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.
My understanding of DID and its origins matches your. While dont have it, I did find IFS therapy useful in fixing myself and recognizing similar in other people. It makes sense (to me) that DID is an extreme on a continuum of splitting of the self.
IMHO most people flaunting their DID online, bragging about their others, claiming to be systems, are just attention seekers that are an insult to those with a real problem. The second "D" stands for disorder after all. It's like the teenagers running around claiming all sorts of odd variations on their sexuality - while being virgins. It's cool to be different, but not to falsely claim someone else's difference.
Indeed. One thing I notice is that a requirement for most, if not all, personality disorders is abuse. And when we talk about a disease, we normally know it can manifest itself in different symptoms in different people, but we still say that the person has the disease, and not that specific combination of symtpoms.
So then that got me wondering why is medicine focused on the psychological symptoms and naming their clusters, when the cause is always the same. If a person has a bacterial infection and gets a sore throat, he will get treated for the bacteria. If that same bacteria gives another person diahrrea, he will still get treated for the bacteria. And yet.... with personality disorders medicine is so focused on clusterizing the symptoms and treating those instead of going after the cause. But then again, not more than 60 years ago we still called all personality disorders hysteria and demonic possession, so I'm pretty sure we are in a similar dark age right now, we just happen to think we're more enlightened than we are (like all generations).
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…
It's even worse. People on TikTok are all diagnosing themselves with anxiety, depression, neurodiversity, OCD, ADHD, and autism out of a mix of fashion, group pressure and teenage angst.
Where are all the schizos and self-diagnosed narcissists? Me thinks the distribution is off.
I'm fine with teens doing dumb stuff as a small side effect of an overall positive impact of the internet for mental health. The internet has made it so people can openly discuss mental health problems, do research on their own, reduce stigma around mental health discussions, and meet other people struggling with similar issues. I'm on r/bipolar2 and its giant, awesome, very supportive discord.
There are proper diagnosed awareness activists with large followings on TikTok, and based on the humanity on display within TikTok, I have no doubt for every legitimate individual, there are many times that number of fakers.
As for a narcissist awareness activist, they're not wrong, they are right, and you are an arsehole and it's all your fault!
Schizophrenia on the other hand is absolutely tragic, and it often contains disordered thinking. There is/was plenty of content on YouTube but it wasn't awareness based, rather it was paranoia based.
You're always going to get scammers and fakers, but the legitimate people who are letting others in to their lives to spread awareness is overall a good thing. I would have liked to discover I wasn't alone as a teenager with undiagnosed ADHD. Treatment at that point in my life would have changed it's trajectory significantly.
Neurodiversity isn't a diagnosis by the way, just a catch-all for a group of other disorders.
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.
I have made a conscious effort to bring the language in my academic papers closer to the language I would actually speak. Part of that is writing in singular first person when that reflects reality. One of the hardest to write is "I believe" - it just feels so weak and un-sciency!
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.
As someone with DID who is a part of that community (founded two subreddits and moderated /r/DID for a time), I look at at the traumagenic vs endogenic debate as a sad case of ironic community amnesia.
One of the core features of the disorder is the dissociative amnesia that protects us from having to deal with the consequences of the trauma we faced at all times. Systems that have lower dissociative barriers who deal with more trauma symptoms can be understandably upset when they see people seemingly functioning fine, claiming the same disorder with few of the same symptoms. I personally believe that endogenics are systems that have successfully repressed their trauma to the point that they really believe they didn't face trauma, or their trauma was more of an emotional or neglectful nature and their parents matured as they developed so it was safe to totally forget. Many endos will get mad in defense if you try to tell them they have trauma (as a mod the fighting can get unexpectedly emotional), because they have to believe they don't have trauma to survive.
For everyone else in the thread talking about it like it's a curiosity or a psych fad please don't, yeah teens are picking it up and faking it, but some are actually coming to terms with it early--those are rare but they happen--most will lose interest in it after some months or years. People who fake this also aren't psychologically normal. People who claim to have created head mates are engaging in tuplamancy, which is NOT Dissociative Identity Disorder, and does not function in the same way in the slightest.
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'm glad you pointed that out. There are many related therapeutic functions.
While journaling I have a random personality picker which draws from a list of subjectively helpful archetypes. From favorite actors to inner child and future self, and more. Then I interview them or converse with them intuitively, with the aim of exploring the situation or problem from a new perspective.
Related is a theory that by taking the perspective of a given personality, we essentially become that personality (not person, but personality) for however short a time period, giving ourselves access to their tools for problem-solving...
There are references around to "Inner Council Work", including a suggested exercise where you walk some path [in your mind] to a cabin, where at a table you sit with representations of you at different ages. In this exercise, you converse with whichever age seems to have something to say.
Discussed in Stephen Buhner Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm.
I sometimes discuss things with myself, taking two sides and having a conversation in my head. I see it as something like when you discuss something with someone in a dream. Is that voice dialogue?
Yes voice dialogue is a structured engagement/analysis of this capacity. Give structured labels/names to these 2nd persons and your mind will naturally frame the world as a system of 2nd persons on top of the usual 1st/3rd person perspectives of self.
If you find this interesting I highly suggest looking at the "Big Mind" process that's been incorporated into western Zen Buddhism.
I have also seen it posed this way: Label that 2nd person as someone sitting on the other end of a sofa with you. If someone on the same sofa that way were constantly criticizing you, would you keep listening to them or paying them any notice?
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.
We have DID, and I think some YouTube systems may be real, but it's like the social popularity syndrome where you have to completely cast away every part of yourself that doesn't live up to the previously manufactured spec.
