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I show the whole video with a viewing guide. It features teens and really shows students OCD is not what they think.

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Obsessive Compulsive Cleaners S04E01 Country House Rescue

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Extreme OCD Camp Episode 1 BBC documentary 2013  journey to the American wilderness

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Extreme OCD Camp Episode 1 Documentary following six British teens and young adults with obsessive-compulsive disorder as they embark on an incredible journey to the American wilderness for treatment. During the week-long intensive camp, the group undergo exposure therapy, where they are challenged to confront their greatest fears.

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Whether you're defusing a ticking time bomb, or trying to design a decent-looking site, if you choose the wrong color-you're doomed. Okay, so the wrong color selection for a client's site might not be the death of you, but it could curtail your budding career as a web designer. Choosing colors is no simple matter. There are aesthetic, identity, and usability considerations to take into account. And, to make matters worse, most modern displays can render more than sixteen million colors. That's an infinite number of horrible color combinations just waiting to happen!

Fortunately, there's no need to be a swatchbook-carrying color consultant to make good color choices. A wealth of knowledge is available, from touchy-feely (as I like to call them) psychological guidelines to tried-and-true color theories that will help you make the right choices when it comes to color.

Color psychology is a field of study that's devoted to analyzing the emotional and behavioral effects produced by colors and color combinations. Ecommerce website owners want to know which color will make their website visitors spend more money. Home decorators are after a color that will transform a bedroom into a tranquil Zen retreat. Fast-food restaurant owners are dying to know which color combinations will make you want to super-size your meal. As you can imagine, color psychology is big business.

Although it's important to know how your color choices might affect the masses, the idea that there's a single, unified, psychological response to specific colors is spurious. Many of the responses that color psychologists accredit to certain colors are rooted in individual experience. It's also interesting to note that many cultures have completely different associations with, and interpretations of, colors. With those caveats in mind, let's explore some general psychological associations that the majority of people in Western cultures have in response to specific colors.

Color Associations

Describing the emotional connections that people can have with colors can be a very hippy-esque topic. If you find that hard to believe, just head over to your favorite online music store and sample some tracks from Colors by Ken Nordine. Although most designers will stop short at relying solely on the supposed meanings, characteristics, and personalities of specific colors, it's still handy to have an understanding of the emotional attributes of some of the main color groups.

Red

The color red has a reputation for stimulating adrenaline and blood pressure. Along with those physiological effects, red is also known to increase human metabolism; it's an exciting, dramatic, and rich color. Red is also a color of passion. Nothing says love like painting a wall bright red on Valentine's Day for your sweetheart, as seen in Figure 1.1, "Red, the color of affection (two gallons of it!)". The darker shades of red, such as burgundy and maroon, have a rich, indulgent feeling about them-in fact, they can be quite hoity-toity. Think about these colors when designing anything for wine enthusiasts or connoisseurs of fine living. The more earthy, brownish shades of red are associated with the season of autumn and harvest.

Orange

ike red, orange is a very active and energetic color, though it doesn't evoke the passion that red can. Instead, orange is thought to promote happiness, and represents sunshine, enthusiasm, and creativity. Orange is a more informal and less corporate-feeling color than red, which is perhaps a reason why the designers behind the location-based service Gowalla chose it for their logo. Because orange doesn't show up often in nature, it tends to jump out at us when we see it. For that reason, it's often used for life jackets, road cones, and hunting vests. Since orange also stimulates metabolism and appetite, it's a great color for promoting food and cooking. That's probably why the picture of a tangerine in Figure 1.2, "Orange you glad I didn't say banana?" is making you hungry, even if you don't like citrus fruits.

Yellow

Like orange, yellow is an active color, and being highly visible, it's often used for taxicabs and caution signs. It's also associated with happiness and, as Figure 1.3, "Yellow, the color of smileys" illustrates, is the signature color of smileys. The original orange and lemon-lime flavors of the sports energy drink Gatorade are still the best-selling of the brand's products; this is likely due, in part at least, to the energetic characteristics associated with the colors orange and yellow.

Figure 1.3. Yellow, the color of smileys
Green

Green is most commonly associated with nature. It's a soothing color that symbolizes growth, freshness, and hope. There's little doubt why the color has been so closely tied with environmental protection. Visually, green is much easier on the eyes, and far less dynamic than yellow, orange, or red. Although many website designs using green appeal to visitors' sense of nature, green is a versatile color that can also represent wealth, stability, and education. When bright green is set against a black background, it really pops-giving the design a techy feel. For me, it brings back memories of my first computer, a trusty old Apple IIe. This was the inspiration for the MailChimp loading screen I designed recently, shown in Figure 1.4, "ASCII version of Freddie Von Chimpenheimer IV".

Blue

When I was a kid, my favorite color was blue. Not just any blue, but cerulean blue from Crayola crayons. While most kids are less particular, blue is often cited as the universally favorite color. On the touchy-feely level, blue symbolizes openness, intelligence, and faith, and has been found to have calming effects. On the other hand, blue has also has been found to reduce appetite. This is probably due in part to the rarity of blue in real food. Aside from blueberries, how many naturally blue foods can you count? Blue, it would seem, is excluded from nature's appetite-inducing palette; therefore, it's less than ideal for promoting food products.

In addition, blue is sometimes seen as a symbol of bad luck and trouble. This emotional color connection is evident in blues music, as well as in the paintings of Picasso's depression-induced "blue period." It's not all about unnatural food colors and melancholy forms of art, though; blue has universal appeal because of its association with the sky and the sea. For me, the presence of blue in the stacked stones image in Figure 1.5, "Calming stones, sky, and sea" makes me feel more at ease.

This visual connection makes blue an obvious choice for websites associated with airlines, air conditioning, pool filters, and cruises. Have you ever noticed that blue is the primary color in the logos of IBM, Dell, HP, and Microsoft? That's because blue also conveys a sense of stability and clarity of purpose ... that is, until you've experienced the blue screen of death!

Purple

Historically, the color purple has been associated with royalty and power, as it is on the postage stamp in Figure 1.6, "Purple coat of arms on a Norwegian postage stamp". The secret behind purple's prestigious past has to do with the difficulty of producing the dye needed to create purple garments. To this day, purple still represents wealth and extravagance. That extravagance is carried over into nature. Purple is most often connected with flowers, gemstones, and wine. It balances the stimulation of red and the calming effects of blue. According to Patrick McNeil, author of The Web Designer's Idea Book, ¹ purple is one of the least-used colors in web design. He explains that finding good examples of website designs featuring purple was so hard that he almost had to cut the section from his book. If you're trying to create a website design that stands out from the crowd, think about using a rich shade of purple.

