Tanganyika laughter epidemic

The Tanganyika laughter epidemic was an outbreak of mass hysteria that began in 1962 in and around the village of Kashasha on the western shore of Lake Victoria, in what was then Tanganyika and is now part of Tanzania, close to the Ugandan border. It started on 30 January 1962 at a mission-run girls boarding school with three pupils and spread until 95 of the 159 students, aged 12 to 18, were affected. Attacks of laughing and crying, along with restlessness, pain, fainting, breathing difficulty and rashes, lasted from hours to about two weeks, and the school was closed in March. Cases then followed in nearby villages and other schools, roughly 1,000 people in all, before the outbreak faded after about eighteen months. Explanations in the medical and social literature treat it as a stress-linked mass psychogenic illness, tied to the pressures on young people in a newly independent country and to the clash between strict traditional home life and mission-school ideas.