Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but there is probably no time in history where racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, religious hatred, slavery, etc. were less normalized than right now.
These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
Not only that, but if you tell the village idiot they're being an idiot you become a villageidiotiophobe.
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
The times we live in are absolutely brutal for people who struggle with diversity of belief (wherever they are on the sociopolitical spectrum). Never before has an individual had so many perspectives to contend with at once. It breaks a lot of people in different ways, although I think people who can navigate the noise without losing their sense of self are better for the experience.
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
I wonder if this is affecting all of humanity en masse or if this is just another form of infection, mental in this case, that thins the herd and ignores people who can resist its effects and continue living normal lives. Most of us within a healthy community with plenty of opportunity for gaining status, loving family and diverse friends who are willing to call us out on bullshit, purpose in life, and in good physical health are unlikely to get sucked into extreme TERFism, white supremacy, TikTok tics and god knows what else.
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
> one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
One major problem, in my opinion, is that people think what they see online is a representative sample of the population. It’s clearly not.
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
>A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
I personally believe that this is a great example of a moral panic. There isn't much of a there, there. If you look closely.
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class.
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
The problem is that the internet enables the sociopaths, narcissists, power hungry etc. to easily spread their toxicity. And the internet rewards this behaviour by giving them attention.
Challenging gender roles isn't a new thing. I assure you that not being able to inherit property, or other gender-based discrimination has had people questioning gender roles for a long time.
From my reading of the article (which is hard to parse not being an expert) it seems there is a German YouTuber with Tourette's who also on his YouTube shows displays non-tourette's tics. And these tics are being copied by other young people watching his shows, and being presented as Tourette's until they arrive at the clinic where these experts go "hang on this kid does not have Tourette's but does have tics similar to the German youtuber above"
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
There may be a relation to military conditioning. I spent just a single week at a military academy introductory program in high school and when I returned home I was "uncontrollably" (if I thought about it I could avoid doing it, but if I was on autopilot it happened by itself) squaring my corners and calling my family "sir" and "ma'am". The thing was, those patterns were my entire life for that week, and they were very deliberately drilled into me. Eventually they faded because they weren't reinforced outside of the academy (if anything, they were "deinforced"), but there may be a connection here.
If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
> Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
It's the mere suggestion that they might have those tics, but the article says:
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
All behavior is total behavior, so it doesn’t really matter. Article makes the point that this is attention seeking behavior and often used as an excuse to avoid unpleasant tasks. Whether the teens are aware they are choosing the tic, eventually it becomes habitual and they “can’t stop”. Except they can after meeting with a trained phycologist. Get to the root of the behavior and usually the behavior goes away.
> First, all patients presented with nearly identical movements and vocalizations that not only resemble Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but are in part exactly the same, such as shouting the German words Pommes (English: potatoes), Bombe (English: bomb), Heil Hitler, Du bist häßlich (English: you are ugly) and Fliegende Haie (English: flying sharks) as well as bizarre and complex behaviours such as throwing pens at school and dishes at home, and crushing eggs in the kitchen.
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
Stuff like this makes me wonder if taboo and stigma "evolved" in societies as defense against the spread of behavior that could cause a breakdown of social order. For example, if something like dancing mania[0] got out of hand, then important jobs could be left undone and people starve or whatever. So if the notion that such behavior is bad is drilled into everyone's mind before being exposed, then they are more likely to avoid "catching" it.
There's no need for convoluted explanations. A good taboo, understood as a restriction on certain kinds of behavior or speech at least in certain circumstances, exists to protect some good. It's the same reason (or one of the reasons) we partition our houses into rooms by purpose. Human flourishing requires certain limits, not letting it all hang out. The latter is more akin to the liberal notion of freedom understood as "do what thou wilt" and limitless indulgence of the appetites and desires. The classical understanding of freedom is the ability to do what you ought. Guess which leads to happiness and which leads to misery.
Oh yeah definitely. It's easier to just have a general learned feeling of a taboo than to have to explain to everyone the historical and societal consequences of it to every person. It's a learned behavior that helps perpetuate a higher survival rate not because the thing itself is bad if done a handful of times but because it can get out of hand and be done by the whole population.
