Why Young Women on Social Media are Developing Tourette's-Like Tics

acid andy writes:

The Guardian newspaper reports that Doctors are seeing young adults developing tics and seizures that usually start in childhood, with some people linking it to social media use.

[Michelle] Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair. Like Meg, she is now a TikTok influencer, using her platform to raise awareness of FND [(Functional Neurological Disorder]. "Knowing that I am going through the same crap as other people out there makes me feel better," Wacek says. "Without all these platforms, I would be quite isolated."

This month, Wacek's Facebook groups and online communities lit up. The source: a Wall Street Journal report about the rise in young women developing sudden-onset tics that doctors thought could be linked to TikTok. The article prompted a swift backlash from many in the Tourette's and FND community. "I read the article and thought it was a load of crap," says Wacek. "TikTok is not giving people Tourette's." The fact that she followed Meg before developing tics herself, says Wacek, is a "coincidence".

[...] In August, Brain published a paper with the incendiary headline: "Stop that! It's not Tourette's but a new type of mass sociogenic illness". In it, clinicians from Hannover Medical School in Germany speculated that a mass sociogenic illness (MSI) that resembled Tourette's but was not Tourette's, was spreading among German teenagers. A sociogenic illness, explains researcher Dr Kirsten Muller-Vahl, "is when people who are in close contact develop similar symptoms, but without any underlying cause".

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