On this season, we'll be exploring our bizarre beliefs, unfounded fears, and fantastical thinking, how they shape our psychology and culture, and how much of our past we can find in the present.

I'm your host, Chelsea Weber-Smith, and this is American Hysteria.

It is getting to be a great effort for me to think straight.

Just this nervous weakness, I suppose.

What made Solomon so wise?

Snake oil!

Men of your intelligence don't need convincing.

There's some type of electromagnetic thing that we're missing, and so it's good to take your shoes off and walk in the grass.

I don't know what the f*** we talk about.

Over the last few weeks, I've been joyfully perusing the website for Gwyneth Paltrow's

modern lifestyle self-care brand, which if you don't already know, and for reasons I decided

I didn't care to look up, it's called goop. Worried about emotionally toxic people? Never fear. You can get a bottle of psychic vampire repellent for just $27. For another $120, you can deal with anxieties and energy imbalances with body vibe stickers. You can get face cream that's been meditated over by a large group of employees,

ensuring that the infusion of vibrational love will unwrinkle every burdened brow that can afford it.

As annoying and pretentious as Gwyneth Palchow can be, she is just the newest queen

in a long lineage of celebrity

medical quackery, hucking fake cures to biological as well as mental illnesses. In addition to bogus

cures, we also have a long American history of identifying and pathologizing both biological and

mental illnesses that simply don't exist, ones that said

much more about the culture's values at the time than it did about the people who were said to be

ill. I joyfully announced that we'll be traveling together to visit my favorite American

hysteria villains so far, the good doctor John Harvey Kellogg,

the inventor of sugarless corn flakes, who we learned about in our poison Halloween candy episode.

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