Strange Contagion

by Lee Daniel Kravetz

  These anecdotes tell me that a social contagion like hysteria may run its course, but it leaves indelible marks on the culture and its collective memory. Back home, in the unsteady wake of the student suicides, panic leads the district to hire well-regarded mental health specialists. A consortium of faith leaders, doctors, and police produce nearly two dozen initiatives to create a supportive atmosphere for Palo Alto children. The town weighs the creation of volunteer track watchers to stand guard at the rails. The school district mulls a system-wide mental health curriculum and a suicide-awareness training program for all faculty. Schools are overhauling their homework policies to lower student stress. They shift first period to allow the students to get a bit more sleep. I don’t know if these measures are necessary or if they’re overblown responses. Some of these measures seem only logical.

  Then again, what if these school district maneuvers—manifested out of our frantic need to regain control and bolstered by a feeling that we have so little of it—only reinforced the thought that every child is in danger of catching the kind of desperation that leads to suicide? In which case, we’re simply perpetuating a false belief that, like fear, can quickly become a self-fulfilling prophecy, heightening anxiety and stress responses. Not unlike the double-edged sword of awareness, stopping this social contagion becomes yet another catch-22. To stop it, we must act. To act, we cannot stop it.

  Yet stopping hysteria is crucial. And it is possible, through measured and fact-based responses. At the same time, if what I’ve found here in Kern County is any indication of what will happen once we snuff out hysteria at home, then the memory of what’s happened in Palo Alto may still doom us to lasting fear, uncertainty, and suspicion for generations to come.

  Chapter 11

  Tracking Nocebos and the Mystery of the DeKalb County Windmills

  It isn’t until I’m moving through the low canyon of Altamont Pass on my drive home from the Central Valley that it occurs to me that there’s still an element of this social contagion left unresolved. It’s the very thing that makes Palo Alto’s situation different from those in places like Kern County and Tanzania. If hysteria tends to spread fast, far, and wide, why aren’t towns outside of Palo Alto worried about the risk of suicide affecting their children to the same degree we are? Palo Alto is unique, but not so unique that other places, especially those in Silicon Valley sharing the same demographic characteristics, populated by wealthy, tech-driven, highly ambitious people, are not subject to the same factors. The nearby towns of Los Gatos, Los Altos, and Menlo Park also report suicides, although none are responding quite like Palo Alto is. In fact, some places are turning away help from social services, which is either the most rational and measured response possible or an act of mind-boggling denial. In either case, hysteria in Palo Alto remains confined within its finely drawn borders.

  My flight lands at Chicago Midway International Airport on a gray wintery morning. I pull out of the rental car lot and drive sixty-three miles west, to the sleepy province of DeKalb County, where brown and gray barns scatter across northeast Illinois farmland. Small townships delineate the countryside, once run through by the Zephyr streamliner trains. Winter is heavy on the cold ground, with old soot-colored snow and sparse, empty trees. Over the past few years, big flatbed trucks loaded with blocky generators have exited Interstate 55 and driven provisional roads scratched into the geography. They’ve unloaded 126 wind turbine towers that now rise against the county’s skyline. Together the turbines generate enough electricity to power 50,000 homes.

  People closest to the four-hundred-foot-tall turrets receive more than just electricity. The turbines interrupt their sleep patterns. They also generate faint ringing in their ears. Emissions cause pounding migraine headaches. The motion of the vanes also creates a shadow flicker that triggers disorientation, vertigo, and nausea.

  Grievances against wind farms are not exclusive to DeKalb County, with a perplexing illness dogging many a wind turbine project. Similar complaints have surfaced in Canada, the UK, Italy, and various US cities like Falmouth, Massachusetts. In 2009 the Connecticut pediatrician Nina Pierpont offered an explanation. Wind turbines, she argued, produce low-frequency noises that induce disruptions in the inner ear and lead to an illness she calls wind turbine syndrome. Her evidence, now largely discredited for sample size errors, a lack of a control group, and no peer review, seemed to point to infrasound coming off of the wind farms. Since then more than a dozen scientific reviews have firmly established that wind turbines pose no unique health risks and are fundamentally safe. It doesn’t seem to matter to the residents of DeKalb County, whose symptoms are quite real.

