Tourettes Isn't Real

I knew someone with tourettes so I know exactly what’s wrong with you and how to treat it.

I know this thread is super dead but I came across it after pressing the next button on the main page for like 5 hours bc ive been up since 5:16 and its 10am now in scottland and i would rather scroll rdrama than have a healthy sleeping schedule. I want to answer some of your questions as a tourettes/motor tick sufferer myself for 10 years. They say its not understood and thats true but theyre trying to find it out. Theres a more popular explanation

Everyones brains are full of "preprogrammed" thoughts, impulses, words, and actions. When you say a familiar word or phrase, like "pizza" or "how are you", you're not forming them by thinking about each individual sounds and what order they're in, you just think of the whole word or phrase and it all seems to come out by itself. That's why saying an unfamiliar word can be so slow and clumsy. The same is true for movement. For example, brushing your eyebrow uses many different muscles in coordination, but you don't think about the individual muscle movements, you just think of the overall action. All of these programmed words, phrases, and movements are in your brain, just waiting to be triggered. Usually they're triggered by proper context. Like, feeling a slight irritation of your eyebrow triggers the eyebrow brushing movement, and saying a sentence about food triggers the "pizza" word at the right time. When there's no need for those things then they are suppressed so they don't all come flooding out all the time. There's a balance between suppression and activation, and that balance can be quite delicate though we're mostly unaware of it.

With Tourette Syndrome, some of these built in "macros" get triggered at inappropriate times, because they are insufficiently suppressed or because the triggers are too sensitive. Sometimes the suppression actually "backfires" and actually triggers them instead, so trying to hold back makes them worse. And the tics can trigger themselves so they're often repetitive rather than completely random.

A good example is a mosquito bite - it itches, you scratch it, the itch goes away, the itch comes back, you scratch it, and so on. But if you decide to not scratch it, the itch begins to consume your consciousness and the urge to scratch it will build until you eventually give in and have a little "scratching fest" to ease your pent-up itching. And of course scratching it actually causes further irritation which makes you want to keep scratching it even more.

it is not only harsh words or phrases that are part of Tourette's. That is very rare for people with tourettes. Most people with Tourette's experience vocal tics that aren't words, i usually squeak and grunt.

Corporolalia is pretty mysterious, even to doctors, but its not exclusive to people with tourettes. It seems that the innate ability we all have to suppress unwanted movements and unconscious thoughts is somehow impaired in people with TS. Just as people with TS must satisfy the overwhelming urge to twitch, so they must “let out” sounds and words that build up and must be expressed before momentary relief can be felt.

Stfu if our cover gets blown I won't be able to scream slurs at people at Walmart