Hwa-byung
Hwa-byung will make you
yell at your children
fight with your family
go all red in the face
leap from your chair
shaking knuckled fists.
This rising heart fire
takes hold of you:
poor and uneducated
a stuck-at-home wife.
Hwa-byung will ruin
your eating and sleeping
grinding on old grudges
seeping anger in rages
too long suppressed.
The rising heart fire
takes hold of men too:
frustrated, mortified
bad jobs with bad bosses
who don’t show respect
who reek of injustice
until you smolder inside.
Hwa-byung is Korean
for a mental disorder
that may afflict anyone
who withholds their anger
that builds in intensity
burns its way out
bursts through walls
tears down framing
explodes like a bomb
hollowing you out
in ways you don’t expect.
NOTE:
Once classified under depressive disorders, hwa-byung is a culture-bound condition found only in Korea. It was thought to be limited to disgruntled housewives with passive husbands and overbearing in-laws. It is now being diagnosed in male employees who are full of anxiety, nihilistic ideas, and regret about their lives.
No Joke
On lovely Lake Victoria
on the border with Uganda
three female students
at a missionary boarding school
began to laugh and laugh
and they couldn’t stop
and they didn’t stop
and more students joined in
and they couldn’t study
and they couldn’t eat
and they couldn’t sleep
and they couldn’t do anything
but laugh, laugh ’til it hurt
’til they were in pain and
crying between laughing jags
so the school closed down.
When school opened back up
the laughing started back up
so the school closed down.
Some girls arrived home
in their small rural villages
still laughing and laughing
and village girls laughed too
some boys, some adults
and it spread, and spread
to more than 200 people
laughing and laughing
for more than a year
and the experts blamed
the emotional dissonance
of a radical cultural shift
from tribal communities
to a modern way of life.
Laughter is said to be
the best of all medicines
but must always be taken
in a moderate dose.
NOTE:
The laughter epidemic was a mass psychogenic event that occurred in Tanganyika in 1962, soon after the country achieved independence. Schoolgirls brought the illness home to their villages and it spread wildly before disappearing.
The country is now known as Tanzania.
The Witches of Leroy
A pretty cheerleader fell down
and that’s how it all began
in the upstate New York town
that invented jiggly Jell-O.
She screamed and flailed about
cursing as if possessed
cuss words she’d never say…
she was not that kind of girl.
Her best friend suddenly ticced
convulsing, crazed, she ran wild
and sixteen other girls in town
swearing, thrashing, crashing
got rushed to the hospital
their parents hysterical
the ER in chaos
the nurses, doctors puzzled
as testing found no cause.
A rumor began to circulate
about a toxic spill
from a train derailment
but testing showed no toxins
on the high school grounds.
Erin Brockovich was invited
to speak and attract the media
declaring a chemical poisoning
with opinion taken as fact.
But why only teenage girls?
From chemicals miles away?
Spilled four decades prior?
Before the girls were born?
Time slid by as it always does
the parents demanding answers
accountability and recourse
long after their girls recovered
left for college and life away
from the town that created Jell-O.
NOTE:
Mass outbreaks of psychogenic illnesses have occurred in schools in many parts of the world. These events used to happen in convents and were once deemed satanic. Religious and shamanic interventions were employed when illnesses were medically inexplicable.
In the modern world, mass anxiety hysteria (acting crazy) and mass motor hysteria (sleeping sickness or convulsions) are social phenomena without identified physical pathology. Outbreaks are usually limited to the young and are believed to be triggered by issues in the community: emerging sexuality amidst social repression, poverty, dislocation, hopelessness.