White

You might think there's nothing special about the color of the wind turbines in Figure 1.7, "These wind turbines might be white, but they're also green", but the use of white actually helps promote the idea that this is clean power. In Western cultures, white is considered to be the color of perfection, light, and purity. This is why crisp white sheets are used in detergent commercials, and why a bride wears a white dress on her wedding day. For an idea of how ingrained the meaning of white is in our culture, read the poem Design by Robert Frost. ² In it, Frost symbolically contradicts our associations by using white to represent death and darkness. Interestingly, in Chinese culture, white is a color traditionally associated with death and mourning. Such cultural distinctions should serve as a reminder to research the color associations of your target audience, as they may vary greatly from your own perception.

In design, white is often overlooked because it's the default background color. Don't be afraid to shake it up, though. Try using a dark background with white text, or put a white background block on an off-white canvas to make it pop. Using colors in unexpected ways can make a bold statement.

Black

Although black often suffers from negative connotations such as death and evil, it can also be a color of power, elegance, and strength, depending on how it's used. If you're considering using a particular color and are wondering what the associations are for that color, just ask yourself, "What are the first three things that come to mind when I think about this color?" When I think about black, for instance, I think about Johnny Cash, tuxedos, and Batman. When I think about Johnny Cash, his dark clothing, deep voice, and sorrowful songs give a tangible meaning to the mental associations I perceive between the man and the color.

If you treat all your color choices this way, establishing three word associations for each, chances are you'll gain a good idea of how that color is widely perceived among your audience.

Even though color psychology plays a role in the way a visitor may see your site, keep in mind there is no wrong color to use. While psychological reasoning may help to start your palette, the success of a color scheme depends on the harmony that exists between all the colors chosen. To achieve this harmony, we'll need to be mindful of a few other attributes of color.

References

1. Patrick McNeil, The Web Designer's Idea Book, How Books, Cincinatti, USA, 2008

2. This can be found in many a good poetry book, but I used The Norton Anthology of Poetry (5th edition), eds Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy, WW Norton & Company, New York, 2004.

The Principles of Beautiful Web Design

This article is from Jason Beaird's The Principles of Beautiful Web Design book (second edition is out now!). Be sure to lookout for further articles from the book here on Design Festival.

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Whether you're defusing a ticking time bomb, or trying to design a decent-looking site, if you choose the wrong color-you're doomed. Okay, so the wrong color selection for a client's site might not be the death of you, but it could curtail your budding career as a web designer.

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http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/

Simply Psychology explains things in easy-to-understand ways

Annenberg Learner http://www.learner.org/series/discoveringpsychology/therapeutic/index.html

Motivation and Emotion Lesson plans https://sites.google.com/site/charlesnicholsportfolio/motivation-and-emotion-lesson-1

Memory Games http://www.exploratorium.edu/memory/index.html

Personality tests http://similarminds.com/personality_tests.html#.U6MCzfldWqg

What's Wrong with these Studies?

http://www.abacon.com/psychsite/wrong.html

Statistics on Older Americans

http://www.agingstats.gov/agingstatsdotnet/Main_Site/Data/2012_Documents/Docs/EntireChartbook.pdf

Ethical standards and sample scenarios

http://mhhe.com/socscience/psychology/zech/graphics/zech_1_resmethpsych/pdf/zec88196_051_078.pdf

Overview of Adolescent Development

http://pubs.ext.vt.edu/350/350-850/350-850.html

Meaning of Dreams lesson Plan

http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/07/03/the-meaning-of-dreams/?_r=0

Netflix Movies:

This Emotional Life

National Geographic: Stress:Portrait of a Killer

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Creates good discussion on what is aggressive and what is expected in sports

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Video clip showing autistic math prodigy

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Video clip showing autistic math prodigy

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OR36jrx_L44

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Article: Can you tell a woman's politics by looking at her face?

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Article: Can you tell a woman's politics by looking at her face?

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Addresses stereotypical gender roles and facial recognition

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Can you guess which of the US Representatives below is a Republican, and which is a Democrat, just based on their faces? (Answers are at the bottom, no peeking - unless you already recognize all these congresswomen, in which case you can scroll right down to the science.)

Answers:

1. Martha Roby, R-Alabama

2. Lois Capps, D-California

3. Grace Napolitano, D-California

4. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut

5. Judy Biggert, R-Illinois

6. Lynn Jenkins, R-Kansas

7. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine

8. Jo Ann Emerson, R-Missouri

That's a shorter version of the test psychologists Colleen Carpinella and Kerri Johnson gave undergraduates at UCLA for a study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The undergrads were significantly better at guessing than would be expected by chance, and they were especially accurate with women. The likely reason, according to the study: Republican women are more likely than Democratic ones to have stereotypically feminine facial features.

In another experiment, Carpinella and Johnson used a computer program to measure how "sex-typical" the faces of male and female Representatives were, looking at characteristics like jaw shape, lip fullness, and cheekbone placement (they discounted things like hair, makeup, and jewelry). They found that Republican women were more likely to have stereotypically feminine faces - and the effect was more pronounced the more conservative their voting records were. The reverse was true for Democrats - the more liberal their voting records, the less traditionally feminine their faces. The study authors call this "the Michele Bachmann effect."

The study authors think that because the Republican platform advocates for traditional gender roles, women with more traditionally feminine appearances may gravitate toward the GOP. Interestingly, however, they found that Republican men actually had more feminine faces than Democratic men. This surprised Carpinella and Johnson, but they speculate that since governing is still seen as masculine in general, a slightly feminized appearance might not be an impediment to a Republican politician - he's already showing his masculinity by running for office in the first place. And Republicans may have an easier time getting away with slightly feminine faces than Democrats, since their political views are often seen as more masculine (cf. Arnold Schwarzenegger's claim that Democratic legislators were "girlie-men").

It's not clear if less-feminine women have a harder time making it in the Republican party (or if more-feminine women have difficulty being accepted by Democrats), or if people's physical appearances actually influence their political beliefs. Some research has found that political leanings can have genetic underpinnings - maybe the genes that affect liberalism or conservatism affect appearance as well. Or maybe the way women look as they grow up, and the way people respond to their appearance, influence how they vote later on. The less-principled in both parties are likely to spin this research in their favor - Democratic women are manly! Republican men are secret sissies! - but the reality is almost certainly more interesting.

