Doctors Blame TikTok For Surge In Teen Girls Experiencing Tics (people.com) 60
An anonymous reader quotes a report from People: Doctors around the world are seeing a rise in cases of tic-like behaviors in teen girls, which they believe could be caused by watching TikTok videos about Tourette syndrome. Pediatric hospitals have reported an increase in teen girls coming in after developing tics, sudden twitches or noises that are a common symptom of Tourette syndrome, during the pandemic. The sudden rise is unusual, with tics typically occurring in boys, not girls. Experts in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Australia studied the patients for months and consulted between hospitals, finding that the common factor between the girls was an interest in watching TikTok videos from influencers who said they have Tourette syndrome, The Wall Street Journal reported.
According to the outlet, Texas Children's Hospital said they've had around 60 teens come in with tics since March 2020, compared to just one or two a year before then, while at Johns Hopkins University Tourette's Center, the number of patients reporting tic-like behaviors has jumped from 2 to 3% a year to 10 to 20%. And Rush University Medical Center in Chicago had 20 patients with tics over just four months this year, compared to 10 all of last year. Researchers from pediatric hospitals around the world found that referrals for tic-like behaviors soared during the pandemic, especially in girls aged 12 to 25, they wrote in a study published in August in the journal Movement Disorders. Since March 2020, referrals in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and Australia went from 1 to 2% to 20 to 35%. The researchers wrote that they've seen a "similarity between the tics or tic-like behaviors shown on social media and the tic-like behaviors of this group of patients." Another group of doctors say they "believe this to be an example of mass sociogenic illness," where people are copying the behaviors they see in the videos. Doctors recommend therapy to treat kids experiencing these symptoms. They also advise parents to require their teens to "take a social media break or block Tourette videos on their TikTok account," adds the report.
According to the outlet, Texas Children's Hospital said they've had around 60 teens come in with tics since March 2020, compared to just one or two a year before then, while at Johns Hopkins University Tourette's Center, the number of patients reporting tic-like behaviors has jumped from 2 to 3% a year to 10 to 20%. And Rush University Medical Center in Chicago had 20 patients with tics over just four months this year, compared to 10 all of last year. Researchers from pediatric hospitals around the world found that referrals for tic-like behaviors soared during the pandemic, especially in girls aged 12 to 25, they wrote in a study published in August in the journal Movement Disorders. Since March 2020, referrals in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Germany and Australia went from 1 to 2% to 20 to 35%. The researchers wrote that they've seen a "similarity between the tics or tic-like behaviors shown on social media and the tic-like behaviors of this group of patients." Another group of doctors say they "believe this to be an example of mass sociogenic illness," where people are copying the behaviors they see in the videos. Doctors recommend therapy to treat kids experiencing these symptoms. They also advise parents to require their teens to "take a social media break or block Tourette videos on their TikTok account," adds the report.
Tics... (Score:3)
But not Tocs?
Re: (Score:2)
Well De-Toks is the recommended therapy.
Re: (Score:2)
But not Tocs?
I read the headline as "TikTok responsible for surge in teenaged girl tits". Which is basically true.
Confirmed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
I find myself wondering if this is effect and cause - only mentally ill people are on TikTok to begin with.
Re: (Score:2)
I find myself wondering if this is effect and cause - only mentally ill people are on TikTok to begin with.
It's no joke that there does appear to be a lot of mentally ill people on tiktok. Look up Taylor the Fiend on Youtube. His stuff is mostly oriented toward a redpilled audience, but with that said, he shows a lot of Tiktok videos with yelling and screaming women, expressing their hatred of men as well as video howto's of manipulating men. Angry "queenagers" wondering where all the good men have gone because after they decide to settle down in their mid 40's or even after 50, they can't land a man.
So now it
Re: Confirmed (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This article is almost so stupid that you would almost think it's true. Tik tok gives you tic. Lol. I'm sure some is having fun with the mentally deficient editors who can't figure out they're being played.
