'Needle spiking', social panics, and psychogenic illness

The last thing the 19-year-old remembered was being at the bar around 11pm before she suddenly became unable to speak or stand up.

According to friends who got in a taxi to take her home she began “violently throwing up”, screaming, choking, and losing consciousness.

An ambulance was called and she was rushed to hospital. When she woke up the next day she described a throbbing pain in her left hand and a pin-prick puncture wound.

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The case became the most high-profile of a spate of “needle spiking” attacks when Ms Buckle shared her experience with a number of media outlets in October 2021, telling ITV News: “I wasn’t intoxicated on a stupid level or overly drunk.

“I knew I had clearly been spiked but it would have never occurred to me it was via injection if my hand wasn’t throbbing.”

Exactly what did happen in Ms Buckle’s case is unclear. Police investigated, but to date no one has been charged.

The alleged incident was among thousands reported in cities across the UK and Europe - but, more than a year on, there is a growing sense that what really happened might be a form of psychological contagion.

On Wednesday, a report presented at a meeting of the Scottish Police Authority said that Police Scotland had found no evidence of spiking by injection despite around 150 people - mostly young women aged 16 to 18, many of them students - coming forward between October 1 2021 and October 30 this year.

The majority of reports were made between October and the end of November last year, at the height of publicity around the scare as people took to social media to share anecdotes of "blacking out" and suffering "puncture wounds".

Four cases of spiking were identified, but all involved drinks - three of which occurred in residential properties and two where the perpetrator was known to the victim.

Notably, there were no eyewitnesses to back up any cases of needle spiking.

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It might seem strange that so many people could simultaneously experience the same symptoms if nothing actually happened, but it is not without precedent.

Dr Robert Bartholomew, a medical sociologist and expert in mass psychogenic illness, noted that these types of "social panics" tend to occur against a backdrop of anxiety - and that anxiety and stress can in turn manifest as genuine physical symptoms.

Writing earlier this year in Psychology Today, he said: "After two years of pandemic restrictions, British nightclubs had only just returned to normal in the summer of 2021.

"Young people had endured isolation, disruption to their education, friendships, and love lives. They had been bombarded with frightening news reports about Covid, and as clubs reopened, there was still a fear of the virus and guilt associated with the possibility that they may catch it and pass it on to a vulnerable loved one.

"The needle, an object of fear for many people, may represent anxiety about vaccinations and fear of contamination."

Dr Bartholomew drew comparisons with previous social panics such as the 'Halifax Slasher' of 1938 - a razorblade-wielding menace said to have carried out a spate of random attacks on female passersby.

As reports of the elusive 'slasher' spread, there were claims of copycat offences in other parts of the UK.

In the end, police concluded that most of the supposed sightings amounted to a figment of the panicked public's imagination, with most of those who had been wounded eventually admitting to having self-inflicted the injuries due to "nerves" or to make "boyfriends feel guilty after an argument".

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As far as the question of how people could feel so intoxicated if they had not drunk to excess, an Australian study has previously found that self-reported alcohol consumption is often unreliable. It also found that, of 97 patients who presented at hospital emergency departments claiming to have been spiked, no traces of sedatives were found in their blood or urine.

There are plenty of other examples of mass psychogenic illness - or what was once dismissively known an "hysteria".

In 2015, 40 pupils at a school Ripon, Lancashire had to be treated by emergency services for dizziness and nausea seemingly triggered by a wave of anxiety after four other children fainted during an Armistice Day service.

Such incidents are "incredibly common", said Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist and epidemiologist who first wrote about the subject in 1987.

He said: “It may be that someone faints, or has a fit, or a medical incident, and what then gets transmitted is anxiety.

"People get anxious because they don’t quite know what it is, and the thing about anxiety is that it gives you symptoms...the next thing you know, you’ve keeled over.”

There have been similar examples of outbreaks of tics sweeping through schools, such as the widely documented case of Le Roy High School in New York where 20 pupils were stricken - seemingly involuntarily - by bizarre spasms and twitches in 2011.

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Environmentalists claimed pollution was to blame, but by the end of the school year most of the teens had returned to normal with doctors diagnosing mass psychogenic illness and conversion disorder - where psychological stress brings about physical symptoms, and members of a tight-knit group subconsciously mimic one another's behaviour.

The situation at the school was aggravated, said medics, as stories were shared on social media and the situation reported by the mainstream media - effectively creating an anxiety feedback loop.

Perhaps that also explains why reports to the police of 'needle spiking' dwindled at the same time as the media's spotlight on the issue faded.