PARANOIA

Anyone ever considered a Paranoia/Call of Cthulu crossover? I think it's pretty obvious the Lord of R'lyeh is a commie mutant.

I imagine the biggest problem would be Friend Computer causing so much sanity loss that the troubleshooters never make it to the otherworldly horrors.
 

I wonder how definitely the investigators can truly eliminate the other plausible explanations for the reported symptoms. A lot of the symptoms to me sound like rheumatic chorea (St. Vitus Dance). This is an autoimmune response to a strep infection. It is not unheard of for some strains of strep infections to produce sub-clinical symptoms. In medieval times, this affected groups of people - usually teenagers.

It would also be plausible that there was a strain of group A strep going around the school earlier (perhaps the 1st week of school) that tended to produce sub-clinical symptoms during infection and an latent odd immune response a couple months later. How would you know? You couldn't likely detect active GAS in any of these people - the infection is long gone. Maybe one of them had "strep throat" but thought it was a cold and they got over it on their own. Perhaps the others never really had any symptoms. Can any medical investigation detect this?

If the common cause is stress - then why this particular school? Why not the 20,000 other schools?

The odd thing about rheumatic chorea is that it tends to affect people who are a little neurotic and edgy to begin with. I'm not sure if that's because they are _psychologically_ more susceptible or if they are _physiologically _ more susceptible due to differences in their brains. But this, along with a negative reported history of strep, could lead someone to dismiss the possibility of rheumatic chorea and focus on mass hysteria.

I also wonder with the mass fainting spells during choir. It is extremely common for people to faint during choir singing. They have to stand for prolonged periods while singing. This alone can produce Vasovagal syncope, but why does it tend to cluster with multiple x-mas choir singers getting affected? Is it really sociogenic? I've seen this happen in my own 6th grade class years ago and just saw it in another group last year. In both cases, there wasn't a whole lot of stress on anyone that I could see - nobody really cared whether you hit the high "C" note or not.

Perhaps there are other factors that the choir groups have in common with eachother. Perhaps they all ate at the same time. Perhaps during their rehearsal over the previous few weeks, they exchanged some bug (singing with 100 people in close quarters probably spreads respiratory viruses) that can affected the vasovagal system in such a way that people are prone to fainting.