Mysterious symptoms can spread rapidly in a close-knit community, especially one that has endured a shared stress. The TikTok tics are one of the largest modern examples of this phenomenon.
Aidan’s parents looked up from the living room couch with alarm. They had been worried about the teenager’s ratcheting anxiety — related to Covid-19, gender dysphoria, college applications, even hanging out with friends. But they were not prepared for this dramatic display.
But similar outbreaks have happened for centuries. Mysterious symptoms can spread rapidly in a close-knit community, especially one that has endured a shared stress. In new research that has not yet been published, the Canadian team also found a link to gender. The adolescents were overwhelmingly girls, or were transgender or nonbinary — though no one knows why.
In more recent decades, scientists have gained a greater understanding of how anxiety, trauma and social stress can spur the brain to produce very real physical symptoms, even if body scans or blood tests show no trace of them. When these illnesses interfere with day-to-day life, they are now called “functional disorders.”
These sudden symptoms can also spread in clusters, reflecting the shared pressures on a group. In the Middle Ages, a period when many Europeans feared being possessed by the devil, nuns living in a French convent began meowing like cats. “These kids all had their own little albatross that they carried,” said Dr Jennifer McVige, a neurologist at the Dent Neurologic Institute in Amherst, New York, who treated many of Le Roy’s teenagers and has also treated adolescents with the TikTok tics.Notes that Aidan’s mother Rhonda kept of symptoms the teen was experiencing, in Calgary, Canada, Dec 17, 2022.Aidan had always been a sensitive child.
On TikTok, they found scores of teenagers who were sharing their experiences with all kinds of health issues, including multiple personality disorder and Tourette syndrome. Aidan was especially moved by videos of Billie Eilish, the young pop star who in 2018 revealed she had Tourette syndrome, that were edited together to show her tics. Aidan felt an intoxicating connection to these strangers whose suffering was plain to see.
“My practice has seen an unprecedented increase in young adolescent women with what appears to be acute explosive motor and vocal tics,” wrote a doctor in Kansas City, Missouri. The TikTok influencers were saying the same words — like “beans” and “beetroot” — and making the same motions, like thumping their fists on their chests.
The patients needed to accept two things: that they did not have Tourette syndrome, and that their twitches were partly under their control. They had to want to get better. 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.“Doing anything is better than doing nothing,” Dr Hnatowich said. “Your best interest is to get back to your life and do the things that give you meaning.
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.
Other neurologists told The New York Times that they had also seen a disproportionate number of gender-diverse adolescents with the sudden tics. At a London clinic, about 11 per cent of patients were transgender or nonbinary. The head of a large clinic in Paris said 12 per cent were gender diverse. Although the data is limited, some studies have suggested that transgender people have higher rates of functional disorders, which may be related to experiencing higher rates of discrimination, stigma and bias, said Dr Z Paige L’Erario, a neurologist in New York City who collaborated on the unpublished study.
Aidan hasn’t had a tic in a year. They no longer use TikTok — not because they’re afraid of getting sick, but because they find it boring. They still go on Instagram.
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