A similar one I just became aware of is Dissociative Identity Disorder, or multiple personality disorder. There seems to be a huge surge of people doing TikToks etc showing themselves going through identity changes (often "rapid switching"), some with hundreds of thousands or millions of views and seemingly a lot of supporters. There's a whole huge sort of jargon/ontology to this intersecting with other ideas and people identify as a "system" e.g:
Systems, Collectives, and/or Plurals are those who experience being more than one entity in one physical body [1]. Systems are under the neurodivergent umbrella, and are not inherently LGBT+, but being plural can impact sexuality, romantic orientation, attraction, identities, and/or gender (such as with systemfluid). Systems can also commonly intersect with LGBT+ experiences[2]. The experiences may overlap to the point of ones queer identities being a large part of headmates, such as within queergenic systems.
I am not quite sure what to make of all this, but we live in interesting times.
I moderated the DID subreddit for about two years and there was incredible controversy over this constantly in the community and in the mod team. The mod team wanted to have absolutely no discussion of it, while most of the community wanted to either complain or fight with DID youtuber followers. I don't miss moderating that community.
The general consensus in the wider text and image based DID community is that most of them are faking, but we don't have a way of knowing for sure or how many because of just how inconsistent the presentation of the disorder can be in real life. You'd never know I had DID if you met me in person, but I have a good friend who is disabled because she can't function on her own.
The important thing to remember about DID is that it's caused by childhood trauma, abuse, and long term patterns of neglect as simple as "crying it out" or as significant as parentifying. It's not interesting times we live it it has been this way this is often generational, psychology is just finally catching up in this regard.
I was raised (and abused) by my aunt who was only continuing the cycle of her and my mom's abuse that she faced, continued by her father who was abused because of traumas his parents faced on the Trail of Tears. They both described feeling like they had more than one person in them, that their age was not aligned with their body, and the stories of abuse they both told me align. My dad was abused by the Boston Archdiocese, his psychiatric records claimed he referred to himself in turns by John, Jack, and other names, claiming they would act on his behalf. They called it schizophrenia then because of a backlash against diagnosing DID after Sybil and other films reached mainstream.
I’m wondering if this is a modern extension of the old “psych-101 syndrome”. Where undergrads, upon learning of the existence of various mental health diagnoses, suddenly realize they too are OCD or have depression, etc…
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the challenge with DID is that there's no empirical evidence supporting it; something like 10-15% of cases are believed to be fictitious, and there's studies that cast doubt on its diagnostic criteria [1]. Around half of clinical psychologists are skeptical as to whether it's 'real', or if it could be better explained by borderline personality disorder or other diagnoses.
It's not just an internet thing; since Sybil, multiple personalities became an identity to aspire to. What the internet adds to it is that all of these individuals network together and start setting up a common lexicon, demands that the condition be treated as what they say it is, and a bunch of rules dividing "authentic" MPD from fakers. At some point an industry arises to prey on them.
It's like fandom, basically, except with medical treatment and the sense of being an oppressed, abused minority.
It's a spectrum, like everything else, and the idea has existed for ages, it's just that people are now coming up with terminology for it. And yes, just like this (faux-)Tourette's story, it is possible to push oneself around in the spectrum; I know a few people who have deliberately and consciously done that (that can of course change how you classify things, if root cause is part of the definition).
Think of it as ranging from acting differently in front of family and in front of your boss, to being an actor in character, to having that character evolve on its own, to full blown DID with amnesia.
The fields of psychology, neuroscience, etc are sadly still in their infancy; we really have very little idea how the brain truly works. Doctors tend to like to put people in boxes, but the brain isn't digital, it's analog, and there isn't a boolean flag somewhere in your head that determines if you have a condition or not. People are different. The medical community usually concerns itself with cases where the condition impacts people's quality of life, i.e. only the more extreme ones, but that doesn't mean anything below that doesn't exist and hasn't since the dawn of humanity.
I ran into a person in a technical forum recently who kept referring to the themselves as we and us.
I was very confused for a while until someone asked them about it. Turns out they had purposely created a “head mate” and now insisted on being treated as multiple people.
This used to be thing back in the LiveJournal days; I remember people claiming to have a baby personality and typing in mock baby talk, as well as a bunch of "otherkin" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin).
I was taught Multiple Personality Disorder was so rare, you might be able to count the real cases on one hand.
