Many young people diagnosed with Tourette’s after watching a YouTube channel

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.

[1] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2012/08/a-story-that-...

It's like fandom, basically, except with medical treatment and the sense of being an oppressed, abused minority.

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 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.

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.

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Traumagenic

https://pluralpedia.org/w/Endogenic

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.

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.

Interesting that it seems to be coming back in popularity.

I don't think it's anything but humans being humans.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/exmqzz/tulpamancy-internet-s...

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World#Balone...

Or more generally, awareness of informal logical fallacies prepares you for spotting them in the wild (and they are everywhere).

I'd also include texts such as Rudyard Kipling's If in the toolbox of defensive thinking, for its advocacy of balance and humility:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94

And pg's essay on small identity:

http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html

And thought-terminating clichés:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...

None of these are guides to having good ideas as such, but can help avoid falling into the traps of bad ideas.

https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub

A n article on a doco with good background info: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/29/carol-morley-th...

"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.”

> (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).

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.

> 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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysterical_contagion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folie_%C3%A0_deux

Keep in mind the scale of TikTok. What is the sample size where one might? One out of a school? There's still millions of them available.

I'm not saying this is true or not, but being worldwide accessible changes perspective a bit.

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.

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.

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* 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

These are trained CIA case officers and embassy personnel with measurable brain damage.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's a really big deal.

A way bigger deal than a bunch of kids trying to get attention by faking whatever.

> Mass sociogenic illness – also known as mass psychogenic illness or historically called mass hysteria – spreads like a social virus.