  The professor Mark S. Micale writes that hysteria is an alternative form of communication, a proto-language for people who otherwise might not be able to speak or even admit to what they feel. Understanding hysteria comes down to deciphering what a social contagion, in its proto-language, is saying. Wind farm hysteria is, at its core, a conversation led by those fighting bitterly to keep the turbines off their land, a position that grew so contentious that it provoked in some a psychosomatic response.

  The science behind this unique and primitive conversation can be traced to the early sixties, when the physician Walter Kennedy experimented with the placebo effect. Kennedy marveled over the way an inert sugar pill induces positive health results. To this day the exact mechanisms behind the placebo effect continue to perplex even while they prove useful in changing the neural circuitry and complex chemical makeup of the brain in up to 80 percent of patients. Mental focus, personal expectations, the environment in which a patient receives the placebo, and even the shape, size, and color of the pill itself lead people to experience genuine pain relief, lower blood pressure, and better moods. Placebos are so influential that, in one of the more fascinating effect studies, Harvard researchers found that deception, which figures largely into making patients believe they are taking a real pill, is not necessary. Investigators in a groundbreaking 2010 examination came clean and told patients they were going to be taking placebo pills. Nevertheless, participants reported twice as much symptom relief as the group of patients that received no treatment at all.

  But it was back in 1961 that Kennedy discovered a particular kind of placebo, a social contagion that worked on a massive scale. Instead of inducing positive effects, the nocebo reaction, as he came to call it, allowed for the equivalent inert sugar pill to cause people to experience unpleasant effects. As a field of study, nocebos went on to provide physicians and psychologists with a new understanding of the power of the mind. Doctors in 2006 falsely told Parkinson’s patients they were switching off their brain pacemakers, and soon enough their Parkinson’s symptoms increased. In 2010, researchers at Sapienza University of Rome asked a group of lactose intolerant people to drink milk. Even though they were really given glucose, nearly half experienced pain. Later, Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston confirmed that the nocebo effect was more widespread than anything they had ever seen with placebos and powerful enough to induce nausea, stomach pains, fatigue, vomiting, muscle weakness, colds, ringing in the ears, memory disturbances, and other unfavorable health outcomes.

  Like placebos, they take advantage of our highly suggestible nature. They rely on intellectual, emotional, and physical vulnerabilities. The sugar pill is often a single object we come to ritualistically, and obsessively, ruminate over until the expectation of poor consequences brings on symptoms. Negative expectations ramp up the pain regions of the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, the prefrontal cortex, and the insula. The nocebo effect influences the brain’s neurotransmitters, which regulate our moods. In one case study, researchers observed a person who was attempting to complete suicide by swallowing twenty-six pills. Not realizing that they were sugar tablets, the subject experienced dangerously low blood pressure based solely on the belief that the overdose was going to be deadly. After the subject learned he’d ingested
an inert substance designed to have no effect, the symptoms disappeared. Our bodies are not naturally immune to the mind any more than they are to most viruses.

  The residents of DeKalb County bought into the idea that these turbines cause physical harm. I question what it is we buy into at home—the frenetic optimism around Palo Alto’s education system, about the stamina of our children, and about the power of place. Perhaps the culture of Palo Alto is a kind of nocebo, too, the Silicon Valley equivalent of wind turbine farms. The town manifests the false idea that the very act of residing in Palo Alto produces negative health consequences in its kids—that the town cultivates pressure, stress, and oversized personal expectations. Just as the people in Kern County maintain a sense of uncertainty about the status of child molesters among them, a what-if exists within the population of Palo Alto. I am as guilty as anyone of hosting this uncertainty. Something irrational in me worries that the town will adversely influence my son—that as we move him through its school system, he’ll internalize, as we all do, demands both spoken and silent. The nearby municipalities outside of Palo Alto aren’t responding the same way because Palo Alto is the nocebo. Real or perceived, the crippling pressure of high expectation, an enormous personal burden to achieve a level of perfectionism, and other traits we are led to believe Palo Alto has taken on are what’s led its children to become depressed, anxious, numb to pleasure, and suicidal.