Update: Asked what might be behind her findings, Carpinella said voter preference probably played a bigger role than genetics: "We have no evidence to support a biological interpretation of our effects - and that evidence favoring that would require a very different study. Instead, we believe this reveals more about the voters themselves. [...] Specifically, it appears that conservative voters insist that their policy preferences are reflected in the physical appearance of the political candidates who they ultimately put in office. Here, valuing traditional gender norms is apparent in the faces of successful politicians."

It would be interesting to look at the faces of ordinary Republican and Democratic voters, rather than elected officials, to see if the same appearance differences hold true.

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Can You Tell A Woman's Politics By Looking At Her Face?

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Can you guess which of the US Representatives below is a Republican, and which is a Democrat, just based on their faces? (Answers are at the bottom, no peeking - unless you already recognize all these congresswomen, in which case you can scroll right down to the science.) Answers: 1.

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Videos showing developmental experiments with infants/toddlers. These are from a movie called The Baby Human.

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The Development of Language Skills in Young Children | 92Y Parenting & Family

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Hmmm... You could make those arguments...

Piglet/anxiety: Chronically afraid.

Rabbit/OCD: Constantly obsessing over his house, always controlling the situation.

Owl/narcissism: Won't stop talking and is often oblivious to others. Plus dude talks in an English accent... Who does he think he is, Madonna?

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This Will Completely Change Your Perception Of "Winnie The Pooh" Characters

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Hmmm... You could make those arguments... Piglet/anxiety: Chronically afraid. Rabbit/OCD: Constantly obsessing over his house, always controlling the situation. Owl/narcissism: Won't stop talking and is often oblivious to others. Plus dude talks in an English accent... Who does he think he is, Madonna?

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Follow CrashCourse on YouTube

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Intro to Psychology - Crash Course Psychology #1

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Good visuals of schizophrenic brain scans 

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Good visuals of schizophrenic brain scans 

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Schizophrenia.com - Schizophrenia is a Brain Disease

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The Leading Independent Info Source on Schizophrenia Diagnosis, Treatments, News, Blogs, Support Groups and Education.

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PDF describing changes made from DSM-IV to DSM-

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PDF describing changes made from DSM-IV to DSM-

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13 Weirdest Things Psychological Science "Proved" This Year

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13 Weirdest Things Psychological Science "Proved" This Year

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8. You want your baby to sweat

i745.photobucket.com / Via palloc.com

No, don't put your baby on a treadmill. It is a specific kind off sweat. Infants who sweat less in response to scary situations at age 1 show more physical and verbal aggression at age 3, according to new research.

11. Babies R' bullies

Flickr: meanbabies / Via starcasm.net

Yes, it's true. Babies prefer individuals who harm those that aren't like them.

Infants as young as nine months old actually like folks who are nice to people like them and mean to people who aren't like them. So... better start peeing your pants real quick if you ever want babies to like you.

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13 Weirdest Things Psychological Science Proved This Year

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The human mind is weird, right? Luckily we have smart folks at the Association for Psychological Science to tell us just how weird...

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This page was prepared by Linda Walsh, Department of Psychology, University of Northern Iowa for the course Introduction to Psychology (400:008). Thanks to Bill Panak for his help constructing the Jeopardy format.

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Different kits you can purchase that Larry told us about. Lots of sensation and perception.

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Psychology activity kits to make your curriculum fun!

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Are we born good or bad?

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Born good? Babies help unlock the origins of morality

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Can infants tell right from wrong? And if so, how would you know? Come to Yale's baby lab. Lesley Stahl reports.

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A fresh brain.  Straight out of the skull

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A fresh brain.  Straight out of the skull

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First Ever Recorded On Video | India Video

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University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative

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University of Utah Neuroscience Initiative

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In this teaching video, Suzanne Stensaas, Ph.D., Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah School of Medicine, demonstrates the properties and anatomy of an unfixed brain. WARNING: The video contains graphic images, a human brain from a recent autopsy. Background noise is unrelated to this brain or the deceased.

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videos teach all the major concepts

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About the Course

Explore the five senses and their relationship to psychology through this online course. Developed by our team of professional educators, these brief video lessons can serve as a basis for your psychology education or a refresher on topics you've already studied. Either way, you'll be prepared for the AP Psychology Exam; passing this test can qualify you for college credit. Topics covered in this set of lessons include the history of psychological theory, development of the psyche, and biological functions of the brain and nervous system. You can test your knowledge of psychology through the short multiple-choice quizzes that accompany each lesson.

Course Topics

History and Development of Modern Psychology

Learn how the scientific study of mental functions and behaviors began and branched into one of the furthest-reaching disciplines.

Research Methods Used in the Study of Psychology

Understand the process of psychological research, the ethical ramifications of experiments, and the measurements that are gathered.

Intelligence Testing

Explore intelligence tests and other types of tests used by psychologists.

Biology in Psychology

Learn about the brain, the central nervous system, the endocrine system, and how these biological structures impact our psyches.

The 5 Senses and Psychology

Explore our five senses and how our brains interpret sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Sleep and Other States of Consciousness

Understand how sleep, dreams, and other states like hypnosis affect our psyches.

Learning and Conditioning

Learn about learning via classic psychological experiments and various theories in the field.

Memory and Cognition

Explore the processes like memory, reasoning, and problem solving that make up cognitive functions.

Psychology of Emotion

Learn theories that attempt to explain where emotions like fear, stress, and happiness come from.

Child Development in Psychology

Understand the leading theories about the development of various mental processes and functions in children.

Personality Development and Theories

Explore classic conceptualizations of the self and how we become who we are.

Study of Social Psychology

Learn about the psychological implications of groups and how other people affect our psyches.

Abnormal Psychology

Understand the attributes and classifications of various types of psychological disorders.

Treatment Methods for Psychological Disorders

Explore the different ways in which psychological therapy can be administered and the pros and cons of each.

Who won a Nobel Prize for his part in discovering that the human eye contains light-sensitive cells? A) David Hubel B) Ernst Weber C) Torsten Wiesel D) Gustav Fechner

A nerve ending senses a stimulus and sends a message through your spinal chord and brain stem and finally to your brain, which registers and perceives the message. This best describes which process? a) vestibular b) pain c) vision d) top-down processing

The two major theories of color perception are: a) extromission and extromittism b) Young-Helmholtz theory and opponent-process theory c) Trichromatic theory and Young-Helmholtz theory d) theory of color vision and opponent-process theory

Which of the following is the best example of top-down processing? A) Your three-year old nephew writes you a letter with several miss-spellings, but you are able to comprehend the letter. B) If you stub your toe, your brain will first process your reoccuring shoulder pain before your toe pain. C) While traveling on a train, your central nervous system will process objects closer to you last. D) Your brain will process the spatial location of an object before processing the object's color.