This was twent years ago, and Dr. Godsey was the professor. He didn't have tenure, so he did landscaping during the summer. I thought his summer job was cool for a teacher. He might have been the best teacher I ever had. Never forget the first day of class, and he said the C students usually hide in the back row. The next day all the back row seats were empty.
Anyways--I do question certain people who are affected by so many psychological problems to the point they need to use abbreviations to describe themselfs. I don't blame them though. They are just repeating what a licensed professional told them.
Yes, I stumbled upon some of these same community discussions happening on Twitter and Tumblr. It was really interesting to read about the in-fighting about traumagenic vs endogenic DID. This discussion of real or imitated Tourette’s reminds me of that.
But my take is that conventionally clinical DID presenters will not be particularly public about it, because it stems from the most brutal trauma in childhood- not something to showcase to get upvotes or likes.
I don't have any perspective on non-clinical cases.
>A similar one I just became aware of is Dissociative Identity Disorder, or multiple personality disorder.
Is it really crossing over into a MPD however? Voice dialogue is a therapeutic modality where you take a 2nd person perspective on your psyche components in addition to 1st/3rd person. There's something to it but it's not MPD. The most popular example is the "inner child" complex which people often reconnect with when they empathize with their own child.
I remember pluralism being passed around in the earlier days of the Internet too. With some pretty wild claims like being able to enter your own mind and fuck about while another portion of your consciousness lived your life for you. (which, might have been the origin of the other social media thing about reality shifting going around?) Back when it was called tulpas.
Interesting that it seems to be coming back in popularity.
probably just the same thing as code switching. People learn to tap into some portion of the brain that tracks personality constructs of others and can do a 'deep fake' of them.
I don't think it's anything but humans being humans.
When I read the title I had the thought that someone had concocted some kind of adversarial neural network attack on humans that could be delivered by video, like in Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.
Are there such things as mimetic diseases? We have definitely seen that alarmingly insane quasi-cults like Qanon or flat Earth can spread entirely via social media, so that isn’t too far away. The jump would be to something not requiring conscious thought or belief at all, something that fully bypasses the neocortex.
If that is actually possible I can see a future where everyone runs smart content filters (maybe AI powered) and curated whitelists before viewing things. Maybe there could be mental techniques for handling “cognitive hazards” that could be learned too. I feel like some mystical traditions have inklings of that like “visualize a white light around you” or “as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Maybe that stuff fires up some anti-malware in your brain.
Howdy, I've been diagnosed with Tourette's for 23 years. Including coprolalia and all the """fun""" symptoms (narrator: they were not fun). I read the paper behind this phenomenon last week and wrote some thoughts to a friend, reproducing here.
From the paper:
> Thirdly, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely remit while conducting favourite activities.
I was conclusively diagnosed back in the stone age before smart phones were a thing and the internet was still dial-up, and even I got this neverending skepticism from teachers and classmates in the run-up to my diagnosis. "Hey Lars, how come your tics disappear when you're playing video games, but they flare up when it's time for a math test? PRETTY CONVENIENT!"
Well, because tics are brought out by anxiety and vanish when a patient goes into a "flow state," -- this is super well established.
On the other hand, the rest of the diagnostic criteria for this phenomena seems very reasonable to me, and I also am totally ready to believe that an induced faux tourette's syndrome would absolutely present this way.
And then there's this one:
> Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these people they definitely don't have Tourette's, the behavior stops?
They also kind of bury the lede with this one:
> While it appears that age at onset is very similar in different countries with a preponderance of adolescents and young adults, gender distribution seems to be different: while half of our patients are male, the group of Davide Martino and Tamara Pringsheim at the University of Calgary in Canada reports a female to male ratio of about 9:1
I've always heard that the sex ratio of Tourette's diagnosis is like 1:10 skewed towards males (looking it up it looks like it's actually 1:4.3 favoring males). So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that's long been presumed to have some kind of male-associated underlying genetic basis that lines up with a prominent female influence seems like pretty strong evidence for their theory.
So I don't have the medial training to validate the clinical methodology, but from knowing what real tourette's syndrome feels like from the inside, this seems plausible.
TL;DR -- these kids aren't getting tourette's from the internet, but it does seem like they're experiencing a real phenomenon that they need real treatment for. The correct first step is accurately diagnosing them with whatever this new thing is. Maybe some kids are just faking, maybe some others have genuinely convinced themselves they have something going on and this manifests in weird behaviors (which qualifies as a real condition in my eyes). Believe me, you absolutely do not want to be prescribed powerful brain medications unless you really need them.
