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It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

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411–420 of 704 posts

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#411
post #355

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…

It's plausible [1] [2]. 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…

I too have issues with these kinds of thoughts that very nearly cause a whole-body shudder, followed by a kind of yell just to get it out of my system. It doesn't happen often, but hearing others talk about this gives me hope that I'm not a total weirdo... even though I know I am in many other ways LOL!

I've also wondered if my ADHD somehow factors into it, but that I don't know.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#412
post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible [1] [2]. 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…

I have SAD and this happens to me several times a day. Though it's not so much that it pops into my head, more that my train of thought leads me there by association. In a lot of ways SAD feels like a form of PTSD where instead of a single extremely traumatic experience, or many extreme experiences(known as complex PTSD), it's a huge amount of slightly traumatic ones. So it's sort of like a flashback. One of the thin…

Are you talking about Seasonal Affective Disorder? Or can you define what SAD is if not?

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#413

This is the next big area of research in social sciences. You must research this for national security reasons. Early research came in with the idea of mirror neurons but it went further. Statistically you're always going to have 'hot spots' for suicide. # per capita etc. So governments trying to help setup suicide hotlines. Not much uptake on this. So they advertised the suicide hotline and suddenly has mass suicide…

> How about all the kids suddenly becoming trans? Please do not repeat this right-wing talking point. It is a moral panic, and it causes real harm to kids who need genuine mental health support who are instead being dismissed as being part of a trend. "all the kids" are not suddenly becoming trans - the incident rates in society are still extremely small. All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained…

> All rises in incidents of transgenderism are easily explained by a more tolerant society accepting it. The same appeared when we stopped.

Explained (aka semi-solid empirical experiments - where are those?) or imagined (aka ideological beliefs, much like the right)?

> And by and large, with some exceptions that get consistently magnified by those with an agenda, it is not something you can just do on a whim, and generally requires a lot of counselling and a lot of effort to pursue hormonal or surgical changes.

And yet every other week I see a talkshow on public TV discussing this. Prominently hosting a person that thinks the rules in place are faaaar to rigid, while most sane people would agree they are fine and problems lie in other areas. For example, while I agree that in many cases physiological "modifications" might be the most economic solution putting this solely to the purview of the individual might a) incur follow-up costs on society (here, these things are not self-paid) and b) raises the question why we don't amputate the legs of those who think they have one too many. The latter thing is something, which I would really like explained once by someone.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#414
post #395

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 surprise…

Curious: What is the sexy baby voice? And where can I see this weird sounds and then normal voice experiment?

This is a good place to start - https://omny.fm/shows/revisionist-history/from-inside-voice-...

Lake Bell asks the person to speak in their highest note and then their lowest note and then yodel for a couple of times. Then to asks her to just speak, and the voice that comes out much closer to what we associate with a 'normal' woman's voice.

I guess having to manually change tone to such extremes resets the body's ability to recover this incredibly specific learnt behavior, and the person momentarily reverts to a clean sample of their own voice.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#415
post #142

(content warning) It's not commonly discussed, but suicide seems to be a "sociogenic illness" in that reporting on suicides as such can cause more suicides. You may have noticed this in the reporting on celebrity deaths; a young person who "dies suddenly" may be suicide, but news reports will tend to avoid saying that out of concern for the sociogenic effects.

The "Werther effect" is the name for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Many OCD sufferers will not agree.

I think they were referring to behaviors associated with mass psychogenic illness, which is probably a lot more curable than many OCD cases.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-binary simply mean that you do not identify with the two currently accepted gender identity or that you do not perceive gender as a binary system but as a spectrum. That's it. It does not mean that the person suffers from gender dysphoria or that they want to transition. For many, it's simply a way to describe their existing social behavior. It is also an umbrella word that houses many other identies. I'd also ch…

That 50% number is anecdotal, from a friend whose a teacher in a middle school (norther Virginia) ... My guess is 100% of these children are on Tiktok/Snapchat, ingesting whatever content is being fed to their impressionable minds. Its certainly an internet driven phenomenon.

> That 50% number is anecdotal

Then it is meaningless and hazardous to build an opinion upon it.

> My guess is 100% of these children are on Tiktok/Snapchat

TikTok usage is at 32.2% for children aged 10-19. Snapchat usage is at 59% for children aged 13-24. That would be unlikely. Those two platforms also share little in term of features and functionality. How are they relevant here and why single them out?

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#418

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.

I worked with a couple of college classmates, who when they were taking to each other would use this hurry up to stop type of speech pattern. A few really quick words, then a pause, and a few more words. For autistic people this is called cluttering, but they talked to clients and others and didn’t talk that way, so I always wondered where it came from.

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#419
post #395

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 surprise…

Curious: What is the sexy baby voice? And where can I see this weird sounds and then normal voice experiment?

30 Rock had a good example of the whole act https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nm-ZF9AfN40

Re: It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness

#420

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…

> 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.

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