How is the new rapid onset Tourette syndrome any different from ROGD?This is an interesting read.

[DontLikeCrumpets]

Doctors around the world have noticed teenage patients reporting the sudden onset of tics. Is this the first illness spread by social media?

The article doesn't draw any comparison but the similarities are striking.

Here are some snippets

THE TWITCHING GENERATION By Helen Lewis

snip

A typical Tourette’s patient is a boy who develops slow, mild motor tics—blinking or grimacing—at about age 5 to 7, followed later by simple vocalizations such as coughing. Only about one in 10 patients progress to the disorder’s most famous symptom—coprolalia, which involves shouting obscene or socially unacceptable words. Even then, most patients utter only half a dozen swear words, on repeat.

But these new patients were different. They were older, for a start—teenagers—and about half of them were girls. Their tics had arrived suddenly, explosively, and were extreme; some were shouting more than 100 different obscenities. This last symptom in particular struck Müller-Vahl as odd. “Even in extremely severely affected [Tourette’s] patients, they try to hide their coprolalia,” she told me. The teenagers she was now seeing did not. She had the impression, she said, that “they want to demonstrate that they suffer from these symptoms.” Even more strangely, many of her new patients were prone to involuntary outbursts of exactly the same phrase: Du bist hässlich. “You are ugly.”

snip

Tammy Hedderly, a neurologist at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, sometimes calls her new-style tic patients “Evies.” These girls “present thumping their chest, shouting beans, and falling to their knees,” she told the virtual conference. The nickname comes from a 21-year-old British influencer named Evie Meg Field, also known as @thistrippyhippie, who has 14.2 million followers on TikTok and nearly 800,000 on Instagram.

snip

But Field and Zimmerman, who did not respond to requests for comment, are only two among dozens of “Tourette’s influencers” with large fan bases online. According to TikTok, videos tagged #tourettes have been viewed more than 5 billion times.

www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-media-illness-teen-girls/622916/

Honestly, sometimes teenage girls are so weird. I have two at the moment and sometimes I think they will do me in.

This is so interesting. DD developed tics including vocal ones as we came out of lockdown. It was so scary, I really thought it might be Tourette’s but after about a year they disappeared. She was genuinely anxious and the tics seemed genuinely involuntary. Absolutely bizarre.

Helen Lewis leans GC I think so I suspect the parallels, while not started, are intentional.

Oh Jesus, just search YouTube for "tik tok fake Tourette's" or "tik tok fake disorders". Prepare to have the worst second hand embarrassment ever.

The wave of young people women self-identifying as having various disorders is very clearly linked to the surge in trans and non binary self-IDing.

Everyone needs to have a "thing" that marks them out as cool and interesting. Current flavours of the month are Tourette's, dissociative identity disorder, ADHD, and autism ffs.

I'm not convinced it has has to be fake (although actual fakes sound v cringey). Aren't teenage girls meant to be driving force in the evolution of language? They come with the new words and new ways of saying things and then perpetuate it until it becomes common place, all done unconsciously of course, as part of their social interactions. That suggests (to me, I'm no expert) that teenage girls are going to be particularly susceptible to emulating things they are exposed to. Might partly explain why they are the group we see these social contagion issues in?

Social contagion, copied from social media. Same as ROGD.

It could be social contagion, but when I looked up Panda/Pans, which Evie thought might be what she has, it can be linked to have strep, and especially to being an asymptomatic carrier of strep. So that’s terrifying that it can have this effect.

I read about this and found it bizarre, partly because I myself developed some weird tics a few years back, that were thought to be psychosomatic and were perhaps linked to some OCD thoughts (doctor diagnosed - I wouldn’t have given it that name) I’d been having previously. It was completely involuntary and genuinely frightening, but they found nothing wrong. Interesting that it’s obviously based in mimicry, but may genuinely not be consciously created. The human mind is still largely a mystery.

And yes. I think that with the internet, we are seeing a huge wave of emerging oddities. One of my children told me there’s generally a wave of massive social change and unrest when new means of disseminating information arrive, and the internet must surely have a more comprehensive influence than any previous change. An unsettling time for our children to be living through. We must do all we can to limit adding to the damage, and especially avoid invasive treatments in those too young and easily influenced to fully understand what’s happening.

This phenomenon has been known about in tourettes groups (the 1s set up by drs) for years though its exploded over lockdown and most of the parents get very upset when the drs tells them that it's not really tourettes and that they need psychiatric help not the coping strategies that our groups offer. Tbh it's the same with parents groups for asd and adhd (ds has all 3) whilst some parents are relieved that their children don't have these disorders a large proportion of parents just don't want to here that their child is just an average normal child (who is often suffering from mh problems) rather than special and insist that the drs are wrong. I suspect that this phenomenon is driven in part atleast by parents who are almost living vicariously through their oh so special and brave child, that they affirm even against drs diagnosis. It's truly nuts I'd give anything for ds to be "normal " because it would make his life so much easier (I have asd aswell) I just can't understand why people would wish it on a child

These books by neurologist Suzanne O'Sullivan might be of intetest.