Which of the following concepts or principles refers to the observation that humans naturally perceive objects as organized patterns and objects. A) Gestalt Principles B) Circle of Continuity, C) Principles of Visual Organization D) Concept of Visual Perception

Sensorineural hearing loss involves a) birth defect b) surgical trauma c) trauma affecting the sinuses d) damage to the cochlea or to the nerves from the cochlea to the brain.

Tourette's Syndrome is the result a problem with a) the human sensory system b) reflexes and impulses c) the nervous system d) the subconscious

A news story about a man seeing his deceased wife outside his window one night best illustrates a) a psychological disorder b) parapsychology c) visual trauma d) top-down processing.

Although the eye may be sensitive to a single photon, it takes at least seven to thirty photons to perceive the stimulus. This examples best illustrates a) absolute threshold b) perception c) stimuli d) sensory systems

A depressed person is at risk of recalling negative, depressing memories. This is due to a) lack of contrast b) sadness c) mood-congruent memory d) perception

The Advanced Placement Exam (AP) is a registered trademark of College Board, which is not affiliated with Study.com.

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ap psychology: exam prep course - online video lessons | study.com

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AP Psychology: Exam Prep Course - Online Video Lessons | Study.com

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Explore the five senses and their relationship to psychology through this online course. Developed by our team of professional educators, these brief video lessons can serve as a basis for your psychology education or a refresher on topics you've already studied.

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AP Psychology: The Course | AP Central - The College Board

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Explore essential course resources for AP Psychology, and review teaching strategies, lesson plans, and other helpful course content.

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YouTube playlists organized by units. Thanks, Hillary!

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Steve Jones @highschoolpsych

APA @APA

Psychology Today @PsychToday

Psychology News @PsychologyNow

Psychology News

@PsychNews

Amanda Bumgarner

@LMPBumgarner

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Video: Obscene gestures from around the world

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Video: Obscene gestures from around the world

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Emotions Unit:Many facial cues are cross-cultural whereas gestures are culture specific.

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Rude hand gestures from all around the world! Be sure to avoid these while abroad. Song: https://soundcloud.com/deerdeerdear/swim Sources: ...

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Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type?

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Myers-Briggs: Does it pay to know your type?

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1. Double Click Wall

2. Notice 3 options at the bottom of the box

- Link: looks like chain link where you can post direct links to videos, websites, images, etc.

- Arrow Pointing Up: Upload your own files such as word docs, PowerPoints, images, etc.

- WebCamera: Posting live pictures/video... probably won't use. :)

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very experienced AP PSYCH teachers in the doc linked below

http://www.ncpublicschools.org/docs/acre/standards/support-tools/unpacking/social-studies/psychology.pdf

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NY Times article on students in Le Roy, NY

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NY Times article on students in Le Roy, NY

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When doctors told Thera's mother, Melisa Phillips, that her daughter's tics were stress-related, she "went along with it," she told me. "I know she has a huge heart, and she's wound tight." Thera also had an episode of tics three years ago. But when Phillips learned that other girls were coming down with similar symptoms, she began to wonder if there was more to this than stress.

Other parents were wondering the same thing: Maybe there was something in the water at the school or in the ground under the playing fields. By mid-January, the number of known cases was around 12, and parents eagerly awaited the preliminary results of an investigation by the New York State Department of Health. But at the community meeting where the results were to be announced, officials said that out of deference to the patients' privacy, their diagnosis could not be revealed. They did try to assure the crowd that the school's environment was safe, but the air-quality tests they performed left a number of parents unsatisfied, including Katie's mother and stepfather, Don Miller. Five days after the meeting, Katie, Thera and their mothers - all of them photogenic and sympathetic - appeared on the "Today" show. "I'm trying to get all the information together so I can proceed in finding a cure for our daughters," Beth Miller told Ann Curry.

On the show, Katie's tics seemed under control, but Thera's were extreme: she jerked her head to the side and swung her arm across her body and occasionally stuttered over a word before making a guttural cry. She looked impossibly brave for showing herself in that state on national television. "I was always so active, and everybody was always happy to be around me," she said, in fits and starts. "But I don't feel like myself anymore."

The story took off quickly, not just on the local and national news but on Facebook and autism blogs and sites devoted to mental health and environmental issues. The day after Katie and Thera appeared on "Today," a neurologist in Buffalo whose practice had seen many of the girls was given the greenlight to speak about the diagnosis: it was conversion disorder, he said, which meant the girls were subconsciously converting stress into physical symptoms. And because so many students were afflicted with similar symptoms, it was also considered to be mass psychogenic illness, which is another way of saying mass hysteria.

To many parents, the diagnosis was woefully inadequate, even insulting."It's a very hard pill for me to swallow - what are we, living in the 1600s?" the guardian of one of the girls said. Besides, kids are always stressed, and some of these kids may have been less stressed than most. On CNN, James DuPont, the father of an afflicted girl, said, "A lot of these kids were just, you know, having a happy, normal life." Miller told me she did not buy the diagnosis, not one bit. "My daughter hasn't had any trauma," she said. "She was just happy, going along. She was as happy as can be."

Long before any teenagers started twitching, the conversation at the coffee shop in town or at the counter of Jim DuPont's television-repair shop would turn, from time to time, to speculation about what kind of waste Le Roy's manufacturing plants might have left behind. Some of the older residents remember that they could always tell what flavor the Jell-O factory was producing on a given day based on the color of the water in Oatka Creek. What else, they wonder, got dumped on Le Roy?

Beth Miller suspects that there was a cancer cluster on the street where she once lived in Le Roy - she and several of her neighbors have been stricken with tumors - and early on, she suspected that Katie's symptoms might have something to do with the environment as well. Not long after she started pursuing these leads, someone placed under her doormat documentation about a train accident near Le Roy in 1970, in which tens of thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals were spilled into the soil, including trichloroethylene, a solvent that has been linked, in high levels of exposure, to nervous-system damage, among other things.

Three months into Katie's illness, Miller contacted Erin Brockovich, the environmental activist played by Julia Roberts in the film of the same name. Brockovich sent a team to Le Roy to test the soil on school grounds, theorizing that the school might have been built on earth trucked in from the contaminated site. "We don't have all the answers, but we are suspicious," Brockovich told USA Today. "They have not ruled everything out yet."

On Saturday, Jan. 28, Brockovich's team, accompanied by a crew from CNN and a handful of other reporters, arrived at the Le Roy high school to perform their tests, only to find members of the local police waiting to escort them off the property. The mood in Le Roy, already tense, was now charged with anger. "I will tell you that usually in settings or situations like this, when I'm confronted by officials barring access to something, they usually have something to hide," Bob Bowcock, one of Brockovich's testers, told CNN.