I've been starting to think the bible and other religions have their place due to this. Plot people on a bell curve, that's a lot of people that can't grasp basic nuance and critical reasoning.
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
Taboo and stigma are also what drive irrational prejudices, so I'm not sure about the rush to judgment about, ummm, "important jobs" which definitely were not how society was organized during the vast majority of our evolution.
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
is rather peculiar. I didn't expect that this is how neurologists and neuroscientists would speak these days. "Our postmodern society", "permanent identity crisis of the modern man" - these sentiments sound like they've been transplanted from a humanities paper.
A freaky thing that this paper doesn’t mention is that in some cases these tics have gotten so extreme, that one patient began having almost constant seizures and became wheelchair-bound. Imagine being “infected” by watching a video on TikTok! It sounds like a horror movie.
From The Guardian:
“Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says.
Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct.
Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”
When I was in high school, one of the "popular" kids used to talk a bit odd on purpose and sure, it generated a bit of a chuckle at first, but he kept doing it and a lot of kids also adopted a similar vocal tic to seem like they were part of the cool group as well. Monkey see, monkey do.
"they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
There is a tendency to reify aberrations and disorders and to identify with them because it gives you another way of attaining a feeling of (false) "uniqueness" and exceptionality, or a way of trying to manipulate people into showing you "compassion" or pity. It's a disease of our age. "The spectrum" seems to be a popular example. These are afflictions, not identities. They're nothing to be proud of when you have them, if you have them, nor are they things to be desired.
There may also be passive-aggressive motives. Personal autonomy and the absolute sovereignty of the individual and his desires are a superordinate value today. We chafe under any perceived constraint or restraint on our desires. What do some people do when they don't want to follow some rule they should, but fear opposing that rule overtly? They rebel through small, passive-aggressive ways. Imagine now you are faced with the internalized emotional compulsion or fear to behave or not behave a certain way that you don't want to submit to, but fear opposing or ignoring for whatever reason. Simulating tics could be an interior rebellion against that undesired compulsion. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes a habit.
(Curiously, I would attribute the very cause of this inner struggle to our disordered attitude toward desire and appetite in the first place where the tail is essentially wagging the dog. Putting reason before desire and submitting to the truth liberates a person from the capricious tyranny of appetite.)
For those who think this is "just" a fad, there are some descriptions of the emotional harm that that it can cause in this article from February: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/social-med... The semantics of "mass sociogenic illness" aside, there do seem to be damaging real-world consequences.
Imagine you start the same trend, but everyone tries for once to contribute something science wise original to society, so the problem is real, but the potential is greater.
Now comes the part, were advertisers try to create sociogenic illnesses that spread theire product/brands information.
We can also skip directly to the part, were we mourn the youtfull ideals of a idea, taken over by scammers.
I wonder how similar this is to (sexy baby) valley girl upspeak & vocal fry.
Many young women picked this up from the Kardashians/Paris Hilton and now cannot "turn it off". We know this is not their 'natural' voice because if you ask them to make weird sounds and then a normal voice, then their normal voice sounds completely different than the sexy baby voice.
The weird thing is that the women themselves are surprised by this sound they're hearing and cannot easily reproduce it because the sexy baby voice is so deeply internalized.
Ironically categorising this as an outbreak of illness legitimises the attention-seeking behaviour which is firmly predicated on being perceived as a sufferer of illness.
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic
> A large number of young people across different countries
How many exactly? Without numbers, calling it mass-anything is blowing this way out of proportion. So called fakeDisorderCringe has been a thing for a while, thanks to TikTok. But is there any sign that a) it is seriously widespread and b) doesn't "go away by itself", when the kids get bored of pretending?
This appears to be nothing more than a short lived cringy TikTok / YouTube trend that will be over sooner than later, no different from goth culture. God I am glad I will never have children that I need to keep from melting their brains with social media.
I picked up a mental weirdness from the internet and now can't get rid of it: Trypophobia. I never experienced anything like it until Trypophobia was trending a few years back.
