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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsTeen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor
Teenage girls across the globe have been showing up at doctors offices with ticsphysical jerking movements and verbal outburstssince the start of the pandemic.
Movement-disorder doctors were stumped at first. Girls with tics are rare, and these teens had an unusually high number of them, which had developed suddenly. After months of studying the patients and consulting with one another, experts at top pediatric hospitals in the U.S., Canada, Australia and the U.K. discovered that most of the girls had something in common: TikTok.
According to a spate of recent medical journal articles, doctors say the girls had been watching videos of TikTok influencers who said they had Tourette syndrome, a nervous-system disorder that causes people to make repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds.
No one has tracked these cases nationally, but pediatric movement-disorder centers across the U.S. are reporting an influx of teen girls with similar tics. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Childrens Hospital Medical Center who specializes in pediatric movement disorders and Tourette syndrome, has seen about 10 new teens with tics a month since March 2020. Before the pandemic, his clinic had seen at most one a month.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/teen-girls-are-developing-tics-doctors-say-tiktok-could-be-a-factor-11634389201?mod=e2tw
Sadly, teen girls are often involved in social contagion. This is undoubtedly just one example. We (as a society) need to be more aware of this (imo).
Throck
(2,520 posts)stressed.
Never saw this coming. I'm not a social media fan. This is a unique manifestation of stress. It's a combination of long term stress and social media. Low level physical stress. Hope the kids get proper treatment before something worse evolves.
Hav
(5,969 posts)but mimicking a specific behavior you see often, maybe hours every day, combined with a reduction of other (real life) social contact due to the pandemic to provide some form of balance, somehow makes sense.
Whether it turns out to be true or not, it's a fascinating subject to investigate further.
janterry
(4,429 posts)in teen girls. My generation had people coming into the schools to warn about eating disorders. Right after the warnings, researchers found, the behaviors spiked. Online, we know that girls were learning about it on forums and would copy the behavior.
It's more complex, to be sure. And tics are different than eating disorders.......But at the heart of it - we know that girls respond to social contagions. This appears to be one of them .