A few girls at a government tribal hostel in Maharashtra’s Amravati district began crying, laughing and fainting without any clear explanation.
Within days, rumours of ghosts, possession and a “chakwa” spread across nearby villages.
The hostel is part of Shaskiya Madhyamik Va Uchha Madhyamik (Kala va Vigyan) Ashram Shala Doma, a government tribal residential school in Doma village, Chikhaldara taluka. A state health team that examined the affected girls found no evidence of anything supernatural . “The symptoms have nothing to do with anything supernatural. “This is indeed a case of mass hysteria. Once hysterical symptoms emerge, others may also display similar behaviour after observing it. A student who saw her also started crying and laughing uncontrollably. Soon, other girls showed similar symptoms. The Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (ANIS) members found that some families had taken the girls to bhumkas (traditional tribal healers). “We found that the girls were fine.
It is run by the Tribal Development Department and was established in 1979. A woman in Ektai village, around 50 km from Doma, claimed she had seen a supernatural shadow and later began behaving unusually, according to the investigating team. Counselling of parents is therefore essential, as patients may consciously or unconsciously reproduce such symptoms,” Dr Swati Sonone, psychiatrist and head of the District Mental Health Programme, told The Indian Express.
Instead, it identified dissociative or conversion symptoms and said it was a case of “selective hysteria”, news agency PTI reported. A senior Tribal Development Department official said a team of health experts visited the Doma residential school to assess the situation. It could be a selective hysteria-like condition related to mental stress ,” the official said, as per PTI. A hostel source said some girls claimed they had heard the sound of anklets clanking. Some were cooking while others had gone to the fields,” ANIS state executive committee member Nandini Jadhav said, as per The Indian Express.