There's a new Netflix series called Hot Skull around this theme. I haven't watched it yet but it looks like the premise is that a word virus infects people and they start talking gibberish.
This is alarmist BS. Facebook group fodder. “Humans have working mirror neurons” could have been the headline.
All of you futurists who have slipped down the slope are worried about media spreading “sociogenic illness”. Of course media is powerful. It always has been. There has been about 75 years of fears and schemes about using TV to mass hypnotize its watchers. The same with radio before it.
What is happening is mass unstructured clustering by social algos, specifically TikTok. Historically content and ad algorithms have focused on contextual relevance with structured categories. Graphs have extended that to included social context. TikTok has novel input parameters about user behavior. There have been many reports that this unstructured clustering is surfacing niche medical diagnoses regularly.
A lot of neurodivergent traits have historically been under diagnosed for the same goddamn ignorance as OP’s piece: “it’s just attention seeking”. This type of dismissal by parents, teachers, and doctors alike have lead to millions of people leading shorter, harder lives. ADHD, Autism, Tourette’s, Bipolar, schizophrenia, etc are present in larger numbers than are diagnosed. Often time these lifelong genetic differences lead to 10x+ higher suicide rates, inability to sustain work, and myriad health issues. It’s really common that mental health issues that don’t result in property damage just get ignored, downplayed, or under treated even if acknowledged.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 29. Having that information combined with medication, therapy, and exercise has changed my life for the better dramatically. If TikTok was the surface where I discovered that, I would have likely been dismissed or even openly mocked by my doctors, and continued with a life of suffering or worse.
By the way, it seems people cited in the article are experiencing a form of Tourette’s syndrome that is a typical neurological trait associated with other pathology. Echolalia has far less cultural awareness, but accurate describes the behavior: “Echolalia is not only associated with Autism, but also with several other conditions, including congenital blindness, intellectual disability, developmental delay, language delay, Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia and others.” it’s not just swear words like on TV. My child does this. What happened to start as a YouTube ad for “Raid Shadow Legends” turned into a joke punchline, turned into a phrase that they cannot stop themselves from saying compulsively at odd times, after multiple years. It’s sub-clinical by itself, but is consistent with the diagnosis they do have.
This article is red meat, BS fear bait at best, dangerous at worst. To the extent content like this actually promotes diagnosis denial, it’s complicit in very literal harm of patients and those around them.
Is this different from any other learned behaviour? If a baby hangs around English speaking people they are going to learn to speak the language with the same accent. Then you see a group of kids where every sentence is peppered with the F-bomb, it's all the same right?
[+] [-] fleddr|3 years ago|reply
Pre-internet, one would rarely be exposed to ideas that are extreme, unhinged, insane or downright weird. It would still happen but in moderation, for which I'll use the stereotype "village idiot". A village idiot is isolated for having off-base ideas and behavior, hence bad ideas don't take root.
Now it's as if all the village idiots of the world had a meeting and started to run society, at least culturally. The bad ideas and behaviors are not kept in check, they're rewarded, leading to the normalization of things deeply questionable.
Imagine being a youngster right now. You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input. Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points. Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you. Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity. The normalization of the hating of the other sex. Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you. The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
Comparing social media to smoking is a comparison that needs re-evaluating. It's frankly shocking how this untold harm goes unchecked. Then again, intervening can lead to creepy authoritarian legislation. As seen in China, but let's at least credit them for recognizing the harm.
[+] [-] robotresearcher|3 years ago|reply
These things are sadly all too common, there's lots of work to do, and we must not be complacent about past successes.
But when I was a kid, homosexuality was illegal. Twenty years ago gay fear and stupid women were typical jokes on most sitcoms. Some of our grandmothers could not vote. Swimming pools and schools - schools! - were racially segregated within a lifetime.
Contrary to your post, we have been gradually escaping from the extreme crazy bad ideas. Let's keep it up.
