I'm betting it's fraud, started first by one teen girl to get attention, then "spread" to others as it became clear it would be a cool joke to play on adults, and get attention, get famous, etc. Is it possible it's truly some kind of involuntary medical/mental phenomenon? Of course. I'm just saying that I doubt it.
This is a very destructive and incorrect attitude.
Psychogenic illness is not "faking it"...it is very real. It simply means the cause of the problems are based somewhere in the "software" rather than the "hardware". The brain is an exceptionally complicated thing, and the interactions between parts of it can result in all sorts of feedback loops, errors, etc.
If you really don't think it's perfectly possible and probable for a group of teenage girls to develop a shared psychogenic illness completely spontaneously without any sort of guile or even conscious awareness on their part, then unfortunately you have a very simplified and inaccurate understanding of just how complicated and fuzzy our brains are.
Most people have a very poor conception of just how fuzzy the line between what lay people call "sane" and "crazy", and just how easy it is for your brain to trick you. Consider this: a sizable portion of your memories are false. I don't care who you are, this is simply a fact of being human. Some of your memories are constructions based on friends/family describing the event to you some of them are just complete fabrications. However, if asked you would swear up and down they are real. It's not hard to create false memories in people...show them commercials of a non-existent product and many will remember having used it at some point. They're not liars....they're not fakers...they're not idiots...it's just that the human brain is not as simple as we like to think.
This attitude is extremely harmful because it creates an environment where nobody wants to be told they have a "psychogenic illness"....and we get people claiming that hamburgers/magnetic waves/whatever are causing their strange symptoms...and since that's not the case they won't get effective treatment. Furthermore, these people are now potentially harassed by the ignorant; accused of "faking" it for attention...so we have a whole class of illness that isn't being treated due to this ignorant idea.
You've actually got it backwards. It's "possible" that they are faking it, but this sort of involuntary tic is not easy to fake under medical examination. The most likely scenario is that to whatever extent the girls are "doing it themselves", they are unaware of it. I'm sure the attention they get is a part of the feedback loop causing the behavior, but it's important to realize that that does not mean this is some cynical plot to get attention. That's possible of course, but there's no reason to believe it's the most likely possibility and many to believe it's not.
