The Le Roy Tic Outbreak
Later explainedSummary
In the autumn of 2011, teenagers at a high school in upstate New York began to twitch. Facial tics, jerking limbs, verbal outbursts. It looked like Tourette syndrome, and it spread, and eventually around eighteen students had it.
Environmental testing found nothing. A national media campaign arrived. Erin Brockovich's team came to town.
And the affected students got worse.
Then the cameras left, and the ones who withdrew from the coverage got better, and that is the most important sentence in this record.
What is documented
The onset. From October 2011, students at Le Roy Junior-Senior High School developed sudden, involuntary tics: facial contortions, jerking movements of the head and limbs, and vocal outbursts.
The spread. It began with a small number and grew to around eighteen students, predominantly girls, with at least one boy and one adult woman also affected.
The diagnosis. Neurologists, including at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo, diagnosed conversion disorder: a functional neurological condition in which genuine, involuntary physical symptoms arise without an identifiable organic lesion.
What was excluded. The New York State Department of Health investigated. Environmental toxins were tested for. Infection was considered, including a streptococcal mechanism. The Gardasil vaccine was raised and examined. Nothing was found.
The contamination theory. In 1970 a train derailment several miles from the town had spilled trichloroethylene. The site was investigated. Testing at the school, by the state health department and with EPA involvement, found no evidence of contamination.
Erin Brockovich. Her team became involved, testing for the derailment contamination, and the involvement drew very large national attention.
The media. The story went national. Network morning shows. Cable segments. Reporters in the town. Cameras in the school car park.
The affected got worse. This is recorded by the clinicians who treated them.
Social media. Several of the affected students posted videos of their symptoms to YouTube and Facebook.
This is the feature that makes Le Roy important, and it was noticed at the time. Bartholomew, Wessely and Rubin raised it in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 2012: historically, mass psychogenic illness required proximity. You had to see somebody having an attack. Social media removes that constraint entirely.
Le Roy may be the first well-documented outbreak in which the transmission vector was substantially a screen.
The recovery. Most of the affected recovered. The treating neurologists reported that the patients who withdrew from the media coverage improved, and that those who remained in it did not.
Leading explanations
Conversion disorder, amplified and sustained by media attention. Established.
The mechanism has two halves and both are well understood.
The illness. Conversion disorder produces real, involuntary symptoms. The tics were not performed and were not faked. A person with a functional neurological disorder cannot stop, and being told to stop makes it worse, and being told they are faking it makes it much worse.
The amplification. Attention is the fuel. A symptom that is being filmed, discussed, diagnosed by strangers, and offered as evidence in a dispute about industrial contamination is a symptom under enormous pressure to persist.
The clinical observation, made by the doctors treating them, is the finding that closes the case: the patients who got away from the coverage recovered.
The contamination hypothesis. Not supported. The school was tested. Nothing was found. And a chemical exposure does not select eighteen students out of six hundred, predominantly girls, predominantly in one social network, and it does not resolve when a television crew goes home.
What the popular version gets wrong
"They were faking it." They were not, and the treating neurologists said so repeatedly, and this accusation is the single most damaging thing that was said to these young women. Conversion disorder produces symptoms the patient cannot control. It is a diagnosis, not an accusation.
"The town was poisoned and it was covered up." The site was tested by the state health department with federal involvement, and no contamination of the school was found. A chemical does not choose its victims by friendship group.
"Mass hysteria means it wasn't real." It was entirely real. The tics were real, the distress was real, and the disability was real. What was not real was an external agent.
"Erin Brockovich was helping." The registry does not impute a motive. It records what the clinicians recorded: the arrival of a national campaign, and a deterioration in the patients, and an improvement when it ended.
Current status
Later explained. Conversion disorder, diagnosed at the time, with a documented and clinically observed relationship between media exposure and severity.
The registry keeps this record because it updates the whole category.
Mattoon was propagated by a local newspaper. Seattle by regional papers. The Pokemon Shock by national television. And Le Roy by a smartphone, in a bedroom, at two in the morning, watching somebody you know having an attack.
Proximity used to be the limit on how far this kind of illness could travel. It is not any more.
Sources
- New York State Department of Health, investigation of the Le Roy outbreak, 2012.
- Clinical assessments and public statements by the treating neurologists, Dent Neurologic Institute, Buffalo.
- Environmental testing of the school site and of the 1970 derailment location.
- Bartholomew, R. E., Wessely, S. and Rubin, G. J. (2012). "Mass psychogenic illness and the social network: is it changing the pattern of outbreaks?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 105(12), 509-512.
- Contemporary national media coverage, 2012.
Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.