Linguist Christian F. Hempelmann has theorized that the episode was stress-induced. In 1962,<unk>  had just won its independence, he said, and students had reported feeling stressed because of higher expectations by teachers and parents. Mass psychogenic illness, he says, usually occurs in people without a lot of power. "MPI is a last resort for people of a low status. It's an easy way for them to express that something is wrong." Sociologist Robert Bartholomew and psychiatrist Simon Wessely both put forward a culture-specific<unk>  hysteria hypothesis, pointing out that the occurrences in 1960s Africa were prevalent in missionary schools and<unk> n society was ruled by strict traditional elders, so the likelihood is the hysteria was a manifestation of the cultural dissonance between the “traditional conservatism” at home and the new ideas challenging those beliefs in school, which they termed ‘conversion reactions’.
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