Yeah, they give the following factors that excluded a diagnosis of Tourette's:
> (i) onset was abrupt instead of slow,
> (ii) symptoms constantly deteriorated instead of typical waxing and waning of tics,
> (iii) “simple” movements (e.g. eye blinking) and noises (e.g. clearing one’s throat) were clearly in the background or completely absent, although being the most common and typical symptoms in Tourette syndrome,
> (iv) movements were mainly complex and stereotyped and predominantly located at arms and body, instead of at eyes and face,
> (v) overall, the number of different movements, noises, and words was “countless” and far beyond the typical number of tics in Tourette syndrome, and
> (vi) premonitory feelings were reported with atypical location, quality, and duration compared to tics in Tourette syndrome.
Tourette's has fairly specific features. It's not a generic "behaving weirdly/antisocially and moving in funny ways" thing.
Sorry to hear about your coprolalia. That sounds tough to cope with. It's annoying that it gets treated as synonymous with Tourette's in the media when it affects something like 10% of patients. Did it improve with adulthood? I grew out of the worst of my symptoms in my 20s as many do (diagnosed 30 years ago, some vocal tics but never coprolalia).
> So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these people they definitely don't have Tourettes, the behavior stops?
I don't know if there's a general term for this, but there seem to be a category of syndromes where if you're high-functioning with the syndrome, then it's possible to suppress the symptoms, and whether you're expected to suppress the symptoms depends on whether a doctor "grants you the privilege" of a diagnosis of having the disease.
For example, Hikikomori in Japan—these people almost certainly have Social Anxiety Disorder, but it's their parents/caregivers that enable them to live as recluses, and they only tend to do this if they believe their child has some sort of clear mental illness. If they take their child to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist says "nope, no social anxiety, they just like staying home to play video games", then the parents would likely stop enabling the child to stay in their room all the time, and instead would force them to go out. Even if it turns out that the child really just has high-functioning Social Anxiety Disorder, to the point where it's "masked" from a signs-and-symptoms based diagnosis; and so is still markedly suffering when made to go out in public. Without the diagnosis, they're no longer allowed to be free from social approbation when they avoid people.
I would think a similar thing could be at play in "high-functioning", able-to-be-suppressed-with-constant-effort Tourettes cases: without the diagnosis (or rather, with a negative diagnosis), nobody around you will tolerate a Tourettes outburst from you, so you just have to "suck it up" and mask it as hard as you can. Also, given the negative diagnosis, your supporters will likely no longer associate the more subtle symptoms with Tourettes, as they now "know" you don't have it; so they'll mentally categorize those tics, if they do show up, as being something else.
In such cases, you'd also expect that if someone had always known such symptoms were socially-unacceptable and so had always been actively suppressing them, then finding out that there's a disease they might have where presenting these symptoms would be considered socially-acceptable in the context of having that disease, would mean they'd suddenly be willing to start 1. claiming they have the disease, and 2. presenting the symptoms—but only after people know and understand their claim to have the disease, as the whole point is to be able to finally "let out" the symptoms while avoiding social approbation for them.
> So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that's long been presumed to have some kind of male-associated underlying genetic basis that lines up with a prominent female influence seems like pretty strong evidence for their theory.
Charitable interpretation: women are underdiagnosed with Tourettes, because some combination of hormonal and social factors generally leads to them generally being higher-functioning — i.e. "leaking" the symptoms less. But actually, they're still being impacted, just silently (i.e. their dopamine is being drained faster by having to "fight the urge", much like someone with OCD.)
This is the current hypothesis for the gender disparity in diagnosis of childhood ADHD. It's very underdiagnosed in girls (which we know because a lot of these undiagnosed girls become adult women who go to a psychiatrist and find out they have adult ADHD, and then think back and realize they've always had the internal experience of ADHD but were never diagnosed.) We think this is because girls are more trait-conscientious, which leads to them being more motivated to not let (socially-unacceptable) hyperactivity symptoms "leak", while still internally suffering from those symptoms, and visibly suffering from the more socially-acceptable symptoms (which alone aren't usually enough for people to put two and two together and send them to a psychiatrist for diagnosis.)
-----
All that being said, yeah, I don't think this is really "high-functioning Tourettes." That isn't quite how Tourettes works; there's a lot of involuntary stuff in Tourettes that absolutely cannot be suppressed no matter how much you might want to, and
But there are a number of etiologies with related symptom profiles. My guess about what actual "property" these girls are actually noticing about themselves, is that they're high-functioning on the autistic spectrum (another thing underdiagnosed in women!) and so find that stimming behaviors — which can look a lot like Tourettes motor tics, but are actually voluntary, just highly preferred to be executed when possible — help to calm certain sensory processing problems they have.
