Psychiatrist says `mass hysteria’ triggered many illness complaints

An Orono psychiatrist has testified he believed “mass hysteria” was rampant at the Champion International mill where a number of workers are claiming their physical and mental problems are being caused by workplace chemicals.

A labor union official, meanwhile, has testified to conditions in which workers could have been exposed to chemicals.

The testimony is buried in the files of the Workers’ Compensation Commission where the cases of several Champion workers, including the widows of two, are plodding toward resolution as lawyers for both sides await medical tests and testimony from experts.

While several employees have complained of similar symptoms, a relationship among the cases has yet to be established through medical testimony. Where Thomas Watson, the lawyer for the employees, has said there are commonalities among the cases, the company’s lawyer, Peter Weatherbee, said he finds many differences.

And studies of the mill have turned up nothing so far. “OSHA’s conclusions were very clear that they found no link between Norman Crossman’s death and some of the other employees’ complaints and workplace chemicals,” said Seth Kursman, a company spokesman. At the same time, OSHA officials have conceded the impossibility of reconstructing conditions as they were when people may have been poisoned by toxic chemicals.

Watson said about 10 people have asked him to file Workers’ Compensation claims alleging chemical poisoning, and another half dozen people who believe they have been affected have expressed a willingness to help, but are afraid to file claims, he said. “They’ve all been in similar areas of the mill,” he said, and all have complained of upper body muscle weakness, malaise, shortness of breath, lung irritation and other symptoms. Muscle biopsies in some have turned up “some unusual findings,” which he said he was not prepared to discuss.

Judy Brown Cousins’ medical complaints were triggered in part by “this feeling of mass hysteria which seems (to) run rampant at Champion,” testified Dr. David Bourne, a psychiatrist hired by Champion’s insurance company, Sedgwick James Co., to evaluate her.

At a Workers’ Compensation hearing June 15, Weatherbee asked Bourne to explain what mass hysteria means to a psychiatrist.

“It’s more a social phenomenon in which, in this case, a number of people in a workplace … develop symptoms that are psychogenic in origin based on fears which are irrational. There’s a lot of support in their immediate environment for further spread of these fears, and then it becomes a self-perpetuating kind of experience,” said Bourne.

He cited as an example a situation at a school in Massachusetts in which children reported feeling sick and lightheaded. Fears were increased when urine tests showed an organic compound not normally found. The problem, which speculation linked to insecticide spraying at the school, turned out to be attributable to a contaminant in the plastic containers used to collect the urine samples, said Bourne.

Bourne said he would reconsider his opinion that Cousins was suffering delusions if it were shown she had received “serious exposure” to poisonous chemicals.

Owen Oliver, of Verona, told the commission how workers in the pulp laboratory, a center for many of the complaints, were exposed to a variety of chemicals in the air and water. He went to work in the pulp laboratory in August 1988, where he worked with both Cousins and Norman Crossman, whose widow is alleging his death from a heart attack Dec. 7, 1989, was caused by chemical exposure in the mill.

The pulp laboratory was “like a vacuum cleaner,” testified Oliver, who is a union shop steward. Because of the negative pressure in the room, air was sucked in from a variety of surrounding sources, he said. The ventilation system didn’t work, he said. The odors of strong clorox, propane gas, kerosene, acrid smoke that smelled like rotten eggs, “sweet chlorine” and sewer gas sometimes wafted through the room.

At times, the water coming into the laboratory through a tap was blue, like paper dye, or white and foamy. Both he and Cousins drank it because no one told them it was not fit to drink, he said. “We had no idea until something came through the faucets that was discolored that it wasn’t… The first time I saw it I stopped drinking it,” he said.

Oliver said he experienced “chronic congestion, coughing, sore eyes, sore throat, headaches after every shift.” He said, “A lot of times I thought I had the flu… Several times I had to go out, and a couple of times that I can really remember… I was just overcome by whatever was in there at the time, and I was nauseated and sick and throwing up, so I was sent home.”

Champion officials have made improvements to the laboratory during the last year. “They’ve done a real good job on it,” said Oliver. Problems have been “real minor compared to what we were having before.”