Most systems that we know who have DID are generally A. Wonderful people with B. very hard emotional struggles and C. tend to have very painful private lives. It's generally an incredibly painful disorder, in my experience and in seeing those near me. I think the very concept of having different selves in a body... This creates all sorts of deeply painful, existential crises, as well as I think lifestyle dysphoria.
So I think there's a lot of popcorn-y debate about DID YouTubers, but I think that might be like using Logan/Jake Paul's channel as an argument for/against certain parts of California culture. I think there's parts that do line up, most are grossly exaggerated or left out due to popularity reasons, and I think there's one final piece to it. I think for me, the maturation process on this issue seems to start with confusion, followed by some level of agreement/disagreement/potentially strong emotions, and that may go on for a while.
I think I'm starting to come to the point where I can see these systems as real systems, and whether they're more plural or more singular, just being able to have compassion. If a 2-5 year old is going through the emotional/developmental phases they do, oftentimes it's not wise to mock or deride them for it. Their growth phase has little do do with my wellbeing as an individual, but I can be compassionate and caring regardless.
That, or I could move to popcorn debating the intentions of people popcorn debating the intentions of DID YouTubers. At that point, I'd probably set myself up for popcorn debate too.
I don't know, hopefully that's not too discombobulated. I can say that systems that can live well with DID have to have extraordinary leadership and diplomatic skills internally. It's like having a random greyhound bus of people picked randomly all over the world and having them function as a good, moving... I don't know, for the sake of example, performative group. One can sit and be upset about D'Je'be, who seems to be intent on harassing the female members of the crew, or Sarai, who seems to have a personal need for everyone in the crew to dote on her, and so on. All of those things can happen inside of a DID system, and they generally do.
So seeing DID YouTubers, if they are a system, this is part of their journey. It may not even be a bad thing! It's just a thing. But my deepest respect to the systems who can find a way for the D'Je'be's and Sarai's of the world to both authentically be themselves and feel cared for + have their needs emotionally met, while that's being done in a way that doesn't hurt the needs and emotional desires (+needs too, I suppose!) of others in the system.
It's certainly NP hard, and in the class of NP hard that's an NP-hard for NP-hard problems, I'd contend.
Alrighty, enough of me long-form expressing myself here! Happy to answer any questions below. <3
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.
Mimetic disease? If by that you include Bad Ideas, then yes, absolutely there are techniques for defending yourself against them. See things like Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit:
I was about to jump in with the term "cognitohazard", from SCP lore. Imagine a future where you'd hear something like "Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day."
(@qntm is a terrific story writer and also brought us hatetris)
We are so, so close to that. Political parties and nation states now effectively have memetic warfare arms in the form of very advanced and soon AI augmented PR and propaganda agencies. Where there is attack there must also be defense.
Arms races tend to push innovation, which is why I now wonder about actual adversarial attacks on the brain that can bypass choice and thought entirely and even cause illness. That would be the logical endpoint, sort of like how the hydrogen bomb was the outcome of the bombing arms race. If it’s possible I predict it will be discovered in the next 25 years. We may see a video that sends people to the hospital that appears, say, right before an election and is targeted at the opposing side.
"Ninety per cent of participants in reported epidemics are female. [] Studies that try to explain mass psychogenic illnesses have uncovered a familiar pattern. They are transmitted by sight and sound, so you have to witness the events happening to be affected. They often begin very suddenly and spread rapidly. Adolescents and pre-adolescents are particularly susceptible to them. They are also more likely to escalate if the people involved know each other. Seeing a friend who you admire becoming sick is the best predictor of getting symptoms. She faints and then immediately you start to feel shaky and sick too and it starts to spread. As Simon suggested: "Anxiety itself goes up and you get more symptoms. You get breathless, you start to shake, feel nauseous and sick. But instead of saying, ‘I’m getting anxious’, you think you’re possibly getting poisoned.”
Humans lost the war against memes, if there could have been a war, millennia ago. We are now ruled by memes like "language" and "currency" and "justice".
And we like it.¹ Is it “losing a war” if we weren't fighting?
¹: To the extent we don't like it, we're still fighting. And if you're not, consider: why not? (There's a meme for you: one should fight against harmful ideas.)
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).
Nope, still got it. Even have (thankfully rare) bouts of copropraxia, so I tend to keep my distance from folks. My symptoms never really faded with adulthood so much as controlling my environment to be as low-stress as possible helps me keep my symptoms low on a day to day basis. Working from home for the past 15 years has been a huge part of that.
My grandfather was like that. He got worked up easily and the more worked up he got the worse his stutter was, so in a comical way he had to switch to singing his grievances.
It also works to switch someone else's mental state. When my wife gets really argumentative I'll switch to singing whatever I have to say and it often snaps her out of it.
> 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.)
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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.
> 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.
Tourette's can't really be suppressed consistently, it comes out eventually, and suppressing it now just makes it worse later. It is very hard to hide -- believe me, I've tried. Also, see the comment in the above thread -- one pretty strong giveaway is an entire lack of facial tics and other classic tells. I have a ton of the "famous" Tourette's symptoms -- coprolalia, echolalia, palilalia, even a small touch of the dreaded copropraxia, not to mention at times extremely exaggerated arm movements (beating my chest like a gorilla is the most common). However, my first tics, and which continue as a constant background noise, are small facial grimaces, nose wrinkles, blinks, making tiny grunts, etc. It is extremely anomalous to see someone present with "Tourette's" and not have any of those low level tics, but all the "fancy" ones.
> 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.)
I'm more than willing to keep an open mind, but look at the effect size.
