Robert Bartholomew


Robert Emerson Bartholomew is an American medical sociologist, journalist and author living in New Zealand. He is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. In addition to publishing more than 60 academic papers, he has written or co-written 16 popular science and skeptical non-fiction books. He writes for several newspapers and journals on sociological and fringe science topics, including Psychology Today, Skeptical Inquirer, and British magazines The Skeptic and Fortean Times.
He is an expert in fields such as mass hysteria and mass psychogenic illness and is frequently consulted by media during current events of sociological phenomena such as incidences of suspected mass hysteria or panic.

Academic work

Bartholomew first obtained a radio broadcasting certificate studying at SUNY Adirondack in 1977 followed in 1979 by a bachelor degree in communications at Plattsburgh. By 1984 he had been awarded a masters degree in American sociology at SUNY. In 1992 he gained a masters in Australian sociology from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia followed by a doctorate in sociology from James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. Finally in 2001 he gained his teaching qualification from Upper Valley Teachers Institute in social studies.
Bartholomew has also lived and worked in Malaysia and in 2009 worked in sociology at International University College of Technology. In April 2010 he took up a teaching position at Botany Downs Secondary College in Auckland, New Zealand. He is currently an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
In 2012, Bartholomew published Australia's forgotten children: The corrupt state of education in the Northern Territory: A case study of educational apartheid at an aboriginal pretend school in which he uncovered human rights abuses of indigenous Australian aboriginal children who were being exposed to harmful asbestos in the Northern Territory with the knowledge of the Northern Territory Department of Education.
Bartholomew's principal area of academic contribution is in the field of mass psychogenic illness, previously known as mass hysteria, both historical and present day cases, an area he has been studying for over 25 years. He has written extensively about 600 notable instances including the Salem witch trials, the 2011 Le Roy illness, which Bartholomew has described as "the first case of this magnitude to occur in the U.S. during the social networking era", and present-day manifestations, most of which he has said have yet to be studied in-depth by sociologists.
In 2016, Bartholomew investigated the 2012 case of an outbreak of hiccups in Danvers, Massachusetts, in which 24 young people were stricken with apparently uncontrollable hiccups. After requesting and reviewing state documents from the original investigation, he concluded the most likely explanation was a psychogenic conversion disorder affecting the girls involved. He publicly stated the Massachusetts Department of Public Health had "knowingly issued an inaccurate, incomplete report...They have an obligation to issue accurate diagnoses, and patients have a right to know what made them sick" and filed official complaints of malpractice.
Bartholomew has also drawn attention to the role of the internet in acting as an "echo chamber" for spreading moral outrage; for example on social media, pedophile allegations used as political weapons by supporters of the far right against liberal celebrities, which mirrors earlier public outrage which took the form of the Red Scare and the Lavender scare against homosexuals in US government positions.
Bartholomew is frequently interviewed as an expert on topics as diverse as the "Pokémon Panic" of 1997, the spread of UFO conspiracy theories, the 2016 clown panic, the viral spread of online fads such as Pokémon Go, and the suspected sonic attacks on embassies in Cuba and China which began in 2017, about which he said:
In 2020 he co-authored Havana Syndrome: Mass Psychogenic Illness and the Real Story Behind the Embassy Mystery and Hysteria, a book on the sonic attack controversy in Cuba with Professor Robert W. Baloh, a neurologist at the UCLA Medical Center. The authors document dozens of similar examples of disorders that have essentially the same features as "Havana Syndrome", but were given different labels, from the 18th century belief that sounds from certain musical instruments were harmful to human health, to contemporary panics involving people living near wind turbines.
In March 2020, Bartholomew was invited to attend a medical conference in Havana, Cuba, on the "attacks", where he repeated the claim that stress-induced mass psychogenic illness was the most likely cause.

Publications

Academic papers

Bartholomew has written over 60 academic papers including:
In addition Bartholomew contributes to several newspapers and journals on various sociological and fringe science topics, including Psychology Today, Skeptical Inquirer, and British magazines The Skeptic and Fortean Times.

Books

He is also the author of several popular science and skeptical non-fiction books including:
in Mother Jones described Outbreak! The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary Social Behavior as "Essential reading for the era of Trump" while Véronique Campion-Vincent described it as "exceptional in its scope...an indispensable working tool for researchers". Michael Bywater in The Daily Telegraph described Panic Attacks as "a revealing historical corrective to the tempting view that media manipulation is a late-20th-century invention."

Recognition

In 2017, Bartholomew was elected a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.