5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
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Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#2The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#3The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
This was another hysteria that was constantly government-fueled, and discussion of it completely disappeared once the people who met every morning to whiteboard how best to push it were assigned to other projects.
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#4The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
This study isn't evidence against it.
> The NIH study, which began in 2018 and included more than 80 Havana syndrome patients, wasn't designed to examine the likelihood of some weapon or other trigger for Havana syndrome symptoms.
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#5[flagged]
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#6The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
While I agree there is not evidence of a weapon, I am not buying hypochondria. The amount of reports and the peculiarity of the hearing symptoms don't add up to hypochondria. Local environmental pathogens or chemicals could be a cause. Also, our ability to detect such pathogens or brain abnormalities is still very limited, so finding no abnormalities is not surprising.
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#7> Yet sophisticated MRI scans detected no significant differences in brain volume, structure or white matter — signs of injury or degeneration
In case it wasn’t clear: Neuroimaging can’t visualize every possible problem. They performed one type of testing and didn’t find anything.
That’s not the same as concluding that there are no problems.
It should go without saying that a clean MRI isn’t proof that other neurological symptoms aren’t real, though I see some other commenters jumping to conclusions.
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#8The symptoms sounded like burnout from the beginning. Hypochondria is a common symptom of stress, depression, and other mental disorders. A scary and confusion symptom when one does not have tendencies for it normally. There isn't one clean piece of evidence for any energy weapon or attack hypothesis. It's about time the mass hysteria surrounding Havana syndrome is laid to rest.
i wonder if there's legal precedent for management induced mental illness as other physical workplace hazards have
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#9Everyone who looked at Havana Syndrome when it came out with a critical eye realized immediately it was a BS story. Sonic weapons? Oh please.
Thing is, this sort of thing happens all the time. A prominent and current example is cops and fentanyl. If you listen to cops, they will tell you that just being in the rom with fentanyl can be deadly, breathing it in can be deadly. I'm not sure where this started but it's become a problem because cmany people believe it, leading to cops having psychosomatic panic attacks at the prospect of fentanyl exposure [1]. This story has become so effective that many people disbelieve that it's BS or are surprised to learn it.
So the intersting question is: what purpose do these sorts of stories serve?
With fentanyl, it squarely fits into "copaganda", spreading the idea that being a police officer is super dangerous. Not-so-fun fact: it's more dangerous being married to a cop than it is being a cop (eg [2]).
Another example of this is inflating the numbers of line-of-duty police officer deaths with Covid deaths, particularly because it includes officers who refused to get vaccinated [3].
Fear of crime serves a political purpose. Crime is lower on pretty much every metric than it was 20-30 years ago where the last big panic set in the mandatory minimum mania and the carceral state exploded.
So the obvious conclusion to draw from what purpose Havana Syndrome serves is either selling the story of how bad and dangerous Cuba is and/or how dangerous it is to be a foreign official (which is really a proxy for CIA).
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7492952/
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/09/police-...
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/03/covid-police...
Re: 5-year study finds no brain abnormalities in 'Havana Syndrome' patients
#10[deleted]