ADHD and Mass Hysteria

My great great third cousin thrice removed's brother in law is recovering from ADHD. What trauma the family went through those preceding 45 years! Now he's become addicted to philosophy. In a tiny woodshed behind his house he's created a library of suprising scale, in which he sits and pores over his texts. Every weekend, while he's away from running his contracting firm (house building- he's made a lot of money this way), he goes into his little space and dissappears. During the first weeks of this extreme change, they tried knocking on the door, say, for dinner, but soon learned better. They would either be ignored or violently reprimanded from within. Nowadays, he stays inside all weekend. He doesn't even take meals inside the shack, much less come out, except during the very late hours, to go to the bathroom. He goes in the woods. On Monday morning he exits the shack as though nothing's happened at all and very somberly strides up to the house, puts on his working clothes, and, without a word to his wife or five children, drives off in his truck. None of that is out of the ordinary. But we've noticed another curious phenomenon. Little George, aged seven, has taken to sneaking into his father's study after school. George might have his reasons: he doesn't get selected for team sports, for example, or get on much with his peers. Breaking apart battle toys holds very little interest for him. But lately he's come out of the shack before dinner with a dazed look on his face, and he doesn't speak at dinner as he used to, which was almost incessantly, except to ask strange questions that upset his mother and make his father chuckle (which is nice since he usually doesn't speak either). For example, he blurted out last night, apparently, something about 'reified subconsciousness'. The rest of the children accuse him of stupidity, but he doesn't seem to notice. That dazed look seems to convey a deeper paralysis of some kind. Anyway, it's giving the rest of us pause, wondering what this bizarre turn of events could mean. We're all writing extensive emails back in forth, forming desperate and complex theories and comparing notes, trying to find out what it all might amount to, and what it might mean. My great uncle in London thinks it's a case of childhood trauma recontextualized by the 'urban climate', but nobody seems to understand what that means. Then there's my sister's husband, who conjectures that it's a case of mass hysteria manifesting first in these two individuals. This email was rebuffed by my grandmother, who says this would redefine the phrase 'mass hysteria', and that furthermore the phenomenon doesn't really exist since consciousness isn't transferable between people. My grandfather had a few complaints about this, suggesting that we don't really know what consciousness is in the first place, and so we can't know the functionalities of an unknown, or at least non-physical property. As you can probably guess, we've been at our wit's end. So recently, we've sent a petition to the governor of the state asking for an investigation into the crisis. We've not heard back yet, but are hoping for the best, that this mystery will be solved, and that things will fall back into their comfortable normal positions and we can get on with life.