[+] [-] dQw4w9WgXcQ|3 years ago|reply
People are afraid to set boundaries for fear of getting cancel cultured or harassed by a woke tolerance mob. All disagreement is now "toxic behavior" on social media channels. Arguing over perspectives is now sometimes branded with the extreme label of gaslighting. Day by day our Overton window continues to shift, and yet we were all told the slippery slope was supposedly a fallacy.
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reb|3 years ago|reply
Still, it's impossible to deny the negative impact it has on people who can't handle the vastness of opinion, and many of them turn to the comforting simplicity of reactionary extremism to cope.
[+] [-] 8f2ab37a-ed6c|3 years ago|reply
Those with weaker "immune systems" succumb to the mental viruses and cause themselves possibly irreparable harm by either joining a radical cult of their choosing or falling into some medical pathology rabbit hole.
[+] [-] tshaddox|3 years ago|reply
Except for the ones that were widely believed and accepted, of course. Or are you excluding those via a somewhat circular definition of "extreme," "unhinged," etc.?
[+] [-] sergiomattei|3 years ago|reply
Okay.
> You do as your peers do, you live online. Where insanity is your mainstream cultural input.
Reductionist, but I follow. What is insanity, and who defines it? Prior to the modern day, homosexuality was insanity or illness.
> Where mental illness, a very serious issue, is seemingly rewarded for oppression points.
Outside of some very extreme circles, nobody is actually doing this seriously. Where are you even seeing this?
> Where you might question your gender, where before this very idea didn't even occur to you.
No, they just kept quiet about it. That’s the difference, and it seems many are not ready to face the complex nature of psyche.
> Where you're confused between body types, from anorexic to celebrating obesity.
Most people are reasonable enough to understand celebrating obesity and “health at every size” is a fringe, unscientific and extremist idea.
> The normalization of the hating of the other sex.
Once again, extreme communities. Not sure if you refer to incels, would love some clarification.
> Or the other political half. Or an entire race. Or an entire class. Or anybody that doesn't agree with you.
Hate and extremism was invented by the internet?
> The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools. The sheer volume of it. The pointless status games.
I see nothing new here. It’s more accesible, yes, but public shame and gossip (!!!) has happened for millennia.
People can organize better and agendas can be pushed easily via the internet. But these voices are fringe and minority. Outside, in the real world — most people are reasonable and understanding.
Oh, and monocultures aren’t great.
[+] [-] refurb|3 years ago|reply
You don’t have to browse Reddit for long to to see plenty of self-described loners, people dealing with anxiety and other mental issues. And it makes sense that these people would find community online.
But if kids are going online and being bombarded with “the world is doomed”, and “what I thought were just the challenges of growing up are actually a mental illness” or “once I did [unhealthy coping mechanism], I felt like my problems were solved”, they developed unhealthy and distorted views of how kids their age think and act. I can see it being very easy to get sucked into the worst kind of community.
And if kids isolate themselves further the online world is literally 99% of their entire world view. And what an awful distorted world that is.
[+] [-] midoridensha|3 years ago|reply
>The normalization of doxxing, snitching, gossiping and cancel culture as "conversation" tools.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. Back in the pre-internet days, the "village idiot" was "canceled". No one bothered to listen to his idiotic blatherings or attempting to debate or debunk him; everyone just ignored him because he was a waste of time. Hence, he was "canceled", or "isolated" as you put it. But now you're complaining about similarly stupid and dangerous people being "canceled" (i.e., ignored and shunned).
[+] [-] areoform|3 years ago|reply
For example, let's look at the Tide Pod incident, how many teens in total ate tide pods?
86.
A global moral panic was launched over 86 teenagers doing a very stupid thing as teenagers are wont to do.
