New NYT's article about Tik Tok Tourette's really makes you think about the train question

https://web.archive.org/web/20230214015151/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/13/health/tiktok-tics-gender-tourettes.html

It's worth reading the full article, but here's some highlights.

Over the next year, doctors across the world treated thousands of young people for sudden, explosive tics. Many of the patients had watched popular TikTok videos of teenagers claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome. A spate of alarming headlines about “TikTok tics” followed.

Four out of five of the adolescents were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, and one-third reported past traumatic experiences, according to a study from the University of Calgary that analyzed nearly 300 cases from eight countries. In new research that has not yet been published, the Canadian team has also found a link to gender: The adolescents were overwhelmingly girls, or were transgender or nonbinary — though no one knows why.

Although so-called mass psychogenic illness has occurred throughout history, social media has dissolved the boundaries that once kept it geographically contained.

So I can still use this to hate on zoomers? Thank you.

When they searched for the word “tic” and hundreds of videos popped up, Dr. Pringsheim was stunned.

“This is the person that I saw in my clinic today,” she recalled thinking.

The TikTok influencers were saying the same words — like “beans” and “beetroot” — and making the same motions, like thumping their fists on their chests.

TikTok videos labeled #Tourettes have been viewed 7.7 billion times.

The patients needed to accept two things: that they did not have Tourette’s, and that their twitches were partly under their control. They had to want to get better.

This is tourette's erasure Heckin conversion therapy

Initially, many of the teenagers seemed hesitant to let go of their tics, Dr. Hnatowich said. Their behavior had some upsides, often allowing them to get more attention from distracted parents or to avoid the social and academic stresses of school.

An overwhelming number of patients had a history of mental health conditions. Two-thirds were diagnosed with anxiety and one-quarter had depression. One-quarter had autism or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Roughly one in five had a prior history of tics.

Eighty-seven percent of the patients were female , a s*x skew that was also found in previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness. No one knows why girls are more susceptible to this kind of social influence. One theory is that women may seek out belonging more than men do, and may empathize more strongly with others’ suffering. Women also experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and sexual trauma than men.

At a conference on tic disorders last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, doctors from several countries shared another observation: A surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary. But without hard data in hand, multiple attendees said, the doctors worried about publicly linking transgender identity and mental illness.

Looking at a sample of 35 patients with the TikTok tics, the researchers found that 15 of the adolescents — 43 percent — were transgender or nonbinary

At a London clinic, about 11 percent of patients were transgender or nonbinary. The head of a large clinic in Paris said 12 percent were gender diverse.

Dr. McVige, the neurologist who treated the girls in Le Roy, said that four out of her seven patients with TikTok tics were transgender, nonbinary or had gender dysphoria. Dr. Gilbert estimated that among his 200 patients in Ohio, 25 to 30 percent were transgender or nonbinary.

Other doctors suspect that a small subset of adolescents with serious mental health issues may be more susceptible to social influences. And during the pandemic, adolescents spent more time online, engaging with increasingly popular content related to mental health and gender, Dr. Hnatowich said.