HAVANA SYNDROME: WHAT’S CAUSING THE MYSTERIOUS ILLNESS?
Some have blamed top-secret weapons, but the condition could be all in the mind
In December 2021, a former FBI agent previously posted to Guangzhou in China began legal proceedings against the US government. The agent claimed the US Secretary of State and the Department of State hadn’t taken the situation seriously enough when, while in Guangzhou, the agent and his family had begun experiencing sudden headaches, dizziness, nosebleeds, memory loss and nausea.
It was the latest development in a saga that began to unfold in 2016 when dozens of staff at the US embassy in Cuba started describing similar symptoms, often accompanied by an ear-splitting sound and facial pain.
Depending on who you ask, so-called ‘Havana syndrome’ – which has reportedly affected over 200 US staff in Cuba, China, Germany, Austria, Russia and Serbia (there was also a suspected case in Washington) – is caused by a Russian sonic- or microwave-based weapon, or a textbook case of mass psychogenic illness.
The Russians deny having an acoustic weapon that can target the brain. But in 2020, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report in which they concluded that “many of the distinctive and acute signs, symptoms, and observations” described by US employees are “consistent with the effects of directed, pulsed radio frequency energy”. And in November 2021, the FBI admitted to having issued a formal warning to its staff about what it calls “anomalous health incidents”.
There are reasons for being sceptical about the weapon theory, though. Security experts have said that it’s unlikely Russia would have been able to develop some as-yet-unidentified technology without the West finding out. And neurological experts have pointed out that it’s implausible that a sonic device could selectively target the brain.
Meanwhile, recordings said to be of the sounds heard in Cuba (and blamed for the symptoms) have been identified by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, as most likely being the mating call of a Caribbean cricket. And in 2018, a group of
researchers at the University of Pennsylvania reported that brain scans they’d performed on 21 former Cubabased US staff who’d experienced the neurological symptoms showed no significant abnormalities.
When physical symptoms are experienced in the absence of any identifiable physical cause, such as a virus, and especially when the symptoms show signs of contagiousness between people who are in close contact, then one plausible explanation is mass psychogenic illness. This means the ultimate cause of the illness is people’s beliefs, which then ‘infect’ others, potentially leading to a mass outbreak. Some experts argue, controversially, that this is the most likely cause of Havana Syndrome.
Mass psychogenic illness has a few key components. The first is that a set of similar health symptoms emerges in a group of people in close contact. The second is that it often occurs in a context of intense stress or anxiety. And finally, there must be an absence of any known ongoing organic cause, such as a virus, bacteria, poison or cutting-edge sonic weaponry.
It’s worth noting that the initiator of a psychogenic outbreak could have a physical illness. But to meet the criteria for mass psychogenic illness, the people subsequently affected must not have been exposed to that cause, only to the idea of the symptoms.
At the heart of this phenomenon is the ‘nocebo effect’, which is the harmful reverse of the ‘placebo effect’. In this case, the mere belief that something is harmful can provoke real symptoms, just as positive beliefs about a placebo pill can induce real medical benefits. That word ‘real’ is important. Just because the causes of a syndrome are psychological does not mean the suffering and symptoms are not real.
There are countless confirmed cases of mass psychogenic illness in the medical literature. Here’s just one: imagine being at school and suddenly a rising number of your classmates report smelling a strange aroma, followed by a feeling of intense nausea. As fears grow, you too begin to feel discomfort in your stomach and, before you know it, you’re sick too.
It is hard to believe it’s all in the mind and that there’s not some kind of a chemical spill or gas leak. Yet this is exactly what happened at a South Yorkshire school in 2006 when more than 30 pupils and a teaching assistant were suddenly taken ill. No leak was found and all of the pupils that were rushed to hospital were discharged within a few hours.
It’s not currently possible to know for sure whether Havana Syndrome is a mass psychogenic illness, but it does fit some or all of the criteria. Many of the affected agents have been operating in stressful environments. They’ve been in close contact with each other, exposed to the idea of the symptoms and the dread that they might be affected. In the absence of any apparent physical explanation, and with the sonic weapon being purely theoretical and unproven at this point, then a psychological cause seems plausible.
“At the heart of this phenomenon is the ‘nocebo effect’, which is the harmful reverse of the ‘placebo effect’. In this case, the mere belief that something is harmful can provoke real symptoms”