It seems like a variant of hypochondria, so it is certainly plausible. Perhaps a bit like the vocal fry phenomena, where young women try to emulate a vocal cord defect that causes you to sort of sound like a frog, and run your normal voice an octave below it's normal range. I think that one is dissipating, fortunately.
Re: (Score:1)
These things are contagious. My friend stuttered, I didn't. After years of hanging out with him, I developed a stutter.
This has been happening since forever. (Score:1)
It does seem to be mainly young females.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
Weird...
Re: (Score:2)
Are they not just faking it for the social cred?
Re: (Score:2)
One of the most impactful changes of social media appears to be the dramatic change in the conception of the "community" as far as humans are concerned. Before if you had a "window view into someone's life and habits", you were in their immediate physical vicinity. And you had a lot of other people in the same vicinity to calibrate whatever you observed against. Today, the opposite is true. You get slotted into a specific community of statistical outliers by social media recommendation algorithms and things
Re: (Score:2)
Go back a few centuries and men were considered more susceptible to this. Then we got the entire 'women are hys
Re: (Score:1)
This is the popular myth in the gender abolitionist anti-science crowd that is so popular today. In reality, agreeableness is actually very clearly defined, and one of the definitions is in fact "maintenance of social harmony", which does breaks down in part to "emulation of trends among the social group":
>Agreeableness comprises traits relating to altruism, such as empathy and kindness. Agreeableness involves the tendency toward cooperation, maintenance of social harmony, and consideration of the concer
Re: (Score:3)
The same kind of meme infection when spreading among male dominated communities doesn't really get a name outside 'boys will be boys'.
Re: (Score:3)
"Toxic masculinity"
Don't worry, it will pass (Score:5, Funny)
As soon as they notice that they're not special because of it, because everyone does it, it's over.
Water (Score:2)
And here I was thinking that Tik-Tok would simply lead to an increase in videos featuring those tacky jumpy watermarks....
Along with communism, non-binary, adhd, anxiety (Score:2, Insightful)
Keep them home, don't expose them to real people in the real world, treat every little issue as a crisis to identify with and create a safe space for, and yeah. They get twitchy. They get attention for it, it helps them feel distinctive, and with all the Ritalin being prescribed it's no surprise. They don't get physically *tired* from anything they do, so they don't sleep.
Go outside with them, sports or labor for at least an hour every day, all Internet access cut off at 10:00 PM for teens. If they're bored
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
To be completely fair, when I was a kid we'd spend the entire day riding our bikes all over town when we weren't in school. That's quite a big difference from the kids that wake up, jump on their phone or computer, and stay on it all day doing nothing physical at all.
I'm sure the adults in our lives complained about us constantly for this and that, but we weren't around to hear it. We had too much shit to do.
For a brief moment (Score:2)
I thought I was reading a headline from The Onion.
Once in context, it makes sense, but yah.
Old Problem (Score:2)
Oops (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It was science fiction, though, not fantasy. ;)
Oh My Fucking Lord (Score:1)
Females prone to mass hysteria. (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
And in there, tries to blame it on the patriarchy.
Re: (Score:3)
You mean the patriarchy that claimed women envy a penis, can't have orgasms and don't need sex? 130 years later and we've still got a culture that hides women's sexual needs while encouraging them to wear sexually aggressive clothing.
The article is driven by reported facts and isn't a world-owes-me man-bashing whinge. Yes, it blamed the gender-based segregation occurring in patriarchal societies: It's difficult to ignore such segregation and several times on Slashdot, we've discussed whether women avoi
Re: (Score:2)
It isn't the patriarchy encouraging them to wear sexually aggressive clothing.
True, dat. I've watched several interviews where women state that they dress for themselves, not men. And let's not forget the WAP phenomenon, where women are claiming that men are afraid of their WAP. Seems like if we are afraid, we'd be requiring them to wear head to toe coverings, and burkhas to hide their faces.
Re: (Score:2)
You mean the patriarchy that claimed women envy a penis, can't have orgasms and don't need sex? 130 years later and we've still got a culture that hides women's sexual needs while encouraging them to wear sexually aggressive clothing.