HN folks here are proposing that countless young kids could universally mimic a specific symptom set so precisely, that it concerns actual experts.
I've been to endless elementary school plays; I've seen that kids really don't have the refined performance skill to pull this off. One might but not scores.
It seems that the mind can absorb much more than we previously thought from observation. I wonder how the human brain perceives gameplay characters vs humans in a video
I had an abnormally large amount of visible tics when I was growing up as a teenager. This got my parents worried despite assurances from doctors, but they all went away when I grew up along with my raspy voice and terrible propensity for acne.
This seems like a moral panic like fidget spinners back in 2017, and it doesn't answer an important question: what's the problem if teenagers are subconsciously copying tics from a YouTube star?
I've had diagnosed tourette's for 23 years and yes, tics are a big deal, then and now. Maybe your experience was different from mine, but mine was hardly positive.
Teachers hate you.
Classmates hate you.
You get detained and questioned by airport security.
You get detained and questioned by police.
Weird pentecostal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc exorcism rituals.
Weird liberal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc herbal cleansing rituals.
Weird foreign* ladies pop random pills in your mouth thinking you're having an epileptic attack
Everyone finds you annoying and thinks you're looking for attention.
Even when people understand you and try to accommodate you, you are slowly wearing away their patience and you KNOW it.
I would not wish that on my worst enemy.
-------
* no shade meant to non-weird pentocostal people or religious people in general (I'm religious myself); just this one particular one
* no shade meant to non-weird liberal people
* no shade meant to non-weird foreign people
* no shade meant to ladies in general, it's just a coincidence it's always been ladies; mostly probably because they're just trying to help and that's sweet in its own way
One of the people quoted in this article, Robert E. Bartholomew, also wrote a book on the Havana Syndrome, which is most likely another case of mass psychogenic illness.
"You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry about, too."
"Deep structures?"
"Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time you learned binary code?"
"Sure."
"You were forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub. We have to look out for each other."
"What's a nam-shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?"
"Just don't stare into any bitmaps..."
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. (1992)
"The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction."
― Douglas R. Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. (1979)
I think schools more and more will have to focus on teaching kids how to play and live without technology.
These schools already exist of course, but I won't be surprised if someday they become more mainstream. Kids don't need to learn how to use computers anymore. They need to learn how to function without them.
It's a bit of a catch 22. On a surface level one might say that they are faking having Tourette's, and that they are completely healthy. But look a bit deeper and you realize that a mentally sane person would not copy the tics from a YouTube personality and keep the schtick up all the way to the doctors. So no, it's not Tourette's but yes, these people need help.
I don't think mimicking someone's Tourette's, which is what these children are doing, makes them mentally unwell.
It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking or enjoy the idea of being special. It reminds me of the relatively new phenomenon of a community on YouTube where kids faking multiple personality disorder upload videos displaying their "systems", and each persona in the system has some time on the camera before being taken over by other competing personae.
Most people are in agreement that these kids are faking it, and it doesn't necessarily follow that they shouldn't be deemed "sane". It's more likely that they don't value the time of medical doctors and are willing to mimic a YouTube celebrity's tics for self-serving reasons, even if it is wasting their parents' money and the time of others.
> and keep the schtick up all the way to the doctors
It's perfectly normal to keep up a lie alive to an extreme degree just to avoid having to awkwardly admit you were lying. Think about the rape accusers who take it all the way to court before eventually admitting they made it up, or all of the married people who keep up the pretence of religion to avoid awkwardness with their actually-religious partners.
On a more innocuous level, every one has bullshitted to avoid revealing that they don't know someone's name because it has got to the point that saying "sorry I don't know your name" would be too embarrassing.
The article mentions one danger of potential misdiagnosis: the medications for treatment of Tourette's, if applied incorrectly, have sometimes severe side effects.
But one other danger from this phenomenon is the overuse of already-stretched-thin counselors and therapists. If you've tried to acquire any mental health services over the past year... every counselor and organization seems severely overloaded and under-staffed.
you realize that a mentally sane person would not copy the tics from a YouTube personality
Food for thought. Is there really such a thing as a mentally sane person? Anyway the first thing which came to my mind when I read this was not 'mentally insane' but 'oh, puberty'. I'm not claiming all of this is completely normal, or all of these are pre-adult (heck even adults are still known to copy other's behavior) but I'm also quite careful of leaning towards the claim that all these people need help.
