Hysteria! Podcast with Alice Lowe cover art

Hysteria!

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Hysteria!

By: Phoebe Bennett, Nick Minter
Narrated by: Alice Lowe
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About this listen

Hysteria! presents tales of howling nuns, fainting schoolgirls, witches, wombs, online panics and threats, both imagined and real. Crossing decades and continents, and from personal panics to societal scares, Alice Lowe explores hysterical behaviour. Come join the delirium....

Hysteria is a word that regularly gets misused. It gets attached to everything from overly emotional behaviour to moral panics, via stock market crashes, stampedes, viral videos and more. It's often used, pejoratively, about women, and it shares its roots with the ancient Greek word for womb. The story of hysteria touches on issues of stigma, gender, morality and power. But how do we separate mass psychogenic illness from mere emotional excess?

Filmmaker, actress and writer Alice Lowe has long been fascinated by the grey area between behavioural control and abandon. In this six-part series, she explores what we really mean when we talk about frenzies, fevers, manias and panics, both individually and throughout society.

Produced by Wisebuddah for Audible Originals.

This is an Audible Original Podcast. Free for members. You can download all6 episodes to your Library now.

©2019 Audible, Ltd. (P)2019 Audible, Ltd. Psychology Psychology & Mental Health
Episodes
  • Ep. 1: Film, Nuns and Deathly Dances

    Ep. 1: Film, Nuns and Deathly Dances
    Jul 24 2019

    Cinema thrives on hysterical characters, especially when they inhabit closed environments such as convents or girls schools. But what can we make of the dozens of people who died during a dancing epidemic in medieval France?
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    34 mins
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  • Ep. 2: Witches, Wombs and Women

    Ep. 2: Witches, Wombs and Women
    Jul 24 2019

    Hysteria shares its etymological roots with the ancient Greek word for womb. Does that explain why women are still more likely than men to be accused of hysterical behaviour?
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    25 mins
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  • Ep. 3: Spirits, Angels and Seances

    Ep. 3: Spirits, Angels and Seances
    Jul 24 2019

    Death – or being in close proximity to death – encourages unusual social behaviour. From the birth of Spiritualism to WW1 and beyond, how are our beliefs shaped by the people we lose?
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    28 mins
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All stars
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Interesting topic, well researched and very well presented.I felt the first couple of episodes seemed a bit unfocused and lacking depth (although that could be down to a scarcity of early source material or just wanting to provide a grounding for the later events), but the later episodes were excellent and honestly changed my opinion about the "reality" (if that's the right word) of mass hysteria.

Thoughtful and thought-provoking

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I loved this. I ended up listening to every episode over the course of a day and it really is eye opening to hear how mass hysteria has changed, yet stayed the same through the ages. Alice herself is a great storyteller & has a lovely voice. Her guest speakers brought a wealth of information and I'll be sure to check out their individual work outside of this series. I would recommend this to anyone interested in history/psychology as it really is a fascinating listen.

A brilliant series.

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Alice Lowe (the actor, film director and presenter) examines, "Hysteria". In these six episodes, explores hysteria on a mass and an individual and gender related level. It also looks at how we understand the word itself. We get stories of meowing nuns. How soldiers see 'ghosts' in battle. And outbreaks of mass fainting. While the stories can seem weird, scary and far-fetched, Lowe tries to ground them in rational explanation. Great production values with intelligent and entertaining narration.

Like an intelligent discussion with a friend

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I’m usually into true crime but found this look through time at hysteria, it’s origins and causes, absolutely fascinating. Every feminist should listen.

Loved this podcast!

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Who knew there were that many incidents of hysteria attached to women? Well, every woman realky.
This is an interesting and informative podcast marred only by the extra loud music that intermittently ruins the podcast.

interesting

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