Do we know what is the cause of insane/maniacal/hysterical laughter? (Do pyschotic/insane people even laugh as much as they’re often depicted to? My own experience is too limited to know for sure, but the idea should have come from somewhere.)
Do insane persons actually find something humorous, or is the laughter an uncontrolled response? I realize that this may not be easily knowable, I’m just wondering if anyone knows anything about it.
More factual - Are reports of contagious laughing fits to be believed? The most common one I’ve seen is that in 1962, a group of young girls in Central Africa began a contagious laughing fit that affected 500-1000 people for the next 6 months - 2 years. This seems strange … were they laughing all the time (no sleep), or was it just that they could easily and often be set off laughing? And are they any other reports of laughter epidemics of a similar scale?
I can’t find the full text online (yeah, I live a couple blocks from a library… but it’s raining!). This is, of course, only one possible physiological cause of laughter, there may be others.
Also, Kuru (discussed in this thread) is sometimes called the “laughing death,” or “laughing all the way to the grave,” which I think is from the translation of Kuru from a New Guinea language. I don’t have a cite handy though.
I doubt that most mentally ill people laugh more than other people, but one symptom sometimes seen in schizophrenics is situationally inappropriate laughter. This may be where the media stereotype arose.
I once saw a documentary about schizophrenia in which one man said that when he laughed at inappopriate times it wasn’t because he thought that anything was funny. He just could not control it. That’s the only first-hand account I’ve ever heard on the subject, so I don’t know if it’s the same for everyone. I suspect that some people may not even realize that they are laughing until it is pointed out to them, but I don’t really know.
We lunatics often have a dark and gleeful sense of humor that comes from a combination of the incredible crap we’ve had to survive in the name of psychiatric ‘treatment’ plus the assumption that we’re fragile creatures who can’t handle things that normal people can.