Swinging from 1:4.3 to 9:1 is a change of 38X. That is RIDICULOUSLY huge. I'm happy to postulate that women are undiagnosed to some degree, but a swing of that size, that is that sudden, and which lines up so closely with a specific group and a specific female influencer, based primarily on observed novel physical symptoms, charitably speaking at least merits a little scrutiny, wouldn't you think? A mere 1.5X change would be enormous, 38X is astronomical.
> Swinging from 1:4.3 to 9:1 is a change of 38X. That is RIDICULOUSLY huge.
Those numbers would not be as bad if one postulates that there's a subset of men who also have the right factors to lead to underdiagnosis, such that the right influencer with a male audience would make men's numbers shoot up as well; and that such a mens' influencer just happened to have not shown up yet.
> It is extremely anomalous to see someone present with "Tourette's" and not have any of those low level tics, but all the "fancy" ones.
Is it possible that there is an undiscovered "diagnostic spectrum" on which Tourettes is the endpoint? Like how, at some point, we knew low-functioning autism was a thing, but only later figured out that high-functioning autism (e.g. Asperger's) was a thing?
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(That being said, I do think I agree with you that this probably isn't Tourettes of any kind; see the postscript in my previous comment. I just like to ask these Devil's Advocate kind of questions to see where they go, in case there's interesting science down one of these unwalked paths.)
Yeah, so the thing is we don't actually know the underlying cause of Tourette's. It's just a syndrome -- a specific pattern of symptoms you draw a circle around and label it "Tourette's syndrome." Therefore, what is and is not Tourette's is fairly tautological. If you have these symptoms according to this pattern, you have it. If you don't, you don't. It's entirely plausible that Tourette's syndrome is caused by multiple different underlying pathologies, which actually wouldn't be super implausible given the wildly different ways in which different patients with similar symptoms respond to the same medications.
But my point is, the diagnostic criteria are pretty clear, and (most of) these kids aren't matching them. And any time you see a whopping big effect size like that your skepticism lights need to go off. Either you just discovered the find of the century, or you have a basic measurement error. In either case the proper course of action is to subject it to more scrutiny.
I have a feeling that what the people who are "diagnosing themselves with Tourettes" are really trying to say here, then (i.e. "what they'd say if they were all trained psychiatrists"), isn't that they think they have exactly the Tourette Syndrome symptom-cluster; but rather that they think they may have a lesser form of some particular as-yet-unknown pathology that, in its full extent, would be an etiology underlying the syndrome of Tourettes; and that this is causing a cluster of symptoms for them that is similar-but-not-identical to the Tourette Syndrome symptom-cluster — similar-enough that there's nothing really better to describe it by than by comparison to Tourette Syndrome. (Though certainly doctors would come up with a unique name for it in the DSM-VI, if it turned out to not be induced mass Munchhausen's.)
I don't necessarily disagree; I went undiagnosed with Tourette's as a kid while presenting symptoms for a good five years and I knew something was going on with me but I had no idea what it could be.
Also, a good ~10 years after my tourette's diagnosis I was further diagnosed with cataplectic narcolepsy. I knew I had always had these weird symptoms (going spontaneously limp) that weren't well described by Tourette's, but I was grasping at straws to figure out what it was, and trying to self-diagnose I took myself down all sorts of blind alleys convincing myself I had this or that. Once I was able to get a conclusive diagnosis and actually helpful treatment, my narcolepsy symptoms got very well controlled, and then with that stressor off my back my tourette's symptoms finally became manageable without medication. All the symptoms are still "there" but knowing what I actually have -- and what I don't have -- was crucial to getting the right treatment.
> I knew I had always had these weird symptoms (going spontaneously limp) that weren't well described by Tourette's
I wonder how many people who have non-manageable Tourette’s have an undiagnosed comorbidity like this.
Also, your specific case is interesting, because a comorbidity of a type of narcolepsy points more generally in the direction of an interesting cluster of sleep-related “parts of the brain’s sleep motor-inhibition filter turn on while others remain off” conditions, e.g. sleep-walking, sleep paralysis, etc. that — if it turns out a lot of other Tourette’s sufferers had [undiagnosed] comorbidities in this cluster — could potentially be a good fit for “recontextualizing” Tourette’s, or perhaps even finding a true etiology for it. Has anyone looked for these sorts of links, and/or studied Tourette’s from a sleep-neurology perspective?
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.
> Although some patients indeed suffered in addition from mild Tourette syndrome, for all newly
emerged symptoms, it could be clearly ruled out that they were tics for several reasons:
(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.
Thus, worsening of pre-existing Tourette syndrome, for example due to COVID-19 pandemic
as suggested elsewhere 4,5, can be clearly ruled out in our patients.
I've been diagnosed with Tourette's for 23 years and the above is not what I would describe as "universally mimicking a specific symptom set precisely"
That doesn't mean this kids aren't dealing with something real, but it means it's unlikely to be Tourette's. The lack of low-level background tics (blinks, throat clearing, facial grimaces) is a huge tell.
The worst case scenario here is they get misdiagnosed with Tourette's and start treatment that a) won't help them and b) will give them terrible side effects. I've been through the roulette wheel of powerful brain meds, you do not want to go down that road if you don't have to.
Humans are constantly unconsciously mimicking patterns of behavior off each other. This happens even with adults, but more so at early ages (presumably because there are fewer established patterns).
It doesn’t apply to long explicit patterns like a school play, but happens with pieces of behavior that are much shorter in a context-specific way: unless you observe a suitable situation, you wouldn’t know A unconsciously mimics B in behavior X. Additionally, the role of B in A’s life can make behavior mimicry strongly intrinsically motivated, which is a rare chance with a school play.
