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benny  1yr ago (academic.oup.com)   Edited 1yr ago   2898 thread views

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

academic.oup.com

In Germany, the current outbreak of mass social media-induced illness is initiated by a ‘virtual’ index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.

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patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.

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Okay, I'll try:

90% certainty: For as long as this trend continues, the number of official diagnoses of anything Tourette's-related that officially deem the involved symptoms to be caused by a sociogenic component, social contagion, social media etc. will not rise above 50% even solely amongst cases that don't fit traditional diagnostic criteria. They may get a diagnosis of "Tourette's-like functional movement disorder" or whatever instead of the real deal from more cautious docs but they won't get "You're larping this because of social media." The vast majority of providers won't touch that because why give your customer what they explicitly don't want?

To be clear I think it's likely that the actual hard definition of Tourette's will remain mostly unchanged (and articles like the OP's will continue to bemoan the conflation of fully involuntary tics with their more voluntary counterparts), but the actual practical definition in the field will become much more porous based on consumer demand. Diagnostic criteria, like all words on paper, only matter if they're followed. So I wouldn't expect to see the words on the paper describing Tourette's change necessarily, but I would expect to see it become more and more normalized for people who don't exactly fit those words to nevertheless be deemed as defined by them regardless (maybe that's not changing the definition per se, depends on your point of view about ontology).

Do doctors in Germany have "customers"?

I'm assuming they're subjected to patient evaluation to some degree. Surely people in Germany can at least indicate their wish to no longer see a particular doctor, public healthcare or not.

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