In the days that followed, groups of residents made their way to the site of the former spill, to compare notes and to see what there was to see. "I am very angry," said Robyn Horn, a mother of four. "I mean, what are they trying to hide? They wouldn't let them take a little bit of soil?" The Batavian, a local online newspaper, posted a poll asking, "Are you confident Le Roy schools are looking out for the best interest of students?" Of the 1,600 people who responded, 67 percent answered no.

And so on the first Saturday morning in February, five months into the crisis, there was another community meeting. Kim Cox, the school superintendent, stood before the town's parents and faced hostile questions about a host of environmental concerns: natural gas wells on school property, toxic-waste cleanup sites within a few miles and a sticky orange substance oozing out of the playing fields.

"What are you doing now to protect our children in school right now?" one of the parents asked.

Cox offered her best assurances: that environmental testing had already been done; and that no known environmental toxin, the country's best experts agreed, would cause these particular symptoms or account for an affliction affecting almost exclusively teenage girls and not boys or teachers or any other staff members.

A small woman in the audience stood up and began to shout, "You guys need to prove to us it is safe for my daughter to be in this school." The superintendent tried to respond, but the woman pointed her finger at her and said: "No, I'm done listening to you. You need to do something!" Then she stormed out of the room, a man with a video camera hustling after her.

Right around this time - when Brockovich started appearing in the news and everyone was talking about toxins and trust in local officials was at an all-time low - the neurologists in Buffalo who were treating some of the girls started seeing their patients' conditions worsen. One of the doctors, Laszlo Mechtler, told The Batavian that patients who had been improving were suddenly in his office, "crying, 'This chemical is in my head and I'm damaged for the rest of my life.' " Doctors also saw an increase in cases, which they attributed to sensational coverage and increased stress. As more girls got sick, the story got bigger, and then more girls got sick.

Katie and Thera thought some other girls in town might be suffering from conversion disorder. But not them. " No," Katie said. "Me and Thera, we've definitely had times we've been stressed out, but this wasn't the time we were stressed out."

As the afternoon we spent talking wore on, the pink on Katie's bedroom wall turning a darker rose, she started packing up a bag to go to her boyfriend's house. The families were close - her boyfriend's mother drove her and her mom to the hospital the second time she went. Her own mother could not drive, Katie explained, because she was recovering from brain surgery.

In addition to her tumor, Beth Miller suffers from trigeminal neuralgia, a nerve condition that causes excruciating pain in her face. In the weeks leading up to the surgery, she was so sick she sometimes had trouble getting out of bed. The surgery took place just a week before the onset of Katie's tics.

Katie could see the line of questioning that piece of information might provoke, so she quickly clarified. "She's had, like, 13," Katie said of the surgeries. If that seems like something that might be hard on a child, Katie isn't one to dwell on it. "I'm so used to it," she said, her voice trailing off in a huge yawn. "Seriously, it was like a walk in the park."

Thera was perched on the bed, biting her nail. It was not just cheerleading and clothes that bound the girls: both have gone through a lot with their families - troubles of very different natures, but troubles nonetheless. Several years ago there was a traumatic loss in Thera's family, the details of which they requested remain private. And now her relationship with her biological father, with whom she hasn't lived since she was very young, was weighing on her. She was feeling particularly bad about it lately, losing sleep over some harsh words they recently exchanged. She and her mother were angry that, even after she started having seizures, he didn't come up from his home in South Carolina to help out. "I used to be Sissy to him, and now I'm just Thera," she told me. "And he used to be Dad, and now he's just Frank."

Not long after Thera's symptoms began, her mother started dating someone new. But, Thera said, she liked him.

Katie looked up from her cellphone. "Oh, so you like him, now?" Thera said that she did, a lot. She had just been wary at first. "I have trust issues," she said. "I think I have that right."

Over the course of the afternoon, both girls yawned, one after the other; one mentioned her stomach hurt, then the other one did, too. They spoke in shorthand and overlapping sentences. Thera reached into Katie's closet and pulled out a jumper. "It's a onesie," she said. Katie laughed.

"Katie told me that she wouldn't wish tics on anyone," Thera said, "but if it had to be someone, she was glad she was going through it with her best friend."

Like everything else in high school, the girls' symptoms were broken down by status: there were the kids who were really sick and then the kids whose illness was "psychological" and then the kids who were faking it so they could get on the news. No matter how many times the doctors explained that these symptoms were real, something the girls could not control, the finger-pointing persisted. One mother even went on Facebook to publicly accuse her daughter's best friend of faking, before apologizing the next day. "If they were faking it, I'd like to know how they can cause it," said Dave Watson, guardian for one of the affected cheerleaders. "It's not like any one movement is more exaggerated than the next. It's pretty damn consistent. I'd like someone to explain to me how they could walk around all day and do it consciously."

Conversion disorder presents something of a paradox in that it engages some voluntary pathways in the brain but is experienced by the patient as wholly involuntary. One study found overlapping, but distinctly different, brain activity in patients diagnosed with conversion disorder and patients asked to "fake" the same illness, in this case a limp ankle, suggesting "more complex mental activity" in patients with conversion disorder. The very notion of what makes a movement feel voluntary - and whether movements actually are voluntary, or only feel that way as a result of some post hoc coordinating that happens in the brain - is another philosophical and neurological question.

Researchers think the illness might have something to do with the amygdala, a locus of startle and fear responses in the brain, which has been shown to be overactive in patients with conversion disorder. "Ordinarily, the amygdala might create psychological distress, but instead, in these cases, it would create an involuntary movement," says Mark Hallett, a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. He added, though, that while the theory is plausible, "we're at a primitive level" in terms of understanding how it works.

Conversion disorder is somewhat better understood now than it was when the French neurologist Jean Martin Charcot displayed his patients' fainting fits to hundreds of dazzled audience members in the 1870s. Fainting and nonepileptic seizures are common symptoms, as are seemingly paralyzed limbs; less common, but still well represented, are certain types of tics and twitches. Recent research has confirmed some of Freud's early theorizing on the subject, finding that a history of trauma is higher in patients with conversion disorder than in other kinds of psychiatric patients.