The notion that little kids can mimic this symptom set with coordinated precision and not look like a bunch of little kids poorly trying to do the same - this seems unrealistic.
Try paying attention to how a teenage person unconsciously mimics small components of the behavior of a parent or a person they (again, possibly unconsciously) consider of importance. Things like a bad habit, such as smoking (including the finer mechanical details of the process); accent/[mis]pronunciations; usage of idiomatic words or phrases; motions when driving a car; etc. tend to look/sound extremely natural.
I rarely catch myself mirroring the speech impediment of the person I'm talking to. I even managed to get into trouble by offending a colleague. I didn't mean to!
>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.
In middle school I used to look at what drugs were prescribed for what mental illness, then read the DSM–4 for the symptoms, book an appointment for a specialist so I could get those drugs.
Faking mental illness is extremely easy and extremely enjoyable.
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
This has also been observed by the author of The Inner Game of Tennis. In a talk by Alan Kay, Alan Kay shows a clip in where the author of that book (whose name I do not remember) was challenged by some TV team to teach tennis to some lady who had never been physically active at any level. They showed him doing it, and then he explained to the TV team how he did it. IIRC, one thing he did was that, while distracting the woman with conversation, he did the correct movement with a racket, and made sure she saw him. Then he asked her to perform some very simple actions with a racket, and she unconsciously copied his movement form more or less perfectly.
Related: Estimates of 20 Mbits/sec of visual bandwidth, versus 20 bits/sec of [attention?]. Or compare the non-verbal synchrony of a good pair in conversation, versus a written transcript.
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
That actually sounds interesting. I've had breakdowns in public, crying and yelling, I've stood on a bridge trying to jump, I've been drunk off my ass stumbling, been talking to myself and kinda barking at strangers, sleeping on benches and not once has anyone talked to or approached me. Which is normal, who in their right mind would do that. Just kinda paints a different picture of humanity in your head than someone who's been helped.
I've had various tics since adolescence, but your explanation helped me realize how minor they have been compared to some people since I can't relate to most of your struggles. Though it also reminds me how much of mental health is a gradient, and not a on/off switch.
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.
I have been following this topic closely and am in that community.
No I have not read the book, but if it mirrors your short summary, I stand by my assertion.
Thank for the book recommend, I’ll take a gander.
"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)
But, uh, any evidence that that's real? We should be careful with Gödel's results here; the Gödelian incompleteness of the human mind is that a human cannot consistently believe that everything they believe is true. It has nothing to do with sanity and perception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxastic_logic
I think if you take these parables literally, there probably isn't a single input that will reliably cause the mind to self-destruct, but they are a cautionary warning. The internet gives plenty of evidence to support the theory that memetic hazards (1) exist, (2) are more transmissible than widely believed and (3) repeated exposure will cause cognitive malfunction.
To share specific examples here would be irresponsible. But qualitatively speaking, one could argue that viral media are mild forms of memetic hazard propelling irrational, conspiratorial, or even extremist behavior in the real world. While the internet has many positive effects on our society, regardless of your political orientation, I think most would agree that instant, unfettered access to information can also lead to dysfunctional side-effects.
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.
That said, kids also don't know how to use computers anymore. Kids growing up right now, many of them don't know how to operate a desktop computer and some of them may never touch anything that isn't a walled garden mobile device / tablet. For example, pretty much all millennials understand the difference between software running locally on their device and the "backend" components running on a server somewhere (and that something could be completely client-side without a server). Zoomers have a hard time understanding this distinction and ask questions like "how is this program opening without internet?" (I would know, I mentor 100s of them as a coding bootcamp mentor).
My mother was a special Ed teacher for years. Specifically for kids with emotional/personality disorders. She always dreaded parent teacher conferences because the parents were bigger, louder versions of her disordered kids. But despite what you might think, it's less about the kids being raised wrong and more about genetics. Bad parenting is usually a result of the same behavior problems afflicting the kids.
It is the parents responsibility and they fail often.
My SO works in a kindergarden and has to attempt to fix this. Luckily the fact that parents now have to leave their kids there for most of their wake hours does help. At least in good kindergardens. You can ask around, you'll see the problems that new media, as a tool for parents to keep their kids off their hands causes everywhere. Those ticks are just the peak of the ice berg here because there is no way around recognising the tool. The other damage is more subtle. We'll be faced with generations of media zombies and it's kinda frightening.
I've seen a kid once left alone with a tablet in the waiting room while they've been visiting the doctor. I've been passing by and usually I say "hi" or something like that to the waiting patients but this kid didn't even blink. I've watched it over half an hour and it didn't move at all. Than the parent came out, said no word, grabbed the kid, the kid the tablet without it's eyes from it and they just floated out.
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.
This is a direct consequence of society giving aid to autistic people while reducing stigma, it is practically obvious that more people are going to consequently try and fit that label.
What we see is this phenomena where autistic people today have less actual impairments, who might even take offense to the idea that they are impaired, but with more tiktok videos of "stimming" and flapping their hands on YouTube. An emphasis on the preformative over the substantive. There has even been a counter-backlash in this community that too much funding is going towards people with few impairments, and too little funding is going for people so disabled they're completely unable to be independent.
> with more tiktok videos of "stimming" and flapping their hands on YouTube.
I do wonder why people view this as offensive or obviously fake though.
I am a pretty well-adjusted adult who has not been formally diagnosed with anything, and I still "flap hands" when I am in private/can hide it from others. It's hardly performative.
