Pediatricians are growing increasingly concerned about an explosion in facial and vocal tics in teenagers, especially teenage girls. According to the International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society, case numbers in Canada, the U.S., the U.K., Germany and Australia have skyrocketed over the last year. They’ve even called it a “parallel pandemic” alongside COVID-19. A U.K. journal has reported similar findings.
A significant majority of these young patients report spending a lot of time on social media; in particular, a corner of TikTok where influencers who have medical conditions that cause tics share their tics on the platform. According to researchers in the UK, the TikTok channel #tourettes had 2.5 billion views as of last February.
Doctors say that neurological scans of teenage girls with what they are calling “functional tic-like behaviors” don’t have anything like Tourette’s syndrome. The tics are real and uncontrollable, but not neurological. Rather, they are learned over a screen.
These types of phenomena, known as “social contagions” or “mass socio-genic illnesses,” have baffled psychologists for decades. A few years ago, journalist Lee Daniel Kravetz published a book called “Strange Contagion.” In it, he described a Palo Alto, California, high school where, over the span of just six months, five students committed suicide, all on separate occasions. School shootings can follow a similar pattern: The first is widely reported, and within weeks there’s another, and maybe even another. Wall Street Journal reporter Abigail Shrier described a similar phenomenon in her book, “Irreversible Damage,” about teenage girls with “sudden-onset gender dysphoria.” One identifies as trans, and suddenly, many others have too.
Like the “functional tic-like behaviors” that are now alarming researchers, social media plays a big role in each of these examples as well. Whether gender dysphoria, violent behaviors or facial tics, there’s something about us – especially our younger selves – that is so vulnerable to suggestion and pressure, even to the point of hurting ourselves. The reality of social contagions reveals something about how God made us.