Part of what is baffling about the Le Roy case is that it seems to combine two equally poorly understood phenomena: conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness. Jennifer McVige, a doctor at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Buffalo who has seen 14 patients from Le Roy (neither Katie nor Thera is her patient), has said that most of them are dealing with serious stressors or trauma. That history is somewhat unusual for mass psychogenic illness, which is not generally thought to target people with a particular psychological background. In other ways, however, the case in Le Roy is a textbook example. Half of mass psychogenic illnesses occur in schools, and they are far more common in young women than any other category. Simon Wessely, an epidemiologist at King's College in London and chairman of the department of psychological medicine, estimates that hundreds of outbreaks occur every year in the United States - just this past November, 22 students fell ill with stomach complaints at a football game in Houston, and no one so much as noticed outside the local news. Motor mass hysterias - twitching, fainting, stuttering - are more rare and draw more attention. In the past 10 years there have been three such outbreaks in the United States, which Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist specializing in the subject at Botany Downs Secondary College in Auckland, New Zealand, says is a surprising number for so short a period of time.

How could one person's illness be reflected in another person's neural pathways, playing a trick on consciousness, convincing the host that it originated in her own body? In the last decade, scientists have begun to explore the concept that regions in our brain once thought to activate only our own activity or sensations are also firing what are known as mirror neurons when we witness someone else perform an action or feel a sensation. Mass psychogenic illness could be thought of as the maladaptive version of the kind of empathy that finds expression in actual physical sensation: the contagious yawn or sympathetic nausea or the sibling who grabs his own finger when he sees his brother's bleed.

Any two people, as they try to delicately disagree or flirt or compare notes on the best route to Boston, might unwittingly match vocal tones or even frequency of eye blinks. In one study, researchers found that subjects trying to form an alliance with someone else subconsciously tap their feet to match the tapping of that person's foot, or touch their faces with the same frequency. "It's happening unconsciously, but it is serving the goals you need it to serve," says Jessica Lakin, the chairwoman of the psychology department at Drew University in New Jersey, who studies what's known as the chameleon effect. Another study contrived to make subjects feel excluded from an online game; when those subjects were next introduced to someone new, they matched foot-tapping even more assiduously (and equally subconsciously) as if all the more motivated, at some primal level, to bond through physical mimicry. Mass psychogenic illness, whatever its mysterious mechanism, seems deeply connected to empathy and to a longing for what social psychologists call affiliation: belonging.

Cheerleaders frequently come up in case histories of mass psychogenic illness at schools, partly because psychogenic outbreaks often start with someone of high social status. But it might also be that their enviable unity is what makes them more susceptible. In 2002, 10 students, 5 of them cheerleaders, in a rural town in North Carolina suffered from nonepileptic seizures and fainting spells. In 1952, the Associated Press reported that 165 members of the Tigerettes cheerleading squad from Monroe, La., fainted before halftime at a high-school football game in nearby Natchez, Miss. There were no unusual circumstances, other than a little bit of heat and an embarrassing incident in which the girls had come onto the field after the first quarter, by accident. So many girls were fainting in quick succession that five ambulances raced across the field at once. "It looked like the racetrack at Indianapolis," a spectator said.

Most cases resolve quickly. Authorities say something reassuring about the environment, the symptoms fade and everyone moves on. "Things only go wrong," Wessely wrote in 1995, "when the nature of an outbreak is not recognized, and a fruitless and expensive search for toxins, fumes and gases begins. Anxiety, far from being reduced, increases. It is only then that long-term psychological problems may develop." A school in the United Kingdom was plagued for years by the concern that a strange odor was making students and teachers ill, even though public-health officials found no problem. Administrators relocated the school temporarily, but teachers still worried that the books they brought with them could contaminate the new space.

The environmental concerns in Le Roy seemed to be gaining traction rather than being put to rest. At times, it was hard to distinguish between paranoia and justifiable concern. Soon after Brockovich's testers were turned away from the school, a WPIX reporter showed footage of dozens of corroding barrels near the site of the train derailment, some of them oozing a putty-colored material, in an area marked "Hazardous Waste." E.P.A. officials told the reporter that despite the labels, they did not believe "for one second" that the barrels contained hazardous materials - then sent men in hazmat suits to test and later remove them. "With the government, our own health department, collaborating with the school, with Dent, it's almost just short of a conspiracy," James DuPont, one of the fathers, said. "People are getting that thing, like they're trying to hide something."

"That mass psychogenic illness - that's just a bunch of hoggy," said Heather Parker. It was around noon on a Sunday in late January, and she was getting ready to leave the house to go to her job doing technical support at TurboTax. Her 17-year-old daughter Lydia, who took ill one week after Thera in mid-October, was curled up in an armchair in the living room. As she talked, Lydia's right arm moved, over and over and over, in what looked like a hitchhiking gesture that had lost its way.

There was a calmness to the movement, an acceptance, that was different from what she displayed in a dramatic interview on "Dr. Drew," a TV show on HLN hosted by Drew Pinsky, in late January. On that show, Lydia's face looked distressed, and her arm swung far more wildly. She had bruises on the side of her face from where had she punched herself. Beside her that day, Thera fidgeted and twitched.

Thera and Lydia are in the same grade, but before they both started suffering from tics, "we weren't as close as we are now," Lydia said. Lydia is not the cheerleading type or the honor-roll type - she has friends, but a small circle, and she was never much of a student. In some of the earliest news clips, her hair is blond; a few months later it is red; then, most recently, a purply black. She knew Thera from art class. "She is a phenomenal artist," Lydia said. "She can draw like there's no tomorrow. And she's in cheerleading. She has a bunch of friends. She has an amazing boyfriend - and she wasn't stressed out. It's heartbreaking for her." It was only when she thought of Thera's pain that Lydia's eyes looked as if they were tearing up.

Precisely because Thera seemed to have the world at her feet, it's hard for Lydia to accept what the doctors have said about conversion disorder. But there's one thing Lydia is certain of. "It's not the environment," she said. "I always drank my own Snapple."

The "Dr. Drew" interview was broadcast live from Thera's home. Several minutes into a discussion with a medical expert, the camera suddenly cut back to Thera. "Oops," Drew Pinsky said. "Thera is having a little bit of a reaction there. Thera, are you O.K.?" She had slid slowly to her mother's lap and then onto the floor. "Is her airway O.K.?" Pinsky asked. "Do you need me to call the paramedics?" Her mother looked oddly calm, explaining that Thera had epilepsy. Recently she had also been experiencing nonepileptic seizures, which are a common form of psychogenic illness in people who have epilepsy. "It's going to pass," she said. Thera was conscious, eyes open, but seizing up on the floor. Soon after the cameras stopped rolling, Lydia temporarily blacked out. Within a few days, she was feeling so much numbness in her legs, she had to rely on a wheelchair. She borrowed Thera's.