> It’s true that since the Tide Pod Challenge began, the American Association of Poison Control Centers (AAPC) has received 86 reports of teenagers intentionally ingesting laundry detergent. Yet at the end of last year, the AAPC reported that over 10,500 children under the age of five were exposed to laundry pods in 2017 (for example ingesting, inhaling, or absorbing the detergent). If we are going to have a mass panic about poisonings, ten thousand children are clearly in greater danger than less than a hundred teens. So why was it that only the Tide Pod Challenge that made pearl-clutching headlines across the globe?
https://archive.ph/ACiFD
The actual threat is accidental ingestion or inhalation by little children and elderly adults with dementia. They form the tens of thousands of cases that end up at poison control centres. But there's no moral panic around that, because "Elderly lady with dementia who lives alone accidentally ate a tide pod and then ended up in the ER" is less of a salacious story than "Teen eats tide pod for tiktok challenge"
Let's examine this 'Tourettes-like' story,
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos
What's a remarkably high number? As far as I can tell, this Op-Ed doesn't specify it. The author has only examined one patient that he classifies with this diagnosis. Ever.
Also interestingly enough, in most of the articles that talk about this subject, guess whose name repeatedly pops up? The same patient named in this Op-Ed.
Jan Zimmerman.
You can see the search for yourself here, https://www.google.com/search?q=Jan+Zimmerman+internet+viral...
We are told that there are "hundreds" of such patients, but we're never given an actual number, citation, or source.
If you try to track the source down, you find pieces like these, here's the "concrete" evidence that's offered,
First the background rate,
> The new surge of referrals consists of adolescent girls with sudden onset of motor and phonic tics of a complex and bizarre nature. In London, UK specialist tic clinics at each of the two children’s hospitals, each centre received four to six referrals per year (out of a total of approximately 200 in 2019/2020), which were acute onset tics in teenage girls
Then the "surge"
> In the last 3 months (end of 2020–January 2021), both centres have been receiving three to four referrals per week of this nature which, if it continues, would amount to 150–200 cases per year and effectively double the referral rate.
4 * 12 = 48. There are two centers so 96.
And this is during the onset of the pandemic, where global quarantines produced a constellation of anxiety in people of all age groups around the world.
This entire moral panic has been driven by referrals, not diagnoses, not confirmations but referrals from primary care physicians during one of the most stressful events of the past few decades (for ordinary people). No evidence has been presented if any or all of these cases are related to social media use or not.
The paper goes into this aspect and theorizes that this is an acute stress response,
> It is hypothesised that this unusual presentation is related to lockdown, change in usual structure and routine, social media related events/bullying and pandemic-related stress in vulnerable adolescents. Stress may be unmasking a tic predisposition in some, while in others compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, for example, underlying neurodevelopmental or emotional difficulties to the point of becoming overwhelming.
https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420
No specific numbers are provided anywhere w.r.t. how many people were influenced by social media or not, v. how many were patients that were predisposed to such a response that then presented with it in response to a hyper-stressful event.
So no, there is no epidemic of people watching tik toks and running around and changing their gender or becoming tourette-like.
96 possible, undiagnosed referrals does not a pandemic make.
This is just as silly as the moral panic over D&D back in the 80s. It's just updated for modern times.
[+] [-] thaumasiotes|3 years ago|reply
I know there's a panic over "screen time", which I've never really been on board with.
But I think there's a lot more to be said for keeping children away from the internet. The screen isn't so much of a problem. But the internet is.
[+] [-] thelock85|3 years ago|reply
If federal, state and local legislation or exclusive constitutional rights qualify as normalization, then we've been here before in the US... on several occasions.
> The sheer volume of it.
%100 agree. The difference between now and all the other times is that it's hard to escape it if you want to function in society-at-large. But I'd add that an obsession with growth is also key to the deleterious effects of social media.
[+] [-] theGnuMe|3 years ago|reply
"Good afternoon, do you have a moment for me to talk to you about our lord Jesus Christ?"
[+] [-] B1FF_PSUVM|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deterministic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] l3uwin|3 years ago|reply
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgender_history
[+] [-] theknocker|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|3 years ago|reply
So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
Learnt behaviour, copying, or physical tics that once learnt get stuck in the brain?
[+] [-] indigochill|3 years ago|reply
If someone spends many hours a day watching someone with particular quirks, it doesn't seem surprising (drawing parallels here to my experience) that those quirks may transfer because their brain starts to make those associations through observation. I would expect that stopping watching that particular person would probably let the transferred tics decay over a period of time (I'd give it a month).
