http://unherd.com/2023/04/is-trans-the-new-anorexia/
Excerpt:
"The topic felt dated. Because as a prestige diagnosis, anorexia has been replaced. With trans.
Although Freeman spends half a chapter on the overlap between the two afflictions — both are “rooted in the belief that if you change your body, you will no longer hate yourself” — throughout her account I began to notice other intersections.
Both neuroses are clearly communicable. Ever since a preoccupation with thinness took off in the Sixties, eating disorders have soared, making the more recent insistence that anorexia is more of a heritable genetic proclivity than a cultural contagion dubious. From the Seventies onwards, an accelerating number of young women have got the idea to express their discontent through debilitating hunger from lavish media coverage, and one another. In kind, since 2010 the number of teenage girls referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service increased by 5,000% — making claims of a purely genetic explanation equally iffy. Both these afflictions are social confections. Although tales of people who starved themselves or passed for the opposite sex exist in the historical record, eating disorders and transgenderism on a mass scale are recent inventions. Collectively, we made these dire maladies up."
LOTS of precedent for this, too! In Freud's time "hysteria" was a common enough illness to diagnose.
http://www.pbs.org/video/hysteria-axk6v2/
Try to find a case today!
Before that, we had the "Dancing Plagues" in the middle ages. (Oh, for those good old diseases!)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
http://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=Dancing+Plague&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DTKhVE-pP7hA.