I’ve discussed in the past my interest in psychogenic diseases (though I tend to use the term “psychosomatic.”) What are they? Let’s ask wikipedia.

Psychogenic diseases are physical illnesses that stem from emotional or mental stresses.

I have, for example, talked about the girls of Le Roy who developed weird, twitching body tics though for which no cause could be discovered.

Now I stumble on a Vox article on Joni Mitchell’s bizarre illness called
Morgellons. It’s a disease that causes debillitating pain and the appearence of strange fibers in the skin and flesh. But…

For the past decade, researchers have searched for a biological cause or single underlying factor that might explain the suffering. But they have mostly concluded that Morgellons is “a psychosis or mass-shared delusion.”

In one of the most comprehensive studies to date, published in the journal PLOS, researchers from the CDC collected detailed epidemiological information, medical histories, and skin samples from 115 Morgellons sufferers in Northern California.

“No parasites or mycobacteria were detected,” they reported. The researchers also couldn’t find any environmental explanation for patients’ suffering.

The fiber-like strands on sufferers were mostly just cotton debris, probably lint from clothing. Their skin damage seemed to be caused by nothing more than sun exposure. While some patients had sores, these appeared to have arisen from chronic picking and scratching.

I, of course, am in no position to definitively say whether the disease is real or not. But if it is not, we are again forced to examine a disturbing conclusion, that the mind* alone is capable of inflicting serious distress on on the body. Bizarre.

*Of course, I don’t really believe in a “mind” (in the sense of some non-material soul or whatever); I use the term here to designate the variety of what we call mental processes that go on in the brain.