I think what really strikes me is that the most common form of "stimming" I've seen in the wild is the leg bounce. I've seen various other kinds of "stims" from autistic people from verbal, to tapping their fingers, to playing with a pen, to using an actual toy, to squirming around a bit, to standing on their tiptoes. You also mentioned that you flap hands in private, that's the other thing, traditionally people have had this desire to "blend in" even when they DO flap their hands and avoid doing so.
However if you go onto tiktok, you primarily are going to see the stim that everybody knows that real autistic people™ have. There is even some far-left advocacy within this community about having "loud hands", and even said activists have expressed discomfort with "staged stimming"
It's just a very bizarre thing that when you're on tiktok, people desire to share what makes them look the most autistic. The other genre is incredibly attractive women getting indignant about people believing they are not autistic because they are incredibly attractive women. I get this sort of twilight zone vibe going into autism tiktok where everything seems slightly wrong.
> There is even some far-left advocacy within this community about having "loud hands", and even said activists have expressed discomfort with "staged stimming"
I’m not trying to be contentious or combative, but what makes these people/trends far-left?
(Absolutely agree about how people dismiss «attractive» women as not possibly being autistic tho, it’s both sad and infuriating)
Well regarding the specific person I cited they identify as "radical left" in their FAQ and they're probably the most prominent activist I can think of that makes this sort of advocacy.
I don't mean to say all people who day people should stim openly are exactly far left. It's pretty mainstream especially in health/education nowadays to not suppress stimming so long as it's not unduly disruptive or harmful (i.e. stimming by screaming, smashing head into wall), as it's thought to be harmful for the suppressor.
I would say that if somebody is stimming as a political statement or identity I'm almost invariably going to assume they're pretty left of center, because they're making an identity out of nonconformism and because of blog posts from radical leftists like the above.
The first link was more straightup advocacy of stimming, the second is more of a reasoned followup after backlash to the first post 6 years earlier including the phenomenon of performative stimming. I'll jump to the blurb I was referencing in the 2nd link because the posts are quite long:
"But sometimes I have also seen activists engaged in stimming that was not authentic — stimming deliberately used to get attention or to make a statement. I’m not sure if this staged stimming is good and true: I’m not even sure if it could properly be called “stimming” (if stimming becomes divorced from its joy, its delicious rush, its natural high, is it still stimming?). And when we aren’t stimming for joy, because our bodies want and need it, because it is physically releasing us from neurotypical oppression (the rule of quiet hands), then who or what are we stimming for?"
Essentially making the point that stimming for the approval of others is still surrendering to ableism because you're performing for other people's acceptance when you should just be accepted. It's just that instead of trying to look more normal than you are, you try to look more different than you are.
This is to me what gets at the heart of what bothers me about TikTok. It seems to create pressure on autistic people to confirm to stereotypes of autistic people.
> This is to me what gets at the heart of what bothers me about TikTok. It seems to create pressure on autistic people to confirm to stereotypes of autistic people.
To me, this is a deeper problem with identity politics itself.
When group identities are recognized over individuals, there is pressure is to display group identity, regardless of whether that is autistism, blackness, queerness, etc.
TikTok is a Petri dish that amplifies the phenomenon.
Depends on execution, in situations where I'm stimming, it'd never occur to me to turn on a camera. It's certainly not something that feels good or natural when forcing myself to do it.
That said, even if hundreds of thousands of people upload videos indicating they are autistic that seems in line with the statistics on the matter.
I could be convinced stimming videos are fake, but a high number of young people with ASD is consistent with the data.
Stimming isn't performative, it's performs an important role in sensory regulation. Of course, that doesn't mean that there aren't kids who are acting out autism on TikTok. There probably are. But Autism is still greatly under-diagnosed, and I think you should also take into account how many people might be able to put a useful label on something that they'd previously just considered a personal quirk.
I think is is with something like autism that likely represents an underlying cognitive difference. It allows you to find other people like yourself, and calibrate your own experiences. To understand why you react to things in the way that you do. Otherwise you could easily end up going through life receiving advice and guidance that is completely inappropriate for you because it's aimed at an average that you diverge from significantly.
> Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
What a weird way to try to tie this to modern politics. You do realize that the movie "Sybil" had a similar effect (people copying a mental condition) in 1976, predating any kind of acceptance movement?
>Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
Oooh, I think I'm going to steal that.
To be fair, maybe it's just another mechanism for culture transfer. Hours per day on a phone filled with highly evolved addiction algorithms are proving their value, God knows what the future will bring.
If kids never absorbed silly things, we'd never have had bellbottoms.
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I know I've inherited personality quirks, tics, and ways of speaking from notable figures because either I thought they were funny or simply because their tics and catch phrases have a quality much like that of an "earworm". Mimicry certainly doesn't have to indicate a psychological condition beyond perhaps having a bad habit, which everyone has every now and then. The internet is just amplifying some of these inate human characteristics at the same time that we have gotten really good at pathologizing everything and labeling ourselves.
meme: (n) an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be considered to be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means, especially imitation
> 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 depends on what you mean by mentally unwell. If mentally unwell means that they are unhappy, a danger to themselves or others, or having difficulty functioning in the world in an acceptable way - then being attention-seeking to that degree is also clearly being mentally unwell.
If mentally unwell means that there's some physical problem with their brains, then very few people who are mentally well are provably mentally unwell. I would prioritize for help a malingering Tourette's sufferer whose life is falling apart because of that over an "authentic" Tourette's sufferer who has found strategies to cope with the disease in their daily life.
The question shouldn't be to determine if they're really mentally unwell, but to determine whether their illness springs from the same causes that treatments that assume this is a physical problem are effective on, or from different causes (e.g. lack of/need for attention) which might yield to different treatment.