Wow - manshaming as well as irrelevant - you know what - feminists use manshaming like far right wingers paste "liberal" on anything they disagree with. It doesn't work any more. Even more, why would you throw that out as if that's who I am? I never grew up or believed the tripe you're equating me with, and there is a real problem with your twitter narrative. Allow me:
Mass hysteria has been around long before your blame source. And men can also experience mass hysteria, it is just not anywhere near the
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The authors probably felt that they could only go so far. They had facts to back up the occurrences of mass hysteria. However, they had no such solid proof for any cause. So, they could only choose the "politically correct" option.
Exactly. A similar situation happens when a positive attribute is found for. With alcohol the researchers have to "look at something something in grapes", when in fact it's the alcohol in moderate consumption. Gotta take the knee to the loud crowd, so blaming mass hysteria on men is just another blaming men for everything, for which we've mostly given up because it's easier to just say "yes dear" so sorry.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.psychologytoday.co... [psychologytoday.com]
I love how even the guy who has the courage to say it still contradicts himself.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that women are the weaker sex or prone to mental problems. Mass hysteria is not a mental disorder—it’s a collective stress response that unfortunately has a stigma attached to it.
Er - you are literally saying that women are much more prone to mass hysteria. Because they are. It's literally the truth.
Face Palm. (Score:2)
-Please note that chrome thinks that influencer is misspelled, because they shouldn't even be a thing.
'tards gotta 'tard. (Score:2)
Enough said. 'tards gotta 'tard. It's their nature.
Re: 'tards gotta 'tard. (Score:2)
It's okay. My wife's tarded. And she's an airline pilot!
Bullshit! (Score:2)
What else happened in the last year and change that could have possibly fucked with kids' heads and disabused them of any pretensions abou the need to behave normally.
Bullshit!
Re: (Score:2)
Dear Dumb Ass,
People with the actual condition can't just choose not to have tics, because they want to conform.
It's only people who don't actually have this particular problem who can stop doing it. Or just, not start.
Re: (Score:2)
It may not be that simple. We've had a number of crises caused by incompetent education and mental health, disorders that were very fashionable for a time. These include "split personality" and "recovered memory". They were very popular in fiction for a time as well, but the most famous cases turned out to be the results of grossly incompetent therapists mishandling and misdiagnosing their patients. It can be very difficult for someone who is ill, or who has _become_ ill with poor mental care, to get away
Re: (Score:2)
Social media use by teens has become a popular boogeyman to blame all sorts of increase in mental illness on, mostly depression and anxiety stuff, which does seem plausible enough at least.
Being under lockdown has increased consumerist behaviour in a lot of people. And once they're through their Netflix and Amazon Prime library, they'll turn to something else. In the case of younger people they might not even turn to 'traditional' media entertainment like TV series in the first place but reso
Same old story (Score:2)
The "tic" (Score:2)
Is caused by anxiety and the rapidly crumbling social enviroment of society, where general nastiness is rewarded and praised. And unlike the past when the internet was limited or non existent for most people, and no teen had a cell phone of any kind, this rancid enviroment is being brought to teens 24/7.
The only reason Tik Tok is in the spotlight here is because it just happens to be the social media platform of choice at the moment that keeps kids connected to said enviroment.
The article is
What about doctors treating Tourette patients? (Score:2)
Do they also develop the same tics because they get exposed to prolonged social contact with their patients? Or are they immune because they are mentally sane?
Re: (Score:3)
But still, whether it is boy or girl, this lack of media literacy makes them quite different fro
Apart from that (Score:2)
Meanwhile, at the zoo (Score:2)
Monkeys who were shown videos of humans standing up in the herd and singing, "I JUST GOTTA BE MEEE!" went out and joined TikTok.
block Tourette videos - and avoid Tourette people? (Score:1)
sure, the recommendation makes sense - on a social network.
But does the same apply to real life?
Should we really discriminate against those with this syndrome?
If so, it must be based on really robust evidence...
South Park Did It (Score:1)
Re (Score:1)