[+] [-] lisper|3 years ago|reply
I am by all accounts neurotypical (except perhaps for a touch of Aspergers) but I have an involuntary tic. Every now and then (like once or twice a week) a memory of some incredibly stupid thing that I once did -- sometimes decades ago -- will pop into my head and before I can re-establish conscious control I'll make a vocalization that sounds like a cross between a whimper and a sneeze. It's kind of embarrassing, but usually I cover it up with a cough afterwards. I don't think anyone has ever actually noticed except me.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earworm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought
[+] [-] akira2501|3 years ago|reply
The article itself makes it clear. There's an obvious reward for these behaviors. This youtuber got exceptionally popular very quickly and was able to turn that into appearances on other shows. The other patients are also noted to have their "symptoms" express themselves during unpleasant tasks, but to be missing during pleasant ones. To the point it gets them out of doing the unpleasant work.
We've built a system that rewards this behavior because we built a system that also makes this behavior profitable. To me, these results shouldn't be a surprise, and I wonder if this "new illness" is really just an emergent lower level expression of something like Munchhausen syndrome; now given a wider and less sophisticated audience to play to.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|3 years ago|reply
> patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms
> resulting in release from obligations at school and home
> symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities
This is a textbook example of secondary gain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_and_secondary_gain
> So, the weird thing is not they pick up someone else's tics but they cannot get rid of them.
In some cases they did get rid of them after the ruse was discovered and no longer served any purpose.
> in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome
[+] [-] somedude895|3 years ago|reply
> Fourth, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
It also mentions other examples of MSI, where symptoms across the group would subside after a couple weeks or months. So yeah, in most cases all it needs is someone to say Stop That! You're imagining things
[+] [-] rubidium|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kuhewa|3 years ago|reply
To a first approximation, the kids are 'faking it'. The third point I didn't quote was that symptoms appear when it will preclude then from doing a tedious task, and then disappear when they are doing something they want to do.
[+] [-] ridgeguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goda90|3 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polishdude20|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fncivivue7|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thrashh|3 years ago|reply
I always thought it's just that there are things that you, personally, find weird and there are things you don't, and that it's heavily based on your upbringing, and because your neighbor will have a similar upbringing, both of you find the same things weird. When you hang with your neighbor, you will naturally shit on weird things, as we all like to do. A group of people automatically make up a society and so your society finds the exact same things weird and shits on the same things.
And at no point in the process did you have any individuality or real thought in the matter -- usually at least. Society created your identity and you simply promote it. Over time, opinions change because things happen to society collectively, but it's a slow process.
[+] [-] ttpphd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] azangru|3 years ago|reply
> Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21st century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
is rather peculiar. I didn't expect that this is how neurologists and neuroscientists would speak these days. "Our postmodern society", "permanent identity crisis of the modern man" - these sentiments sound like they've been transplanted from a humanities paper.
[+] [-] boyanlevchev|3 years ago|reply
From The Guardian: “Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says. Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct. Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”
Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/16/the-unknown-is...
[+] [-] werdnapk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lo_zamoyski|3 years ago|reply
There is a tendency to reify aberrations and disorders and to identify with them because it gives you another way of attaining a feeling of (false) "uniqueness" and exceptionality, or a way of trying to manipulate people into showing you "compassion" or pity. It's a disease of our age. "The spectrum" seems to be a popular example. These are afflictions, not identities. They're nothing to be proud of when you have them, if you have them, nor are they things to be desired.
There may also be passive-aggressive motives. Personal autonomy and the absolute sovereignty of the individual and his desires are a superordinate value today. We chafe under any perceived constraint or restraint on our desires. What do some people do when they don't want to follow some rule they should, but fear opposing that rule overtly? They rebel through small, passive-aggressive ways. Imagine now you are faced with the internalized emotional compulsion or fear to behave or not behave a certain way that you don't want to submit to, but fear opposing or ignoring for whatever reason. Simulating tics could be an interior rebellion against that undesired compulsion. Repeat something often enough, and it becomes a habit.
