Ticcing — fast, repetitive muscle movements resulting in sudden and seemingly difficult-tocontrol body jolts or involuntary sounds. Common examples include blinking, grimacing, sudden jerks, repetitive sounds or phrases, such as repeating particular words such as ‘beans’.
Normally, tics first appear at around the age of 5 but lessen over time and most eventually disappear. The NHS says they are ‘quite common’ and affect maybe 1 in 5 children.
Post pandemic, clinicians are reporting a new kind of tic disorder — more extreme, coming on much more quickly, affecting teenagers and young adults rather than children, especially girls.
What is different is the increased numbers of young people presenting.
Evie Meg: Inflencer who has 14 million followers, lives in Durham and posts videos showing her Tourette’s symptoms. These include hitting herself repeatedly, swearing and making uncontrolled sounds.
Susceptible [suggestible?] young people are catching tics from social media influencers who expose their own symptoms online. Normally tics have a gradual onset, but these new ones appear suddenly.
Patients are typically presenting from the age of 13 to 15 with florid attacks that appear overnight. Instead of being face and eye tics [such as twitching and eye rolling] they are fullbody flailing movements and sometimes sudden-onset vocal tics, repetitive words and noises.
Teenagers may be ‘catching’ tics from social media sites such as TikTok and Instagram. Young viewers become compelled to mimic the physical and vocal convulsions they watch. It can be contagious, like yawning. If you stare at people ticcing all day, it might make symptoms worse.
British specialists report significant numbers of girls with this new ticcing disorder, repetitively uttering the word ‘beans’, which is one of Evie Meg’s common vocal tics.
Evelina London NHS Children’s Hospital have doubled referral rates for tics in the past few months, with more than 70 young girls being sent for professional help. They’re seeing only very severely affected cases — there could be much larger numbers. Similar outbreaks are reported in the US, Germany, Denmark, France and Canada.
Kirsten Müller-Vahl, professor of psychiatry at Hannover Medical School, claimed that the phenomenon should be labelled a ‘mass social media-induced illness’.
from the journal ‘Brain’
Afflicted teenagers develop similar or identical functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviours’. They all display nearly identical movements and vocalisations that are often the exact same, such as shouting ‘Bombe’, ‘Heil Hitler’, and ‘Fliegende Haie’ [flying sharks], as well as throwing pens at school and dishes at home’.
The unprecedented pressures of lockdown may be a contributory cause, while in others it may be compounding an existing vulnerability to anxiety which is overwhelming — social media may make it worse.
There may be multiple reasons for the tics emerging. There needs to be a focus on the individual. What predisposes them to tic?
• Once patients realise the cause is copying social media, they usually stop.
• Another approach is to stop worrying obsessively about their next bout.
• You might want to look at their use of social media.