To some degrees sanity is defined by alignment with surrounding norms. If your peers Norms are going to extremes to do things for the lols, you might end up at the doctor's.
> a mentally sane person would not copy the tics from a YouTube personality
A sane adult, sure. Kids? Hell no. Doing stupid things is a basic right of childhood. Kids always need help from adults in general, but I would not read to much in this single case. Overall from the kids perspective this seems rather harmless as nobody was harmed.
We all make gestures, look left, right up or down, squint, have a narrator in one's head, sometimes clap, smack forhead when trying to get a thought formed, access memory, formulate a sentence, or express feelings.
Perhaps what we diagnose as Tourette on the low end is like above but overwhelming and more involuntary?
Perhaps people who acquire it via mimicry are in the category where movements are not entirely involuntary, but perhaps feel good and help them think or function maybe to relief stress or anxiety on subconscious level.
IRL I can’t imagine people getting stuck on this if they understand it’s a tic and are familiar with the person. When going online or through any automatic scanning mechanism though, it must become a hell to get away from automatic flagging, shadow banning etc.
The phenomenon I find most baffling is the insistence that we not be concerned, in any way, about that percentage of apparent cases where the person is faking a condition / system / syndrome. As if this causes no harm whatsoever to the person (themself), families, and society. Isn't this its own condition which merits study and (separate) classification / treatment?
[+] [-] themgt|4 years ago|reply
Systems, Collectives, and/or Plurals are those who experience being more than one entity in one physical body [1]. Systems are under the neurodivergent umbrella, and are not inherently LGBT+, but being plural can impact sexuality, romantic orientation, attraction, identities, and/or gender (such as with systemfluid). Systems can also commonly intersect with LGBT+ experiences[2]. The experiences may overlap to the point of ones queer identities being a large part of headmates, such as within queergenic systems.
I am not quite sure what to make of all this, but we live in interesting times.
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rapid+switching
https://lgbta.wikia.org/wiki/System
https://www.inputmag.com/culture/dissociative-identity-disor...
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-did-influencers-of...
[+] [-] xerox13ster|4 years ago|reply
The general consensus in the wider text and image based DID community is that most of them are faking, but we don't have a way of knowing for sure or how many because of just how inconsistent the presentation of the disorder can be in real life. You'd never know I had DID if you met me in person, but I have a good friend who is disabled because she can't function on her own.
The important thing to remember about DID is that it's caused by childhood trauma, abuse, and long term patterns of neglect as simple as "crying it out" or as significant as parentifying. It's not interesting times we live it it has been this way this is often generational, psychology is just finally catching up in this regard.
I was raised (and abused) by my aunt who was only continuing the cycle of her and my mom's abuse that she faced, continued by her father who was abused because of traumas his parents faced on the Trail of Tears. They both described feeling like they had more than one person in them, that their age was not aligned with their body, and the stories of abuse they both told me align. My dad was abused by the Boston Archdiocese, his psychiatric records claimed he referred to himself in turns by John, Jack, and other names, claiming they would act on his behalf. They called it schizophrenia then because of a backlash against diagnosing DID after Sybil and other films reached mainstream.
[+] [-] pfarrell|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmcgough|4 years ago|reply
[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/08/a-story-that-...
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
It's like fandom, basically, except with medical treatment and the sense of being an oppressed, abused minority.
[+] [-] marcan_42|4 years ago|reply
Think of it as ranging from acting differently in front of family and in front of your boss, to being an actor in character, to having that character evolve on its own, to full blown DID with amnesia.
The fields of psychology, neuroscience, etc are sadly still in their infancy; we really have very little idea how the brain truly works. Doctors tend to like to put people in boxes, but the brain isn't digital, it's analog, and there isn't a boolean flag somewhere in your head that determines if you have a condition or not. People are different. The medical community usually concerns itself with cases where the condition impacts people's quality of life, i.e. only the more extreme ones, but that doesn't mean anything below that doesn't exist and hasn't since the dawn of humanity.
[+] [-] learc83|4 years ago|reply
I was very confused for a while until someone asked them about it. Turns out they had purposely created a “head mate” and now insisted on being treated as multiple people.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hellbannedguy|4 years ago|reply
This was twent years ago, and Dr. Godsey was the professor. He didn't have tenure, so he did landscaping during the summer. I thought his summer job was cool for a teacher. He might have been the best teacher I ever had. Never forget the first day of class, and he said the C students usually hide in the back row. The next day all the back row seats were empty.