  Once again it falls on the community to set the record straight, to deliver accurate and scientifically sound facts, and to help the rest of us avoid buying into this hysteria, believing that this town brings harm to its children. The natural decibel level of fear is high, so rational voices, with rational answers, must speak louder. The town isn’t going to make our children catch anxiety, depression, a belief in uncompromising promise, skyrocketing expectations, heart-bursting loneliness, or suicidal thinking. And yet I think back to the studies I’ve read about patients knowingly swallowing sugar pills and continuing to report medical benefits or health impairments. Awareness, as Gerald Russell told me, is paramount to spreading a strange contagion like bulimia. But now it’s clear that, not only do we have to worry about concrete facts like the mechanics of binging and purging to spread a strange contagion, but we also have to contend with awareness based on false beliefs, facts that are not facts at all but remain, nonetheless, those that people hold deeply.

  Despite assurances that the wind farms are perfectly safe, regardless of the facts people have read and in some cases have come to fully believe, there remains suspicion, because people are getting sick, and people are laid out, and people are afraid.

  I’m in DeKalb County to see if the windmills will make me feel any different. I know they are harmless, and yet the mind is far more powerful than the knowledge it holds. My heart rate will accelerate. I will feel the pinch of a migraine behind my eyes. A wave of nausea will knock me down.

  But I feel nothing.

  I give it some time. Drive through the small town of Genoa. Grab a bite to eat at a sandwich shop off Route 64 in Sycamore.

  None of these effects has taken hold yet.

  As hysteria is a kind of psychosis, I suppose it’s possible to catch madness. In his short story “The Quantity Theory of Insanity,” the writer Will Self considers a scenario in which there is only a limited amount of saneness in the world. Lunacy moves like a virus from person to person, latching onto individuals for brief periods of time before letting go and jumping into the next body. People are living their lives, going to work, raising their families, and waiting for their turns. Here I am, moving across the land of wind turbines, waiting for the madness to grip me. And here we are, existing in Palo Alto, still waiting for the madness to let us go.

  Part IV

  The Motivators

  “God, how we get our fingers in each other’s clay. That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make of each other.”

  ―Ray Bradbury

  Chapter 12

  Discovering the “Hard Drive” Virus

  This town pushes people to push harder. That’s the belief as Roni Habib frames it for me. It’s as though, he suggests, his students have contracted a caffeine-like stimulant that engenders a disconnect with reality, that gets the heart rate pumping furiously, that inculcates a dependency on this personal drive, that numbs them, and that yields a dampening anhedonia. The exhaustion that threatens to overtake them is one they will fight to push, push, push through.

  Right now as we talk, Habib is locking their grades for the semester, rating and ranking his students. He’s logging their scores like diagnoses. “Everyone points to the fact that these kids are driven,” he says. “They want to succeed. They’ll always go the extra mile.” He sees this far more now as a teacher than he did as a student at Gunn High, but it was part of the culture here even back then in the late nineties, this pervasive desire to take the hardest classes and to do so as though you’re in the middle of an intense competition. Or an all-out war. I’ve heard it said in different ways from other teachers in town, from social workers, from therapists, from students, from parents. A researcher at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford I spoke to spent a year visiting high schools around the country, gathering information ahead of a research project. He told me he’d never seen anything like the kind of personal drive rousing students at Gunn High.

