the second infant who caught the virus, and those who might catch it still. Instead, I’ve done nothing. With my inaction I’ve failed to protect them.

  Chapter 9

  Shifting Strategies, I Turn to Tracking Hysteria

  Not long after permanently pulling my son from the child care facility, I’m back on the campus of Gunn High. I pass golf carts parked under a canopy for maintenance workers and posters promoting the upcoming spring musical. Classes have just let out for the afternoon, and the walkways are teeming with students.

  My investigation into a cure for the strange contagion event has recently shifted direction a bit. Bulimia, my early model for the investigation, only highlighted how difficult it is to treat the problem head-on without encountering its remarkable defense mechanisms. Tools of treatment become tools of spread.

  Instead, I’ve determined that I need to attack this more strategically. The task has now become one of identifying the specific social contagions contributing to the strange contagion event in this town. Only once we identify them might we counteract them. In my conversation with Nicholas Christakis, he spoke about the way in which thoughts, behaviors, and emotions catch. He called it flow. My new supposition is that if Palo Alto were able to stop the flow of enough individual social contagions, maybe it could bring down the beast itself.

  Of course, uncovering the mechanisms behind individual social contagions becomes problematic, considering that each behaves according to its own rules. Contagious weight gain spreads faster among women than men, for instance, whereas gender matters little with social contagions like emotional burnout. Making social contagions even more difficult to track is the fact that they don’t operate in a vacuum. They interact with each other. Also, not every idea, behavior, or emotion spreads as easily as others. Which things catch, and how far they spread, varies, adding more complexity to the puzzle.

  I came away from the experience at my son’s child care center with an idea about where I should look first: hysteria, a natural consequence of this roiling and churning storm. Today I’m at Gunn High to learn how hysteria manifests here and to what effect.

  This is only my fourth visit, but I’ve already intuited the goodness of these students and the enormity of their capabilities. There is also something hard in their eyes, and a flatness that better belongs to people two or three times their age, people who have
lived long enough to experience disappointments and heart-bursting ache. Since kids from here started dying, many have.

  The students present themselves to the world as a series of mismatched illusions. I find it nearly impossible to resolve the contradictions, of which there are many. Deborah Brenner-Liss facilitates therapy as far south as Silicon Valley, this place I am coming to know as one of extremes. “The kids in Palo Alto, they have a different temperament than kids in other places,” she’d said when we’d met. “Young people are running as fast as they can, and at younger and younger ages. They’re trying to achieve in all areas, even those that are internally inconsistent and very difficult to reach.” There was fear in her voice when she said this and I sensed disappointment. Having lived in this town for a little more than half a year now, I’ve noticed that dissonance as well: a kind of adulthood superimposed on the bodies of babes. The kids at Gunn High, barely out of elementary school and halfway to graduating from the Ivy League universities many are so determined to attend, are on the path to reach some unprecedented level of success, stacking their transcripts with AP courses and extracurricular activities, stuffing their résumés, and looking to the future with hope and with worry.

  Then again, maybe I am reading these kids wrong. When I ask students about their lives at Gunn High, they usually say all of the right things: grades don’t matter; social support is their safety net; self-care is important; a rich life is one defined by relationships and love, not money or success. I believe that they believe they are telling me the truth. I will also come to believe that, for many of them, the opposite is also true. The grade point average that bears so much credence in the school becomes both an encumbrance and the yardstick by which one measures one’s value and worth in many other settings. Good friends and good times come easily, but they also come at the expense of time better spent on refining oneself, sharpening one’s acumen, polishing the sheen to outshine all the others in a field already defined by its exuberance. I question what it is about this town that invites such extremes and wildly varying contradictions. For the kids of Palo Alto, everything that doesn’t matter matters to the core.

  As for what vulnerabilities distinguish the living from those who have ended their lives, I’m not entirely sure. Not yet anyway, even as I am coming to better know their stories. One of the children who died liked working with cloth and fabric, looping thread through buttons, infusing character into dramatic plays through costumes and design. One was a varsity team wrestler, aggressive on the mat, a master at sprawls and pins, at throwing his body and countering the weight of another. One played tennis, lunged and volleyed, grunted and sweat and leapt. One was active in student affairs, listening to ideas, learning to work within systems and how to challenge them. Despite our individual experiences at the high school and beyond it, the fact remains that each of us is equally susceptible to social contagions flitting about among the mundane and the ordinary plots of daily life. Every moment offers great potential for mirroring others, the opportunity to incorporate and map foreign instincts and desires onto our own personalities. I’m learning that, despite any personal differences, the language of social contagions speaks to all of us, and that includes each of the students at Gunn High.

  I am on campus today to meet with one of the people who knows these students well. His name is Paul Dunlap, and he has taught English and drama for twenty years at the high school. I learned about him shortly after he began sponsoring a student-led watchdog group for signs of suicidal thinking and psychological trouble called ROCK: Reach Out. Care. Know.

  A broad-framed man with a military-style crew cut awaits me in his surprisingly expansive classroom. Empty desks fan out in a weblike pattern. He folds his long body into one of these student-size tables.

  Dunlap tells me that, prior to the first suicide, he’d attended two, and only two, emergency all-staff meetings at Gunn High. The first assembly alerted teachers to the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The second meeting was to inform the staff that a United States–led military coalition had moved into Iraq, signaling the start of war. Those intermittent emergency assemblies have since become semi-routine, beginning with the shocking train fatality of Jean-Paul Blanchard late last school year. By early 2010 “we all started looking at everyone and wondering who’s next,” he tells me. “There’s that feeling you get, looking around, like: Are we going to see everyone tomorrow?”