(Curiously, I would attribute the very cause of this inner struggle to our disordered attitude toward desire and appetite in the first place where the tail is essentially wagging the dog. Putting reason before desire and submitting to the truth liberates a person from the capricious tyranny of appetite.)
[+] [-] frereubu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] winReInstall|3 years ago|reply
Now comes the part, were advertisers try to create sociogenic illnesses that spread theire product/brands information.
We can also skip directly to the part, were we mourn the youtfull ideals of a idea, taken over by scammers.
[+] [-] screye|3 years ago|reply
Many young women picked this up from the Kardashians/Paris Hilton and now cannot "turn it off". We know this is not their 'natural' voice because if you ask them to make weird sounds and then a normal voice, then their normal voice sounds completely different than the sexy baby voice.
The weird thing is that the women themselves are surprised by this sound they're hearing and cannot easily reproduce it because the sexy baby voice is so deeply internalized.
Sounds rather similar to these involutory ticks.
[+] [-] air7|3 years ago|reply
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_mania
[+] [-] cnity|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Traubenfuchs|3 years ago|reply
> Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic
> A large number of young people across different countries
How many exactly? Without numbers, calling it mass-anything is blowing this way out of proportion. So called fakeDisorderCringe has been a thing for a while, thanks to TikTok. But is there any sign that a) it is seriously widespread and b) doesn't "go away by itself", when the kids get bored of pretending?
This appears to be nothing more than a short lived cringy TikTok / YouTube trend that will be over sooner than later, no different from goth culture. God I am glad I will never have children that I need to keep from melting their brains with social media.
[+] [-] hanoz|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] labrador|3 years ago|reply
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21834-trypoph...
[+] [-] theGnuMe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mfrankpb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reilly3000|3 years ago|reply
All of you futurists who have slipped down the slope are worried about media spreading “sociogenic illness”. Of course media is powerful. It always has been. There has been about 75 years of fears and schemes about using TV to mass hypnotize its watchers. The same with radio before it.
What is happening is mass unstructured clustering by social algos, specifically TikTok. Historically content and ad algorithms have focused on contextual relevance with structured categories. Graphs have extended that to included social context. TikTok has novel input parameters about user behavior. There have been many reports that this unstructured clustering is surfacing niche medical diagnoses regularly.
A lot of neurodivergent traits have historically been under diagnosed for the same goddamn ignorance as OP’s piece: “it’s just attention seeking”. This type of dismissal by parents, teachers, and doctors alike have lead to millions of people leading shorter, harder lives. ADHD, Autism, Tourette’s, Bipolar, schizophrenia, etc are present in larger numbers than are diagnosed. Often time these lifelong genetic differences lead to 10x+ higher suicide rates, inability to sustain work, and myriad health issues. It’s really common that mental health issues that don’t result in property damage just get ignored, downplayed, or under treated even if acknowledged.
I was diagnosed with ADHD at age 29. Having that information combined with medication, therapy, and exercise has changed my life for the better dramatically. If TikTok was the surface where I discovered that, I would have likely been dismissed or even openly mocked by my doctors, and continued with a life of suffering or worse.
By the way, it seems people cited in the article are experiencing a form of Tourette’s syndrome that is a typical neurological trait associated with other pathology. Echolalia has far less cultural awareness, but accurate describes the behavior: “Echolalia is not only associated with Autism, but also with several other conditions, including congenital blindness, intellectual disability, developmental delay, language delay, Tourette's syndrome, schizophrenia and others.” it’s not just swear words like on TV. My child does this. What happened to start as a YouTube ad for “Raid Shadow Legends” turned into a joke punchline, turned into a phrase that they cannot stop themselves from saying compulsively at odd times, after multiple years. It’s sub-clinical by itself, but is consistent with the diagnosis they do have.
This article is red meat, BS fear bait at best, dangerous at worst. To the extent content like this actually promotes diagnosis denial, it’s complicit in very literal harm of patients and those around them.
[+] [-] martyvis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] snorkel|3 years ago|reply