Anyways--I do question certain people who are affected by so many psychological problems to the point they need to use abbreviations to describe themselfs. I don't blame them though. They are just repeating what a licensed professional told them.
[+] [-] rdimartino|4 years ago|reply
https://pluralpedia.org/w/Traumagenic
https://pluralpedia.org/w/Endogenic
[+] [-] pnathan|4 years ago|reply
But my take is that conventionally clinical DID presenters will not be particularly public about it, because it stems from the most brutal trauma in childhood- not something to showcase to get upvotes or likes.
I don't have any perspective on non-clinical cases.
[+] [-] evv555|4 years ago|reply
Is it really crossing over into a MPD however? Voice dialogue is a therapeutic modality where you take a 2nd person perspective on your psyche components in addition to 1st/3rd person. There's something to it but it's not MPD. The most popular example is the "inner child" complex which people often reconnect with when they empathize with their own child.
[+] [-] ED_Radish|4 years ago|reply
Interesting that it seems to be coming back in popularity.
[+] [-] cyanydeez|4 years ago|reply
I don't think it's anything but humans being humans.
[+] [-] twic|4 years ago|reply
https://www.vice.com/en/article/exmqzz/tulpamancy-internet-s...
[+] [-] api|4 years ago|reply
Reminds me of this oddity: https://rarediseases.org/rare-diseases/jumping-frenchmen-of-...
Are there such things as mimetic diseases? We have definitely seen that alarmingly insane quasi-cults like Qanon or flat Earth can spread entirely via social media, so that isn’t too far away. The jump would be to something not requiring conscious thought or belief at all, something that fully bypasses the neocortex.
If that is actually possible I can see a future where everyone runs smart content filters (maybe AI powered) and curated whitelists before viewing things. Maybe there could be mental techniques for handling “cognitive hazards” that could be learned too. I feel like some mystical traditions have inklings of that like “visualize a white light around you” or “as I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.” Maybe that stuff fires up some anti-malware in your brain.
At least there is already a symbol: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/264113001
[+] [-] larsiusprime|4 years ago|reply
From the paper:
> Thirdly, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely remit while conducting favourite activities.
I was conclusively diagnosed back in the stone age before smart phones were a thing and the internet was still dial-up, and even I got this neverending skepticism from teachers and classmates in the run-up to my diagnosis. "Hey Lars, how come your tics disappear when you're playing video games, but they flare up when it's time for a math test? PRETTY CONVENIENT!"
Well, because tics are brought out by anxiety and vanish when a patient goes into a "flow state," -- this is super well established.
On the other hand, the rest of the diagnostic criteria for this phenomena seems very reasonable to me, and I also am totally ready to believe that an induced faux tourette's syndrome would absolutely present this way.
And then there's this one:
> Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these people they definitely don't have Tourette's, the behavior stops?
They also kind of bury the lede with this one:
> While it appears that age at onset is very similar in different countries with a preponderance of adolescents and young adults, gender distribution seems to be different: while half of our patients are male, the group of Davide Martino and Tamara Pringsheim at the University of Calgary in Canada reports a female to male ratio of about 9:1
I've always heard that the sex ratio of Tourette's diagnosis is like 1:10 skewed towards males (looking it up it looks like it's actually 1:4.3 favoring males). So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that's long been presumed to have some kind of male-associated underlying genetic basis that lines up with a prominent female influence seems like pretty strong evidence for their theory.
So I don't have the medial training to validate the clinical methodology, but from knowing what real tourette's syndrome feels like from the inside, this seems plausible.
TL;DR -- these kids aren't getting tourette's from the internet, but it does seem like they're experiencing a real phenomenon that they need real treatment for. The correct first step is accurately diagnosing them with whatever this new thing is. Maybe some kids are just faking, maybe some others have genuinely convinced themselves they have something going on and this manifests in weird behaviors (which qualifies as a real condition in my eyes). Believe me, you absolutely do not want to be prescribed powerful brain medications unless you really need them.
