Tik-Tok Tics

"Even professionals in the mental health community can miss it. Because we don't approach patients from the perspective that maybe they're fibbing."

"You get what you need emotionally just by reading an injury on a health-related website and then signing on to one of the tens if not hundreds of thousands of support groups dedicated to that illness."

"You don't have to act in real life. You just get all the attention you can possibly handle, because those groups are unconditionally supportive, at least to start."

"Everybody who's sick does want a little time and attention and care, and that's reasonable. It's only when it becomes willfully deceptive and emerges as a serious pattern of behaviour and an individual may feel, even to the person, compulsive or addictive, which are words they often use, do we worry about it being Munchausen syndrome."

"The limit is only a person's creativity and motivation and knowledge and anybody can become an expert in even rare medical conditions just by reading the Wikipedia entry for 20 minutes."

"There's also a certain kind of perverse cachet associated these days with having a mental illness, in that there's more sensitivity to the issue of mental illness and more awareness than there was when I started this work in 1990."

Dr.Marc Feldman, psychiatrist, University of Alabama

(cottonbro studio/Pexels)

A fairly new and growing phenomenon has been noted by psychologists, and that may just be because people are showing up in their offices in droves and they're seeing people presenting with mental-health disorders and Tourette's-like symptoms. This is not normal, and this abnormal situation is skyrocketing in numbers. Certainly there must be a cause. People are susceptible to communications, to hearing, seeing and delving into new peculiarities that ask for attention -- and replication.

Humans do this kind of thing from a tender, learning age. Even infants barely learning to walk love imitating gestures, occasionally very complex ones, repeatedly entertaining themselves and becoming proficient in mannerisms and dance steps to gain attention, applause and admiration. The invaluable three As we're always on the lookout for, as though emotionally starved of notice. Some of us are. There are those who are raised in households where parents are undemonstrative leaving children hungering for a human touch, a hug, a kiss, praise.

It can all be found -- emotional validation -- remotely, through the resource that has taken over our lives; the Internet and its vast communication network. A research paper in 2021 noted a video showing what it terms "TikTok tics" was viewed in a three-week period over 5.5 billion times. That's equivalent to 2/3 of the world's population. There is a belief among researchers that the young, mostly adolescent girls and young women, have been acquiring symptoms of a wide number of disorders from viewing posts on social media influencers who display symptoms.

 

Kayla Johnsen, 17, in her bedroom in Sugar Land, Texas, says she began watching TikTok videos of people displaying tics shortly before she began experiencing them herself.

 

The phenomenon appears to have been initiated through the Tumblr site, then Instagram, and more recently TikTok. A wide variety of presenting issues have been recognized; gender dysphoria, depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and eating disorders. Some teens are thought to be faking while others may have acquired genuine symptoms. Illnesses acquired through the Internet seems a modern incarnation of mass psychogenic illness.

Patients are showing up looking for treatment for tics associated typically with Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder. A paper published in Archives of Disease in Childhood made note of two tic specialty clinics at two London children's hospitals reporting a doubling in referral rates of children presenting with tics.

Psychiatry professor Dr. Andrea Giedinghagen indicates the increased number of cases with tics may represent a genuine portrayal of stress release, relating to the pandemic. According to Professor Gedinghagen's paper published in the journal Child Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry, Munchausen's by Internet is when a person assumes a sick role for the purpose of receiving support through the Internet. 

There is an example of a mass pschogenic illness other than the current one spread by social media, when people between the 14th and 17th centuries in Europe broke into fits of manic dancing. No obvious reason for this behaviour presented itself. Priests began performing exorcisms. There were people who danced themselves to death. There is a theory that it was a case of mass psychogenic illness originating in cult groups that spread the social contagion.

For a more modern explanation, one has only to look at how dominant online activities have become. Isolation caused by the pandemic drove more people to spend more time online. In the cohort of 28 subjects with an average age of 18.8 years, 93 percent showed coprolalia (obscene language) or copropraxia (obscene gestures) in expressing themselves. A way of 'acting out' to attract greater attention, perhaps.

Aidan, 18, developed involuntary tics after watching videos on TikTok posted by teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. The New York Times

 

"While it is possible that these are all conversion phenomena, there is also some evidence -- though thus far only explicated in the lay press -- that these may be deliberately manufactured, or a form of factitious disorder."

"The only difference between [TikTok tics] and the medieval dancing plagues is that, thanks to the Internet, people no longer have to be in the same geographic space for that social contagion to spread."

"A lot of times there's an  assumption of malicious intent, which these folks don't have."

Dr. Andrea Giedinghagen, psychiatry professor, Washington University School of Medicine, St.Louis