It's All in Your Head: Stories from the Frontline of Psychosomatic Illness

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00T5H3Y2K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_V6BWJRFH1HN6NHFWNV9T?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

And

The Sleeping Beauties: And Other Stories of Mystery Illness

www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08LDPKHF4/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apan_glt_0F34JERY6M3KNY1Q164D?tag=mumsnetforu03-21

I believe its a form of social contagion from social media. Think of the HOURS young people spend on their phones absorbing all of this crap.

It's no coincidence that these "illnesses" and "conditions" have taken a massive leap since the advent of social media sites.

I liken it to the Salem Witch Trials. Mass hysteria.

It's the same as the new trend "alters" where there are "multiple personalities" inside someone.
It's all about being cool and different.

I think it is a combination of factors. The Internet, lockdown and the general culture we live in now. Teenagers seem desperate to be different, to be a "normie" is bad. It also gives a potential excuse against cancellation, it wasn't me it was my alter!

I think there is also a pattern of pathologising normal behaviour. For example under certain circumstances nearly everyone will exhibit ADHD or OCD type behaviour, it does not mean that they have ADHD or OCD.

this is a good thing surely. Less surgery and life long physical repercussions?

I think this has been linked here in another thread a while back. Arielle Scarcella on the epidemic of rapid onset everything, on TikTok in particular. Tics and Tourettes are so last year, and have been superseded by self-diagnosed DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder).

@Hoardasurass

This phenomenon has been known about in tourettes groups (the 1s set up by drs) for years though its exploded over lockdown and most of the parents get very upset when the drs tells them that it's not really tourettes and that they need psychiatric help not the coping strategies that our groups offer. Tbh it's the same with parents groups for asd and adhd (ds has all 3) whilst some parents are relieved that their children don't have these disorders a large proportion of parents just don't want to here that their child is just an average normal child (who is often suffering from mh problems) rather than special and insist that the drs are wrong. I suspect that this phenomenon is driven in part atleast by parents who are almost living vicariously through their oh so special and brave child, that they affirm even against drs diagnosis. It's truly nuts I'd give anything for ds to be "normal " because it would make his life so much easier (I have asd aswell) I just can't understand why people would wish it on a child

Speaking of nuts, at the parental level what it reminds me of is the peanut parents in the early 90s. I don't know about the UK but where I live there were waves of these parents trying to have all kinds of rules passed about nuts in schools and other places. And when doctors and allergists came out saying that in most cases this wasn't helpful, and the number of allergies that were life threatening seemed to be massively exaggerated, these parents freaked. And they used a lot of the same kinds of language that you see in parents (and young people) who are pushed about these other kinds of instances today.

I feel like our society has become convinced that witchcraft is real and increasingly hysterical over it - we just don't call it witchcraft, we cloak it in the language of science.

I remember a job working with teens who had tourettes, alongside other social and learning difficulties. Neurotypical kids could be quite hostile when we were out and about. Or worse than being avoided, there were moments when our kids would nearly get beaten up due to misunderstandings. (It was very different with the kids with, for example, down syndrome, who generally elicited a positive response).

So I suppose since then there has been "awareness raising" etc which should lead to greater understanding. But I can't help feeling that it ends up being quite appropriative. I would hope the kind of kids I knew might be slightly more accepted and less at risk of being beaten up now. But I also suspect their voices and experiences are liable to being drowned out.

The dissociative identity thing is very similar to gender identity in the way it retro fits ideas.

People tend to develop actual multiple identities as a coping mechanism for enduring horrific, prolonged abuse from which they are powerless to escape. Similarly, most trans adults used to describe childhoods full of sexism, homophobia, not being accepted and abuse.

Transsexualism and dissociative identity made some kind of sense in their original contexts. I'm amazed at the lack of curiosity by those who now adopt these as identities.

ROGD is a GC myth and had been debunked many times. Trying to claim if it happens in this condition then it must still be true is desperate. Is science not a thing on these pages?

And yet Disgusted it is a term used to describe a large portion of the current cohort of child or young people currently seeking to transition. Have you not read the Cass interim report Disgusted?

If ROGD is not a thing, why have 5 of my daughters year (4 girls and one boy) come out as trans in the last two years? This is in a year group of about 100.

It absolutely IS happening.

My teen’s friend group of 7, 5 are under the trans umbrella. And at least two are identifying as transboys. All five are female.

But Disgusted seems to like to tell women they have no idea about what is happening to girls. And particularly to their children.

I won’t comment further on what might motivate these posts.

Aaaaand here’s Disgusted claiming the science high ground from a rigorous underpinning of “cos I say so”. Always good to see.

@DontLikeCrumpets

There could another motive which is that nowadays anyone who identifies as part of an oppressed group or is a victim of circumstance such as a mental health condition has power. It is paradoxical but nowadays the powerless have power.

@GromblesofGrimbledon
There could another motive which is that nowadays anyone who identifies as part of an oppressed group or is a victim of circumstance such as a mental health condition has power. It is paradoxical but nowadays the powerless have power.