I had a classmate in elementary that faints almost everyday when the teacher is not around and gets well very fast once a teacher is called or get nears. We are all just kids and we thought she was very unwell. She likes being attended to we didn't knew it back then.
Maybe doing a cross cultural study would help determine if it’s mimicry (a social phenomenon) or there is something else by going to cultures that are different from ours and seeing if some of their kids get affected. Indonesia, Congo, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc.
Let me mimic mental disorder so I can be a punchline to weekly idiot doing stupid things mashup videos? or worse pr0n mashups like Sweet Anita? I dont see it.
> 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?
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.
I don't know who you're talking to or what exactly you're referring to. If you read the article, phenomena is neither "faking it" nor is it "really Tourettes syndrome". IE, mass sociogenic illness is not "fake" but a result of humans being social organisms.
Edit: And no one in the discussion I can see is expressing unconcern.
This is like how people conflate psychosomatic effects as somehow ‘fake’, which they certainly aren’t. Your brain controls a lot and can cause a lot of very real not fake damage.
I don't think 'faking' is the right word here, as in kids conscientiously trying to mislead others by practising tics, calculating the performance etc..
But from the study it seems that it's not Tourettes either.
The Placebo Effect is very real as well, and people weren't faking being sick in the first place, it's just that we're not as 'consciously in charge' as we might think.
My armchair hunch that this is real phenom, and that we are much, much more impressionable than we imagine, and that so many of our attitudes, behaviours and ideas are grafted onto us as opposed to being choices we make.
As noted when doctor's diagnosed kids as 'not having Tourettes', for many, the symptoms just disappeared - as though a more rational authoritative voice overcame some 'inner constructed belief'.
I think this reaches into more than just behaviours, but all those complicated issues of 'identity' as well.
It's an amazing thing it would be very fun to study.
You sound like you have some fun opinions. This has been happening for a long time, you just hear about the more extreme cases more readily, because, internet.
Any time someone is pontificating about the sudden rapid downfall of society it should peg your BS meter. People are basically the same as they've always been. We do become familiar with the behaviours of some of those people to a much deeper degree now than we might have had the opportunity to do before.
I won’t really get into it, but I at this exact moment have three separate little cousins who right now are all trans. They say so. Their parents say so. Everyone is dead set locked in on it.
It’s been… causing rifts in the family. I don’t know anything about anything, but statistics tell me something isn’t exactly lining up.
Clearly some are in a phase, but FFS don’t say that to the parents!
Which begs the question, what should one do if they genuinely desire social justice and don't want to play games? It sometimes sounds as if the nay-sayers think this is an impossibility.
That prognosis strikes me as odd since so much social change occurs form organizing, communicating, writing and debating. All activities that benefit tremendously - incomparably! - from the internet.
The problem in my opinion is that some of this social change erodes the very foundation of society and us as a species. I'm not talking about who rules or by what means we select them by but rather things that even define us as a species, what's the norm for humankind is under constant attack with the excuse of inclusiveness.
If find yourself shaking your fist at something the kids are doing and pontificating about how its the moral downfall of the species you should probably stop to consider whether you might have just gotten old. I'm sure every generation that's ever existed could have typed that post with a few madlibs and it all turned out fine.
"Social Justice Warrior" is emphasize on "Warrior". They are people who want to fight and harass others, and figured that the best way to get lots of people to harass and fight without many consequences is to fight for social justice. Their goal isn't social justice, rather their goal is to make lots of enemies which hurts the cause of social justice.
But of course social justice is a great thing, but social justice WARRIOR isn't.
In the 70's, many young people behaved in incredibly odd and harmful ways after seeing similar behaviors on TV. it was called "Disco".
Fortunately, after a few years, the symptoms faded and the victims took up more socially useful behaviors, like snorting cocaine and creating stock market scams.
The algorithm promotes what you want to see. If you're not interested in silly or stupid things, you can nudge the algorithm towards content you find engaging. It's kinda "one-size-fits-all", but yeah, the average user is looking for entertainment you'd probably classify as 'silly'.
Probably not. Don’t know much about TikTok, but if I click a link on YouTube, barely watching the video, my recommendations will be spammed with similar filth forever - and it seems to be pushing certain channels or types of videos.
Educated guess, as I’ve no idea how these things work - videos I’m more likely to share will be recommended, bringing controversial content to the top
People have been saying the same thing about TV since its inception, and that has a larger scale than the internet. So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a documentary.
hey President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho of Idiocracy at least tried to hire the best minds available and took their advice. that is far and away better than we have had for a long time
I think there's also an effect that when some trend is new, it seems overwhelming, but people tend to get used to it and cultivate a natural defense to whatever new bullshit came around, and push against it. So there's some kind of societal immune response to it. Like waves of the ocean that came suddenly but slowly recede. At least that's my hope with some of the stuff going on nowadays - but part of it will probably always be around.
The only group in the US with a lower birthrate than white people are asians, as a group, though with a lot of variance by subgroup.
Worldwide, white people are at the bottom, excepting China due to the one child policy. Even in China, minority groups in rural locations were allowed more than one.
There are dozens of better choices to use for the sake of comparison if you want to say that you find the majority of people to be far beneath your brilliance and virtue.
The decay of civilization in idiocracy was directly and exclusively due to two things:
- intelligence is genetic
- smart people bred themselves out of the gene pool
I have literally heard people be chastised when they tell others they chose not to have kids, because have you seen idiocracy?
The basic premise of the movie is so fundamentally flawed it is beyond offensive.
That's a problem with social networks at large. At least before the stupid or degenerate were ashamed of themselves. Now everybody can find a circus of freaks to belong to, which makes them believe their behaviour to be appropriate.