On the day we spoke, Lydia no longer needed the wheelchair, but she still did not seem well. She was having trouble sleeping and was on 11 different prescription medications. As we spoke, Lydia's 5-year-old sister silently came into the living room and crawled under a fleece leopard-print blanket beside her, looking out warily. Lydia's mother works long hours, and her grandmother works nights. That leaves Lydia to give her sister dinner, to put her to bed, to take her along on trips to the mall with her friends.

As for their father, "No one knows where he is," Lydia said. And even if he were around, she would not trust him to watch her sister. "He was always violent since maybe I was 10," she said. The worst incident occurred in February 2009. Her father had been drinking. "I threw a shoe at him, he kept yelling at me and punched me in the back of the head," Lydia said. "We ended up in a corner just like that, punching each other in the face for 10 minutes before my grandmother pulled him off." Lydia, her arm swinging steadily, spoke in a low, almost disinterested monotone. Fourteen at the time of the attack, she filed a police report.

"He reached out to me on Facebook a couple of days ago," Lydia said. For the first and only time during the interview, she let out two loud humming noises. "He found out from watching - hmm, hmm - from the news and stuff. I didn't really let it bother me."

Her sister got up and wandered into the kitchen to get some potato chips. "It isn't important," Lydia said. "It isn't relevant."

The psychiatric department at the Rochester Medical Center was partially funded by a gift from Helen Woodward Rivas, heir to the Jell-O fortune and resident of Le Roy. (The department, its chairman liked to say, "rests firmly on a foundation of Jell-O.") It also happened to be the scholarly home of a physician-psychiatrist named George Engel, who was best known for promoting what he called the "biopsychosocial" model of diagnosing and treating illnesses. His influential 1977 paper in Science argued that doctors should evaluate the life circumstances, family backgrounds, income levels and daily habits of patients in addition to their physical health.

Engel would have seen biopsychosocial factors everywhere in Le Roy, a town that changed, like so many others in Western New York, when its factories closed down. The median income there, even as recently as 1980, was almost 9 percent above the national average; now it's below average. Where there were once single-family homes owned by their residents, there is a higher than average number of rental properties, meaning a more transient population. And the town's changes in family structure follow a trend that is particularly pronounced in working-class communities - more divorce, more single mothers. In 1980, Le Roy had fewer single mothers living there than in most of the country; now that number, too, is higher than the national average. Economically, "you see a decline in Le Roy, relative to the rest of the country,"said Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College and a consultant in census statistics for The New York Times. "The change in household structure - that's quite stark."

A common thread emerged among the five girls I interviewed extensively: none had stable relationships with their biological fathers. And the father of a sixth girl had seen little of his high-school daughter until his concern about the tics galvanized their relationship. Another student was a foster child who switched foster homes shortly before his tics came on; yet another is in the custody of an older sibling. Another two have spotty contact with their fathers. One young woman I interviewed was close to homeless after she and her mother left her father's trailer. They're staying with a friend of a friend while her mother, who was laid off two times in the last year, tries to scrape together first and last month's rent so they can get a place of their own.

Nineteen-year-old Chelsey Dumars was both estranged from her own parents and a single mother herself. But she was also proof of the way that families could be put back together again in new variations. She lives in a narrow house by the railroad tracks that belongs to Penny Privitera-Watson and Dave Watson, the mother and stepfather of her former boyfriend, Peter. Chelsey moved in with them not long after she found herself pregnant last year. She and Peter were just friends at that point - the father was someone else - but she was on the outs with her own parents, who live in nearby Brockport, and needed help. Penny's sister runs a day care center behind the house, which means that Chelsey could go back to school - and cheerleading - knowing that her baby was well cared for.

Chelsey's symptoms came on about two weeks after Thera's. Her head twisted to the side every few minutes, her mouth grimacing as if she had tried and failed to stop the movement midway. At times, her neck twisted so severely that she was afraid to eat for fear of choking. Watson and his wife have taken her to various doctors and hospitals and are frustrated by what they see as an inadequate diagnosis. "These girls are no more stressed than the girls the year before and the year before that," Watson said. Peter suggested another reason for people to accept the diagnosis of conversion disorder: The way he saw it, it didn't offer much hope. "It's like it's incurable unless you eliminate the stress," he said. "And there's stress everywhere you go."

There are, of course, dozens of girls at the Le Roy high school with plenty of stress and difficult family situations who did not start twitching and jerking - and many more who suffer neither poverty nor trauma nor family illness, and watched, their mother and father sitting beside them, as their friends appeared on the nightly news. Why these girls? One could try to connect the dots: the relationships of cheerleading and art class and friendship, the way the symptoms seemed to flow from the girls at the top of the social heap to those who looked up to them, the commonality of a certain kind of vulnerability. But the workings of the illness are in some ways as mysterious as the hidden codes of adolescence itself.

Hysteria, the medical historian Robert Woolsey writes, is a "protolanguage," its symptoms "a code used by a patient to communicate a message which, for various reasons, cannot be verbalized." As their parents and the media and town officials conducted a conversation all around them, the girls in Le Roy seemed to be sharing a language that maybe even they did not fully understand. That so many people in town were more preoccupied with environmental waste than the homes of the affected young people suggests that their message may have been hard for some of the adults to hear, too.

But there were also some Le Roy residents who knew the girls' backgrounds and who made the link between those histories and the symptoms. Lynne Belluscio, the director of the Le Roy Historical Society, said that in a small town, "people weren't going to go and shout, 'Say, these kids have got these kinds of problems.' " They were not going to say it at a community meeting, and they might not even say it to friends. "That's damaged the trust within the community," she said.

The sickness of the girls seemed to ripple out to affect the health of the whole community, which suddenly found itself an object of fascination and fear and mistrust. Five basketball games were canceled when parents of players in neighboring counties voted not to let their children travel to Le Roy. Belluscio has a friend who is worried that her real estate sale is falling through, a common tale in recent weeks, and local businesses were complaining that commerce was down, because people had fears about the water, not to mention an aversion to the media vans up and down Main Street. "It's emotionally exhausting to people who love this community," said Lorie Longhany, chairwoman of the Genesee County Democratic Committee. "Without laying any blame on any of these families - they're going through their private hell with this. But it's not private hell, it's public hell. It's almost like a depression has just settled over Le Roy."

Eventually, the E.P.A. tested the barrels and found they did not contain hazardous waste. Eventually, it was discovered that the sticky orange ooze on the playing fields was something known as rust fungus, which is common to Kentucky bluegrass. And yet Erin Brockovich said there was more to investigate. It seemed the door on potentially dangerous toxins could never fully be closed.