[+] [-] omnicognate|4 years ago|reply
> (i) onset was abrupt instead of slow,
> (ii) symptoms constantly deteriorated instead of typical waxing and waning of tics,
> (iii) “simple” movements (e.g. eye blinking) and noises (e.g. clearing one’s throat) were clearly in the background or completely absent, although being the most common and typical symptoms in Tourette syndrome,
> (iv) movements were mainly complex and stereotyped and predominantly located at arms and body, instead of at eyes and face,
> (v) overall, the number of different movements, noises, and words was “countless” and far beyond the typical number of tics in Tourette syndrome, and
> (vi) premonitory feelings were reported with atypical location, quality, and duration compared to tics in Tourette syndrome.
Tourette's has fairly specific features. It's not a generic "behaving weirdly/antisocially and moving in funny ways" thing.
Sorry to hear about your coprolalia. That sounds tough to cope with. It's annoying that it gets treated as synonymous with Tourette's in the media when it affects something like 10% of patients. Did it improve with adulthood? I grew out of the worst of my symptoms in my 20s as many do (diagnosed 30 years ago, some vocal tics but never coprolalia).
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] derefr|4 years ago|reply
I don't know if there's a general term for this, but there seem to be a category of syndromes where if you're high-functioning with the syndrome, then it's possible to suppress the symptoms, and whether you're expected to suppress the symptoms depends on whether a doctor "grants you the privilege" of a diagnosis of having the disease.
For example, Hikikomori in Japan—these people almost certainly have Social Anxiety Disorder, but it's their parents/caregivers that enable them to live as recluses, and they only tend to do this if they believe their child has some sort of clear mental illness. If they take their child to a psychiatrist and the psychiatrist says "nope, no social anxiety, they just like staying home to play video games", then the parents would likely stop enabling the child to stay in their room all the time, and instead would force them to go out. Even if it turns out that the child really just has high-functioning Social Anxiety Disorder, to the point where it's "masked" from a signs-and-symptoms based diagnosis; and so is still markedly suffering when made to go out in public. Without the diagnosis, they're no longer allowed to be free from social approbation when they avoid people.
I would think a similar thing could be at play in "high-functioning", able-to-be-suppressed-with-constant-effort Tourettes cases: without the diagnosis (or rather, with a negative diagnosis), nobody around you will tolerate a Tourettes outburst from you, so you just have to "suck it up" and mask it as hard as you can. Also, given the negative diagnosis, your supporters will likely no longer associate the more subtle symptoms with Tourettes, as they now "know" you don't have it; so they'll mentally categorize those tics, if they do show up, as being something else.
In such cases, you'd also expect that if someone had always known such symptoms were socially-unacceptable and so had always been actively suppressing them, then finding out that there's a disease they might have where presenting these symptoms would be considered socially-acceptable in the context of having that disease, would mean they'd suddenly be willing to start 1. claiming they have the disease, and 2. presenting the symptoms—but only after people know and understand their claim to have the disease, as the whole point is to be able to finally "let out" the symptoms while avoiding social approbation for them.
> So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that's long been presumed to have some kind of male-associated underlying genetic basis that lines up with a prominent female influence seems like pretty strong evidence for their theory.
Charitable interpretation: women are underdiagnosed with Tourettes, because some combination of hormonal and social factors generally leads to them generally being higher-functioning — i.e. "leaking" the symptoms less. But actually, they're still being impacted, just silently (i.e. their dopamine is being drained faster by having to "fight the urge", much like someone with OCD.)
This is the current hypothesis for the gender disparity in diagnosis of childhood ADHD. It's very underdiagnosed in girls (which we know because a lot of these undiagnosed girls become adult women who go to a psychiatrist and find out they have adult ADHD, and then think back and realize they've always had the internal experience of ADHD but were never diagnosed.) We think this is because girls are more trait-conscientious, which leads to them being more motivated to not let (socially-unacceptable) hyperactivity symptoms "leak", while still internally suffering from those symptoms, and visibly suffering from the more socially-acceptable symptoms (which alone aren't usually enough for people to put two and two together and send them to a psychiatrist for diagnosis.)
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All that being said, yeah, I don't think this is really "high-functioning Tourettes." That isn't quite how Tourettes works; there's a lot of involuntary stuff in Tourettes that absolutely cannot be suppressed no matter how much you might want to, and
But there are a number of etiologies with related symptom profiles. My guess about what actual "property" these girls are actually noticing about themselves, is that they're high-functioning on the autistic spectrum (another thing underdiagnosed in women!) and so find that stimming behaviors — which can look a lot like Tourettes motor tics, but are actually voluntary, just highly preferred to be executed when possible — help to calm certain sensory processing problems they have.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|4 years ago|reply
I've been to endless elementary school plays; I've seen that kids really don't have the refined performance skill to pull this off. One might but not scores.