No, just unmoderated social networks. One of the longest-running types of “social network” (going for centuries now!) is the academic journal—but those have the explicit goal of sanity cross-checking anything submitted to them before allowing it in, so they result in something else being promoted.
(I don’t want to say it's “good, rational discourse” that journals promote, because that doesn’t seem to be exactly what comes out of journals; they do have their own incentive structures that bias "the conversation" in specific directions, even besides the ones that are extrinsically imposed upon them by academic hierarchy.)
I think it’s a matter of time before the copy-cat stuff is going to get us one of those weird Japanese suicide pacts. They are already starting with the new crate challenge (which is dangerous as fuck).
I saw kids doing this on concrete recently. On concrete.
Tiktok is literally an at-scale sorority/fraternity, which means people are taking part in an at-scale hazing ritual - to fit in. The problem with this is the same problem that arises if you are 20 and watch Sesame Street every day still. There’s a time and place for this behavior and we are not setting any cut offs for when it’s time to stop the nonsense.
People already died from planking. And tide pods. People have been ongoingly dying from drinking bleach. People dying due to social trends isn't new though: perhaps more notable is that it's easier to know it's happening in an age of instant global communication, and since we all have quick and easy access to all the knowledge needed to avoid these entirely preventable outcomes.
The milk crate challenge on concrete is hardly different to any other dangerous behavior engaged in by (principally) young men: i.e. what's the difference really between this and say, street racing? Which has been a thing pretty much since car's became affordable to 20 year olds.
There is a voyeurism here. At risk of entering extreme levels of armchair psychology, it’s the bystander effect at scale.
You are free to Google milk-crate challenge death and see for yourself (how guilty am I for the thing that I condemn). They fall on their necks.
I certainly don’t have the answer, but this can’t be normalized, and sadly I think we are just at the beginning.
Kids abusing the medical system, disrespecting a disease, walking on shaky crates six feet off the ground. It’s hard for me to say it’s kids being kids, or the weak in natural selection being handled. Something is up.
People are not robots. Horrible mishabs happen. But 50 years ago, nobody was doing a global list of these. They ended up being a village story.
We need to educate the young to make sensible decisions. It doesnt really matter if TikTok, FB, the foobar challenge, or something else is the current culprit. The world is full of crazy things. People need to navigate that anyway.
Have you seen LinkedIn recently? It's all of the Facebook garbage just moved to a new home. Most of the content on there has little to nothing to do with the professional world.
It is convenient to categorize things into as few buckets as possible, but most things in nature (and human behavior) is on a continuous distribution. Yes, some are bimodal distributions, but that 5% fall in between humps is unsurprising to me.
So what? As long as they don’t start taking hormones or cut off their genitals, I’d say let them be! They’ll grow out of it, like we grew out of being emo.
Well in this story children were “cured” of their Tourette’s when they were correctly diagnosed and told it was fake.
However, the only acceptable treatment for trans-presenting children is 100% acceptance and affirmation, including a continuing push for puberty-stopping medication.
Given that, then I say there is a risk of harm. If some of those children aren’t trans, but they are being told they are and are given hormones, who knows what damage will happen to them.
I’m not an expert in this but I can see you’re mixing up a few things
> However, the only acceptable treatment for trans-presenting children is 100% acceptance and affirmation
This is a bit reductive isn’t it? You can take them at their word while observing and interrogating in an age-appropriate way. If that means others need to treat the kids as if they’re 100% trans while their guardians work on it then so be it
> including a continuing push for puberty-stopping medication.
Only relevant when puberty is about to begin and kids need more time to solidify their identity
> If some of those children aren’t trans, but they are being told they are and are given hormones
Kids don’t get hormones. At the most extreme they get puberty blockers, which are generally safe and given to many other people in many other contexts for many other reasons
No its not, perhaps I can clarify and say the only socially accepted treatment is affirmation. Please, feel free to presnent one case in the past 5 years where a doctor has attempted to explore if a child is really trans and not been harassed?
> Kids don’t get hormones. At the most extreme they get puberty blockers
Puberty blockers are hormones. And just because a drug is safe in one context for one group of patients, doesn't mean its "safe" - ivermectin is a safe anti-parasitic drug for humans, but is dangerous for people with COVID.
I hope and believe we will see an ever-growing number of people rejecting traditional gender roles because we are developing new ways to think about gender that give people a way "out". That doesn't mean they are mentally ill in any meaningful sense.
It would probably be upvoted if it was astroturfing. Hacker News doesn't have a huge commentariat, I think it's just a few people with an axe to grind.
Why would posting evidence of a massive increase in people declaring themselves trans be evidence of a conspiracy versus, say - an example of an on-topic relevant comment?
On its own perhaps it wouldn’t be. It would be a stretch and not an exact equivalency. But I could, perhaps, see someone using it as an example. But considering how political it is, and how many other examples you could find to use I can’t help but think: Maybe the half a dozen comments throughout the thread, trying to make the two situations seem the same, aren’t exactly in good faith.
It was an obvious-enough thought to me that I searched the page to see if anyone had made the comparison. I was not, of course, paid or otherwise influenced to do so.
I find it deeply concerning that even considering a parallel betweem the situations is deemed "anti-trans".
This hits close to home because there's a reasonable likelihood I would have attempted a transition if the social climate were like this when I was a teen. How I am now as an adult I am happy with my sex, and I'm not sure how that would have went.
Obviously there's no way to know, but I'm primarily concerned with how easy and how common it is to shut down discussion surrounding the issue. Especially with how volatile teens are, and how high the suicide rates are for these demographics, I feel like these issues deserve to be explored. Should all this really be hidden behind "show dead"?
