A team of psychiatrists has reported what they're calling "the first outbreak of a new type of mass sociogenic illness" that is spread by social media alone.
Published in the journal Brain, the team reports that they have seen a "remarkably high number" of young patients who had been referred to their specialist Tourettes clinic in Hannover, all displaying "nearly identical" movements and vocalizations. The patients not only had similar movements but also said a lot of the same words as each other when experiencing a "tic", regardless of the language they were speaking it in.
Words included "fries", "bomb", "flying sharks", and, most concerningly, "Heil Hitler".
Another strange aspect to the tics, and not seen usually in Tourette's patients, was that their vocalizations shifted pitch whenever they had a "vocal tic", their voice becoming much lower than usual.
Though all the patients had been diagnosed with the childhood-onset chronic combined motor and vocal tic disorder, Tourette's syndrome, before being referred to the clinic, the team noted that the tics were unusual, and unknown in Tourettes syndrome. However, they had seen the tics before: on the YouTube channel “Gewitter im Kopf” (“Thunderstorm in the Brain”).
The channel, presented by Jan Zimmermann, documents life with Tourettes syndrome.
"Judging from the videos, he indeed suffers from a mild form of Tourette syndrome," the team write in their paper. "On this YouTube channel, however, he shows a countless number...
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