In her book "Hystories," the feminist critic Elaine Showalter argues that hysterical epidemics require three ingredients: physician-enthusiasts and theorists; unhappy and vulnerable patients; and supportive cultural environments. The physician-enthusiast generally offers "a unified field theory of a vague syndrome, providing a clear and coherent explanation for its many confusing symptoms," she writes.

Le Roy certainly had vulnerable patients and a supportive environment. And in late January, Rosario Trifiletti, a pediatric neurologist from Ramsey, N.J., stepped forward with a theory of the illness. In a local doctor's office, where a group of concerned parents had gathered to hear what he had to say, Trifiletti laid out his thinking: the girls were suffering from an illness similar to Pandas (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcus), a disease in which the immune system alters the neurochemistry of young people suffering from strep infection. The parents had questions, and Trifiletti seemed to have reasonable answers. If it was an infection, why would it only affect girls? Trifiletti explained that it might be their more sensitive endocrine systems. Why so many girls, if Pandas is generally rare? It could be a particularly virulent infection. What about the environmental toxins? That might be compromising their immune systems in ways that left them particularly vulnerable to this kind of autoimmune disease.

Susan Swedo, the neurologist at the National Institutes of Health who first described the disease, has implied that she doubted Pandas or a similar syndrome could be responsible for the symptoms in Le Roy. The phenomenon is rare enough that the odds of so many students suffering from it at once, all in one high school, were almost impossible. But a week later, after examining the girls, Trifiletti revealed on "Dr. Drew" that all nine of the girls he tested showed evidence of either strep exposure or exposure to the organism associated with pneumonia. Results were far from conclusive, and he would need to study the levels of antibodies in their blood over time to know more, but he said there was enough evidence to get them started on antibiotics and anti-inflammatories.

After that, more lines were drawn in Le Roy. Some girls, including a few who had been receiving treatment at Dent, started seeing Trifiletti and taking the medications he prescribed. Others remained with their original neurologists, and were bullied on Facebook by those who were now taking the antibiotics: if you got better without the pills, you had surely been faking all along. The accusations invariably exacerbated the symptoms. Wessely, the epidemiologist, cited a medical-journal paper whose title had long resonated with him: "If You Have to Prove You Are Ill, You Can't Get Better."

When I spoke to him in late February, Trifiletti told me that the girls he was treating were showing dramatic signs of improvement. Katie's parents said they believed that she was responding well to the antibiotics; Chelsey's family reported that the drugs are helping her as well. But another patient of Trifiletti's said she was still fainting.

When the subject of the girls' personal backgrounds came up - the biopsychosocial factors that might be affecting their health - Trifiletti said he had not had the time to ask them about those kinds of things. The abuse, the troubling family circumstances - much of it came as news to him. "Jeez, I didn't realize the extent," Trifiletti said. "These aren't things people want to talk about. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to distinguish between the drug and the placebo effect."

Trifiletti's Pandas-like disease was so vaguely formulated that it was impossible to rule out. There was no way to know whether the antibiotics were really doing the work or serving as placebos. Then again, even the benefits of therapy could be considered a placebo effect: to believe in mass hysteria is to believe in the power of the mind to convince itself of almost anything.

Jennifer McVige, the neurologist at Dent who has been treating many of the girls, told me she was seeing dramatic improvements in many of the girls as well, especially after news outlets took down videos showing them experiencing tics. But she also suggested that their recovery would probably come in fits and starts. "It'll get better and then something stressful will happen - a breakup or the loss of a family member - and those physical sensations could start coming back," she said.

McVige is young and warm and won some girls' trust even before they could accept what she had to say. "I love her," Lydia Parker had said to me. "I just don't like the diagnosis."

McVige's approach has been to offer them cognitive behavioral therapy, psychological counseling, antidepressants and exhaustive testing. "If you come off saying, 'It's in your head, you have to deal with it,' people don't want to hear that," McVige said. "The first thing you need to do is say: 'No, you're right. There is a problem. The first thing I'll do is make sure there's nothing metabolic or organic or infectious.' " McVige checked their thyroid, their hemoglobin, their drug levels and their strep exposure, as well as other possibilities, and encouraged the girls' families to seek out other infectious-disease specialists for further confirmation.

She also found a way to talk about conversion disorder that put it on a continuum with other, less threatening forms of stress-induced illness. "I also work with migraine patients, and I tell the girls, the first thing we talk to migraine patients about is their level of stress," McVige said. While the girls waited for various test results, she asked them to keep a diary and write down anything that was on their minds. "If there's nothing there, great, no harm done - but nobody ever got harmed by taking a good hard look at your life," she said. Even some of the girls who do not subscribe to the diagnosis of conversion disorder - Katie, for example - have been receiving therapy in addition to taking antibiotics. And slowly, McVige feels, more and more of her own patients have started to accept that their life stressors might be connected to their symptoms.

The day after Trifiletti announced his findings on television, Thera was in high spirits, feeling so strong that she went to the basketball game where her team would be cheering. Maybe she was relieved that there was some resolution to her illness, a way forward that did not entail believing that her symptoms were purely psychological or that the rest of her classmates would soon fall ill from environmental toxins. After months of missed school, she started returning for a few hours a week and even felt up to working with a friend on her "individual," a performance that cheerleaders give at games, solo, in practice for possible competition.

Thera was still too weak to do the splits and jumps of her teammates, but she looked confident when she took the floor at halftime for her individual routine. A few girls chanted her name: Thera, Thera, Thera.

In the middle of the gym, with everyone's eyes on her, she didn't look vulnerable or troubled or like someone who would be the subject of intense media fascination. She looked like a lovely girl who could dance, surrounded by the community who knew her as a person before everyone else came to know her as a cheerleader with tics.

The music started. She raised her hands up in the air, then turned around and looked sweetly back at the crowd. Watching her dance, it was easy to feel optimistic about her future. Thera would get better. And surely, the other girls would follow.

Correction: March 11, 2012

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The Mystery of 18 Twitching Teenagers in Le Roy

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When doctors told Thera's mother, Melisa Phillips, that her daughter's tics were stress-related, she "went along with it," she told me. "I know she has a huge heart, and she's wound tight." Thera also had an episode of tics three years ago.

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Kahoot! is a game-based learning platform that brings engagement and fun to 1+ billion players every year at school, at work, and at home.

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Confuse your body with 4 tricks you can do now. Post to Facebook: http://on.fb.me/RsNXeV Like BuzzFeedVideo on Facebook: http://on.fb.me/18yCF0b Post to Twitter: http://bit.ly/RsO0HB Song- https://soundcloud.com/djgiz/shades-of-soul-moods-vol-2

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