  Hysteria is driving fear and hypervigilance through this town, but something else is driving these kids. There’s fear, yes, of failure and uncertainty, but there’s something richer, too.

  “It’s more than kids thinking it’s the Ivy Leagues or bust,” Habib says.

  “It’s a personal challenge,” I offer.

  “No, it’s more like they’ve caught a sense that it’s in their best interest to work like mad,” he clarifies. “Generally speaking, it’s all they’ve ever known.”

  And it’s obvious why: this contagious work ethic—the kind that drives the creation of better products, better workplace environments, better leadership models, better transparency across processes, and better product iterations—is the philosophy of Silicon Valley, a shining example of innovation that is also a place where employees log sixty- to eighty-hour workweeks, motivated by a basic intention, to do it better.

  The characteristics of Silicon Valley’s unspoken mantra might be responsible for instilling in children super-high expectations, extreme drive, hyperfocus, or perfectionistic tendencies. Still, I wonder about the validity of these claims. And in the end, is one’s tendency to catch motivation really so bad?

  So I peel back stratas of history overlaying this place by revisiting the development of the first vacuum tube by the Federal Telegraph Company and the founding of corporations like Magnavox, Hewlett Packard, and Varian Associates. The seeds of a deep-seated work ethic sprouted from this bedrock. But this kind of extreme drive to succeed doesn’t belong to a single unique culture, and it never has. The professor of philosophy Musa Owoyemi presents the tenets of a strong work ethic as a series of contrasting associations, beliefs about the moral superiority of hard work over leisure, pride over carelessness, sacrifice over extravagance, earned over unearned income. It is about a commitment to working hard, he writes, and doing so for the purposes of wealth, societal obligation, the betterment of the community, and, as some contend, rewards in the afterlife. Judeo-Christian memes about the value of a strong work ethic influenced capitalists across Northern Europe in the sixteenth century and spread to America through the Germanic immigration.

  Eventually, US fortitude and the principles of the Protestant work ethic intertwined and created the American myth of the self-made person, one who starts from nothing and becomes someone of value and importance through ability, resourcefulness, and resilience. In both boardrooms and classrooms, a belief in a work ethic transmits through peer modeling and proselytizing. People naturally adopt ideas and standards when they have either an economic or an educational motive for doing so.

 
The business writer Eric Chester highlights the better transmissible characteristics of a contagious strong work ethic—things like positive energy, professional attire, ambition, integrity, and gratitude—which people can, and do, unconsciously catch from others. The positive spillover improves bottom lines and becomes a hidden driver of great performance.

  But the opposite is also true. Writing on social and emotional learning, the psychologist Daniel Goleman finds that a poor work ethic introduces a kind of social virus to an otherwise cohesive and well-functioning system. It threatens to impede motivation. Stunt creativity. Halt learning. Maim cooperation. It also stokes conflict. In scenarios where team members are dependent on one another, a person with a poor work ethic triggers a natural move to restore balance. As a result, group members collectively, and often unconsciously, reduce the amount of work contributions all around. From here, a subtle and automatic cascade occurs. Over time, a single person with a bad work ethic can create a company-wide atmosphere of problematic behavior. The social contagion spreads from one team to many teams. Businesses lose more than half a trillion dollars a year due to diminished employee motivation and burnout, which wreaks havoc on productivity, recruitment, and training costs. The more exposure people have to those infected by a bad work ethic contagion, the more it spreads.

  It doesn’t help matters that an employee with a poor work ethic has a natural advantage in groups. A 2006 study in the journal Research in Organizational Behavior suggests that negative attitudes are heavier than positive ones. Because not every social contagion carries equal influence, the lowest, poorest-functioning teammate, the person who’s short on agreeableness and functioning, determines the performance of an entire group. If I were to add a number score to every member of a team according to positive or negative work ethic, the most negative among them would singlehandedly predict overall group performance better than the average personality score. In fact, the most cooperative and hardworking person among the group will have a rough time counterbalancing a singular bad influence.