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.”

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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/

I’ve noticed this as well, and with a nephew who has had the “typical” presentation of Tourette’s, it makes me a bit annoyed. My nephew is not trying to be special or different, and his tics can cause him injuries.

I think a lot of teen girls will look back at this phase in their life and cringe.

I've noticed this as a thing... I guess with this 'tourettes' it's wanting to be not boring old neurotypical and while you can't assume characteristic of being ADHD/on autism spectrum, you can affect 'tics' and be all 'Yeah, I've got tics, I've probably got tourettes'.

A friend has a daughter who has actually had tics for some time and had noticed friends almost being jealous of them. This friend works in medicine and actually mentioned there is a description for these 'pseudo tics', I can't remember what it is, but they're habits that have got fixated on, not an actual neurological condition like tourettes.
My oldest did for a while talk a lot about 'tics' or 'stimming' but I did have a word to say a lot of kids seemed to be fixating on little habits and calling it tics or tourettes and it's kind of disrespectful to people who actually have it to self diagnose - they did draw back from it a bit then.

I don't especially like the term ROGD mainly as it can be accused by people of being inaccurate in the sense that most kids described as having it 'don't have gender dysphoria' but I think that's actually neither here nor there. It is totally without question to me that there's a social contagion aspect to this gender identity divergence stuff going on among kids (my oldest included) - the vast majority of the time without dysphoria and, in my opinion harmlessy. And yes, it's related to the Tourette's thing on some level, but it's not exactly the same.

*Ah yes, article mentions what my friend mentioned - 'functional neurological disorder'

@ThrowawayBerna - I'd forgotten about DID- it's a very popular newcomer with many young girls. Deliberately being able to 'bring out' certain 'personalities' like a parlour trick for their videos.

@DisgustedofManchester

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?

It certainly doesn't seem to be a thing on pages in the specific locations that overlap where you post your interpretation of science or (more accurately) an ideological interpretation of it…

This clip about gender identification and social contagion also mentions Tourettes type presentations.
I agree with a pp that girls may be particularly sensitive to Social contagion .

[quote SirVixofVixHall]This clip about gender identification and social contagion also mentions Tourettes type presentations.
I agree with a pp that girls may be particularly sensitive to Social contagion . [/quote]
This was a compelling but incredibly disturbing watch. I feel awful for these young women and disgusted by the adults who have so badly let them down.

I have mixed feelings about this. I have tourettes, Ive had tics since i was 6 but mild and they werent obvious till 4-5 years ago when I was 21/22. They suddenly got much worse. No stress I was second year of uni, so may have actually been 20/21. I'm not too sure. but anyhoo.

FND tics are defintely a thing. Quite a lot of the people with tics on tiktok have other symptoms of FND, like paralysis and seizure like events.

I know quite a lot of people in the tourettes community dont have an issue, if you have tics you have tics. even if its not necessarily tourettes.

'm thinking, "Well, at least this isn't going to result in the youngsters having irreversible surgical procedures," but I predict that there will soon be a wave of neurosurgeons offering stereotactic brain surgery to "treat" the neurological abnormality that they and sufferers claim is the cause of the tics.

As someone who does have Tourette’s I actually thought the article was very sympathetic. She rightly points out that it is a way of expressing their distress.

Tourette’s syndrome is a genetic condition and is linked to other neurological conditions there is a significant overlap between Tourette’s and OCD and specialist therapy addresses the two together.

Tics are very suggestible and get worse at times of distress so some of the girls will actually have Tourette’s.

I think it is a good thing that social media is raising awareness of Tourette’s but I do worry that people want to watch the stereotypical Tourette’s which is not what Tourette’s is actually like at all. There are a lot of people on tic toc who are faking having Tourette’s and this can only be harmful to those who have it.

Being a human being is difficult and complicated and we feel distress. The ways that we express that distress are a combination of social influences - what's 'acceptable' and also what fits into the current 'scripts' that the society we live in has for expressing that distress, along with stuff that is more innate to the individual. A steroptyical difference is men turning distress outward through violence and women inwards harming themselves. But yeah, social scripts change over time too.

So it makes sense to me that this is distress comes out expressed in different waves over time. We are hugely social creatures and because of this we have rituals and bonding and hierarchical structures and all of that interacts too to create those waves.

Add to this that there does seem to be a worsening of general mental health - I don't think we're just talking about it more and in some ways this makes sense. In others it doesn't, but humans are odd, illogical creatures.

Yeah, I mean you can see this if you look at what different cultures do in terms of expressing problems. Many of the disorders and things we think of as objective illnesses, in the same way something like cancer is an objective illness, are expressed very differently in different cultures.So things like anorexia for example.

Somehow we seem to assume that because we aren't superstitious and our medicine is "scientific" we don't have these cultural elements.

But I do think it's true that social media exacerbates them, and also the way or culture is structured now encourages people to want to have some kind of "diagnosis".

Somehow we seem to assume that because we aren't superstitious and our medicine is "scientific" we don't have these cultural elements.

There's also the bit where psychiatry groups symptoms into disorders or diseases. But with mental health stuff a lot of the time it's just symptoms and behaviours that you are describing, not a physical thing like cancer or a broken bone. And then these are the boxes that medicine then sorts people - which also leads people to sort themselves into those boxes, a) by diagnosis, but also b) by behaviour. We like to think that what we do isn't socially influenced, but it is. Look at how people who suffer bad thing X often use similar descriptive language to describe their emotional reactions - it's human memes reproducing.

Tics are very definitely catching. My daughter suffers from them for many years but rarely swears. She went to a weekend away with other Tourettes kids and when I went to pick her up they were all swearing and shouting, and when one started it kicked off a load of echoes. My concern was that this led to her talking about "we shouldn't try to stop ourselves from ticcing, people just have to deal with it". While I'm sympathetic because I can see that hers are genuine, I do think if you want to be able to live a "normal" life, hold down a job etc then you do have to fit in with society and attempting to control antisocial behaviour, even involuntary, is part of that. There us a definite movement of"being proud of your Tourettes" on tictoc. While I don't think they should be ashamed of it, nobody goes around shouting about how proud they are of the fact they are incontinent for example. It's an inconvenience you keep to yourself as much as possible, not a way of life!

@savehannah

Tics are very definitely catching. My daughter suffers from them for many years but rarely swears. She went to a weekend away with other Tourettes kids and when I went to pick her up they were all swearing and shouting, and when one started it kicked off a load of echoes. My concern was that this led to her talking about "we shouldn't try to stop ourselves from ticcing, people just have to deal with it". While I'm sympathetic because I can see that hers are genuine, I do think if you want to be able to live a "normal" life, hold down a job etc then you do have to fit in with society and attempting to control antisocial behaviour, even involuntary, is part of that. There us a definite movement of"being proud of your Tourettes" on tictoc. While I don't think they should be ashamed of it, nobody goes around shouting about how proud they are of the fact they are incontinent for example. It's an inconvenience you keep to yourself as much as possible, not a way of life!

*@savehannah*

Why shouldn’t you be proud of tourettes, okay I know it sounds weird but it’s a very obvious and embarrassing condition. If it helps to try and be proud of it then that shouldn’t be squashed. It’s like the autistic community.

Im personally not proud of my tourettes but I can understand people who are. It’s a very complicated condition.

And for fitting into society that’s really fucking difficult with tourettes. If you suppress the tics to fit in, it’s rather painful to do that and often makes the tics worse when you do let them out.

Im able to be suppress but I don’t very often just because it hurts so much.

I don’t see why we have to control our tics just to fit in, the public should be more understanding of a disability. You don’t tell people who use wheelchairs to fit in and walk do you.