  In an article for San Francisco magazine, the writer Diana Kapp framed the growing tension within the town in terms of a rising hysteria pushing the community into panic. In my mind, it actually seems to be a kind of double hysteria, part witch hunt for a scapegoat and part fear frenzy. Because no one knows who is going to be next, one has to assume anybody might be. Responding to these fears, the Children’s Health Council, a kind of think tank and multidisciplinary treatment center for school-age kids, will later invite nearly sixty psychologists and educators to form a suicide call-to-action committee. Religious leaders from a dozen denominations have already hosted numerous town symposiums. The school district, civic leaders, and parents, worried and angered and panicked, foster a fear about a dark phenomenon taking the town’s kids.

  Nurturing the contagious frenzy of hysteria is the fact that for every student who has died, people have pulled others off the rails before the train has struck. By now, 3 percent of young people in Palo Alto are making serious attempts on their lives. The number of completed deaths by suicide in this town barrels toward a twentyfold increase in less than a year. Therapists are treating four dozen Gunn High students for suicidal thoughts. It is enough to fuel hysteria among even the most measured of us.

  Dunlap describes the worry in Palo Alto and says he feels that it’s intensifying. Silicon Valley nonprofits specializing in emotional health receive more requests today than ever before. Gunn High has tapped the country’s best-known adolescent psychologists and is bringing in the National Peer Helpers Association to train counselors. Each death has heightened the stakes and the sense of impending doom. It’s not just the school but the town, too, he says, that is swept up in a kind of spontaneous frenzy, reacting to this series of horrible events. Dunlap doesn’t want to admit he is powerless, that we are at a loss for actions and desperate for resolution. So instead he’s created a ritual for his room. “We enact it at the end of every class,” he says. “I have my students turn to their neighbors and promise each other they’re going to see each other again.” It’s really the only thing he is able to think to do.

  Hysteria feeds on our capacity to imagine the worst. Even amid improbability, our belief in the inevitable seals us in our certainty that something bad is coming, is already here, is unstoppable.

  Like many people, I first heard about hysteria in connection with the witch trials of Salem, Massachusetts. When I view the trials today through the lens of functionality and psychology, I see a town’s desperate attempt to relieve the paranoia and anxieties associated with periods of rapid social and economic changes. Historical accounts from the seventeenth century play heavily on the myth of a frenetic female condition that Hippocrates in ancient Greece called wandering womb. When the playwright Arthur Miller writes about young girls taken by hysterics in The Crucible, he represents this furious state with a show of children acting as though they are cornered animals, screaming and writhing, infected by a kind of mania. In college, I read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which described hysteria’s telltale signs of dizziness, anxiety, feelings of suffocation, instability, melancholia, and boredom. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James portrays a governess’s slow decent into madness as a fever of fear, paranoia, and hallucinations. Even Lady Brett Ashley’s flirtatiousness, promiscuity, and independent spirit might have signaled symptoms of hysteria in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises.

  An epidemic of hysteria stormed nineteenth-century Europe, where it landed one out of every five people in French madhouses. The neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot’s investigation into hysteria looked
upon the condition as a physical illness caused by hereditary defects. He began a fruitless search for a dysfunction of the central nervous system. Hysteria, he theorized, was the result of a mysterious lesion hidden somewhere within the body that caused a psychological illness. Charcot was also among the first to use hypnosis to demonstrate how hysteria and the mind were innately connected. His model led the psychiatrist Hippolyte Bernheim to interpret hysteria as an exaggerated reaction to stress. Because people are highly suggestible beings, he wrote, under the right conditions anyone can succumb to hysterics.

  Hysteria, he continued, takes on the qualities of a social contagion, with the ability to manifest and spread over populations by way of mere suggestion. Sigmund Freud, in adopting Charcot’s hypnosis technique, regressed patients to the origins of their symptoms. So remarkable was this power of suggestion that Freud claimed he was able to cure hysterical convulsions, paralysis, blindness, and fits. I can’t imagine it was lost on Freud that suggestibility, which allowed him to treat hysteria, was the very same mechanism that led to hysteria in the first place.

  In reading account upon account of hysteria throughout history, one of the things that becomes painfully evident is the effectiveness of fear as its unwavering catalyst. I think about this, and about Paul Dunlap’s fear of the future and of the unknown. Since our conversation, I’ve found myself back in the archives to try to discover how other towns ensnared in strange contagion events have assuaged fear-based hysteria. My research turns up numerous stories.

  The one that sticks with me, that turns in my head, is the case of Fishers, Indiana. In 2004 its residents gathered in a small municipal building to talk about the fear of an imminent terrorist attack by Al Qaeda operatives on their rural home. With national security focused on the terror threats in big cities, people worried extremists might instead look for unprotected targets. Perhaps a grocery store in Kansas. An amusement park in Texas. A mall in Nebraska. The worry was so real that the CIA held terrorism briefings with small-town law enforcement officials designed to empower rural areas to defend themselves. The Department of Homeland Security even provided resources and counterterrorism training. It didn’t matter that a threat of international terrorism in Fishers never existed, or that there was no evidence at any time to suggest the town was a target. However unfounded, the fear itself was real.