I happen to have a very stigmatized mental health issue with an absurd suicide rate (5-10%?), and I'm happy to come across people discussing it, even if a few of them regard everyone afflicted with it as incorrigible.
Back to the topic, I also went through a phase of convincing myself I had DID/schizophrenia, and did expend my mom's and a doctor's time with it, then just clammed up.
In my case one experience was a lot more "real" than the other; I strongly felt closer to another gender, it was never about attention or identity, it was just a mild internal struggle. On the other hand I might have latched onto being severely neuroatypical purely for it seeming "cool", wanting it to be part of my identity, as well as garnering attention from my parent.
Now that I'm older, I'm blessed to be happy with my body and my sex/gender, despite the stronger feelings I had when I was younger. That came with time and perhaps from landing in a loving relationship. Of course not everyone will be this fortunate, but I do worry about people like me who might be directly or indirectly encouraged to make drastic changes they might not be ready to make.
I also of course recognize that severe mental disorders can be very impairing, and aren't something to wear as fashion. (However I would be lying if I said I didn't think schizophrenia is a beautiful form of suffering.)
In conclusion,
I guess I think transgenderism is rarely cut and dry--despite people often seemingly treating it that way--and I can't speak from experience but I assume fashion sometimes plays a role.
I find it a bit absurd to label that notion as anti-trans, so long as it isn't accusing an individual or writing-off the entire phenomenon.
Even when fashion does play a role, does it invalidate anything? I reckon it would just muddy the already-muddy water that is identity. It's up to individuals to sort through it if they choose to.
There are a surprisingly high number of hateful people on HN. The community is still worth it, but man it's tiring to wade through the ignorance sometimes.
That's sort of an arbitrary distinction. Both are abnormal presentations that cause significant problems in day-to-day life and consequently have clinics set up to treat the issue. Whether the issue is voluntary for a particular patient is also similarly important in assessing an appropriate treatment modality.
Putting the obvious political agenda aside, I would argue teenage girls faking tourettes is pretty much the same phenomenon as teenage girls faking gender dysphoria. It's not helpful to pretend that faking tragic mental conditions isn't a phenomenon among teenagers.
"Both are abnormal presentations that cause significant problems in day-to-day life"
The same was one-hundred percent true about homosexuality for nearly all of human history in most societies. If the "day-to-day problems" are because other people are mindlessly hateful and intolerant, who exactly has the mental health issue? In terms of homosexuality, we now largely agree it is the bigots, not the queers, who have the problem.
Many groups are social pariahs, none have a suicide rate close to the transgender community. Dysphoria by itself is clearly horrible to deal with, that's why people are willing to have double mastectomies in the pursuit of easing their mental pain. A vaginoplasty is incredibly invasive and isn't going to have a meaningful impact on day-to-day social judgement. I really don't buy the claim that it's purely or even primarily about acceptance.
I would also point out that the the trans community themselves are advocating for greater access to treatment, not less. It's really not the same as the gay rights movement. Unlike gay people, treatment is literally one of their objectives.
Gender dysphoria is feeling uncomfortable in your gender-at-birth. Therefore, transitioning or rejecting the concept of the gender isn't the disease — it's a cure for the disease.
Again, the dysphoria is caused by not feeling comfortable with your gender. Trans people solve that by transitioning. That's why you don't see trans people regretting it or trying to undo it in any significant amount. Once they've transitioned, they feel comfortable with their gender, therefore problem solved.
Of course, that transition also usually leads to other types of discomforts caused by other people not respecting their decision, but hey, it's not trans people's fault other people are dickheads.
It could just be the uncanny valley. Like it or not, we’re used to looking at other people as being either male or female and many trans people don’t make good versions of what they wish to present as. There’s also some men who enjoy presenting as female as a sexual fetish which can cause problems in locker rooms and other female only spaces.
Oh I don't mean transition as in sex-reassignment-surgery-exclusively. Sometimes it's as simple as changing clothes and growing/cutting/painting your nails and hair.
This has more to do with the growing acceptance of being transgender rather with there suddenly being more transgender individuals. Its a very common pattern to see in healthcare as acceptance grows around a health related issue.
An example would be autism. It had the same kind of "sudden growth" back in the 1980s when diagnosis became more accepted and practiced. But there didnt suddenly exist more autistic people than before. Just more people who got it diagnosed and help from their doctors.
Imagine if the catholic church approved stigmata as a way of showing one's devotion. I suspect the number of people suddenly getting scars on their hands would sky rocket.
Doubt any of them would actually be channeling Jesus.
There are very few conditions that are real and they have easily detectable and unambiguous physical signs, e.g. epilepsy.
The rest of them are ways for people to show distress, either positive or negative. The positive side would be stigmata 'look at me and how holy I am' the negative would be witches 'look at me and how unholy I am.
Transgenderism moved from the negative distress to the positive distress pile in less than 5 years last decade and people are having a hell of a time dealing with it.
The 'acceptance' of deviancy isn't helping, it's just pushing people to become more extreme in what they do to show their dislike of current society.
Sex reassignment surgery isn't a requirement for being trans. That's not what skyrocketed in the UK either, what skyrocketed are hormone treatments and puberty blockers, both of which will not make your penis disappear one day.
Also most of them are female-to-male, not the other way around.
Mass sociogenic illness. This seems to describe a good deal of the mass hysteria during this pandemic (behavioral psychology has been again weaponized against the populace). Truly freaky stuff like open hostility toward the unvaxxed in the media, even wishing them death. Psychotic.
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...