TIKTOK TICS
Teenage girls and young women are reporting bizarre tics and sharing them on social media
Doctors worldwide have been reporting an upsurge in girls and women aged between 12 and 25 coming to them with what they report as uncontrollable physical tics, such as excessive and exaggerated blinking, seizurelike jerks, uncontrollable limb movements and noisy outbursts, which patients often link to Tourette syndrome. Texas Children’s Hospital says that in a normal year they would expect to see one or two patients with these symptoms – but they have had more than 60 since March 2020, and similar increases have been reported elsewhere. Medics believe that anxiety and depression resulting from lockdowns and other Covid restrictions may have contributed to this increase as stress will sometimes produce physical symptoms, particularly in teenagers, but they also suspect that lockdown boredom and social media have played a part.
Several papers examining the phenomenon have been published in the journal Movement Disorders describing the behaviour as “a pandemic within a pandemic”. These suggest that much of the increase is due to people viewing “Tourette influencers” on TikTok where videos with hashtags such as #tourettes and #tourettesyndrome have amassed more than six billion views. These feature people who claim to experience the syndrome doing things like attempting to recite the alphabet without verbal outbursts or cooking while experiencing jerking limbs. Doctors suspect that teens bored with pandemic restrictions have been watching these and, either wittingly or unwittingly, have picked up tics from the influencers. Their suspicion is based partly on the fact that both the influencers and the people presenting with tics are almost exclusively female, whereas people with Tourette syndrome are predominantly male. In addition, some of the tics presented are not typical of Tourette syndrome, but are exhibited by high profile influencers, and in some cases, the tics patients have been exhibiting seem to have been directly derived from their videos. For example, several teenagers had presented with a tic where they would repeatedly say “beans”, even if they didn’t speak English, and some of them did it with a British accent. This could be traced to a British Tourette influencer who had posted videos of herself saying “beans” repeatedly.
Doctors at Rush University Medical Centre in Chicago say they “believe this to be an example of mass sociogenic illness,” and that the girls aren’t developing Tourette syndrome but have a functional movement disorder that can be addressed by cognitive behaviour therapy and taking a break from social media. people.com, 19 Oct; nypost.com, 20 Oct 2021.
Several teenagers presented with a tic where they would repeatedly say “beans”