[+] [-] willcipriano|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] okareaman|4 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/r/Tulpa/
[+] [-] olingern|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mFixman|4 years ago|reply
I had an abnormally large amount of visible tics when I was growing up as a teenager. This got my parents worried despite assurances from doctors, but they all went away when I grew up along with my raspy voice and terrible propensity for acne.
This seems like a moral panic like fidget spinners back in 2017, and it doesn't answer an important question: what's the problem if teenagers are subconsciously copying tics from a YouTube star?
[+] [-] larsiusprime|4 years ago|reply
Teachers hate you.
Classmates hate you.
You get detained and questioned by airport security.
You get detained and questioned by police.
Weird pentecostal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc exorcism rituals.
Weird liberal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc herbal cleansing rituals.
Weird foreign* ladies pop random pills in your mouth thinking you're having an epileptic attack
Everyone finds you annoying and thinks you're looking for attention.
Even when people understand you and try to accommodate you, you are slowly wearing away their patience and you KNOW it.
I would not wish that on my worst enemy.
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* no shade meant to non-weird pentocostal people or religious people in general (I'm religious myself); just this one particular one
* no shade meant to non-weird liberal people
* no shade meant to non-weird foreign people
* no shade meant to ladies in general, it's just a coincidence it's always been ladies; mostly probably because they're just trying to help and that's sweet in its own way
[+] [-] anaphor|4 years ago|reply
https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783030407452
I've been reading it, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who wants to learn more.
[+] [-] bmc7505|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] post_break|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] raffraffraff|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magpi3|4 years ago|reply
These schools already exist of course, but I won't be surprised if someday they become more mainstream. Kids don't need to learn how to use computers anymore. They need to learn how to function without them.
[+] [-] nixpulvis|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] selfhoster11|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tenaciousDaniel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] nightcracker|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptoo|4 years ago|reply
It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking or enjoy the idea of being special. It reminds me of the relatively new phenomenon of a community on YouTube where kids faking multiple personality disorder upload videos displaying their "systems", and each persona in the system has some time on the camera before being taken over by other competing personae.
Most people are in agreement that these kids are faking it, and it doesn't necessarily follow that they shouldn't be deemed "sane". It's more likely that they don't value the time of medical doctors and are willing to mimic a YouTube celebrity's tics for self-serving reasons, even if it is wasting their parents' money and the time of others.
[+] [-] IshKebab|4 years ago|reply
It's perfectly normal to keep up a lie alive to an extreme degree just to avoid having to awkwardly admit you were lying. Think about the rape accusers who take it all the way to court before eventually admitting they made it up, or all of the married people who keep up the pretence of religion to avoid awkwardness with their actually-religious partners.
On a more innocuous level, every one has bullshitted to avoid revealing that they don't know someone's name because it has got to the point that saying "sorry I don't know your name" would be too embarrassing.
[+] [-] geerlingguy|4 years ago|reply
But one other danger from this phenomenon is the overuse of already-stretched-thin counselors and therapists. If you've tried to acquire any mental health services over the past year... every counselor and organization seems severely overloaded and under-staffed.
[+] [-] stinos|4 years ago|reply
Food for thought. Is there really such a thing as a mentally sane person? Anyway the first thing which came to my mind when I read this was not 'mentally insane' but 'oh, puberty'. I'm not claiming all of this is completely normal, or all of these are pre-adult (heck even adults are still known to copy other's behavior) but I'm also quite careful of leaning towards the claim that all these people need help.
[+] [-] totetsu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slightwinder|4 years ago|reply
A sane adult, sure. Kids? Hell no. Doing stupid things is a basic right of childhood. Kids always need help from adults in general, but I would not read to much in this single case. Overall from the kids perspective this seems rather harmless as nobody was harmed.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] antattack|4 years ago|reply
Perhaps what we diagnose as Tourette on the low end is like above but overwhelming and more involuntary?
Perhaps people who acquire it via mimicry are in the category where movements are not entirely involuntary, but perhaps feel good and help them think or function maybe to relief stress or anxiety on subconscious level.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dang|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] makeitdouble|4 years ago|reply
That’s unfortunate.
IRL I can’t imagine people getting stuck on this if they understand it’s a tic and are familiar with the person. When going online or through any automatic scanning mechanism though, it must become a hell to get away from automatic flagging, shadow banning etc.
[+] [-] ezekiel68|4 years ago|reply