The negative effects social media can have on teenagers is well established.

Recently, some doctors are worried: several young patients have indeed come for consultation after the emergence of tics in the face, closely resembling Gilles de la Tourette syndrome.

This name designates a neurological disease which results in certain sudden and uncontrolled tics.

These may be characterized by gestures (such as sudden movements or spasms) or uncontrolled sounds.

And it is this disease that the symptoms of these patients strangely resemble.

According to doctors, social networks, and especially TikTok, are no strangers to this.

The pandemic and TikTok questioned

In August, a Canadian study was conducted on this subject by neurologists at the University of Calgary. “Since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, our colleagues working in eight different Gilles de la Tourette syndrome (SGT) clinics around the world have witnessed a parallel pandemic of young people aged 12 to 25 (almost exclusively girls and women) with the rapid onset of complex motor and vocal tic-type behaviors. (…) In addition to suffering the stress and anxiety linked to Covid, these young girls were more exposed to influencers with tics or Gilles de la Tourette syndrome, which would have obviously had an impact on themselves ” , details the neurologist Davide Martino.

The doctor therefore partly explains this phenomenon by the preponderant place taken by social networks during the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular by TikTok which exploded at the same time.

And, on TikTok, several people with Gilles de la Tourette syndrome offer videos, collected under the hashtag #TicTok.

It should be noted that some young girls who developed these symptoms already suffered from anxiety disorders before and these were reinforced by viewing these videos.

But, for others, it was absolutely not the case and the tics developed suddenly.

A matter of mimicry

The researchers highlight the mass effect produced by these videos.

As explained in a July report on the correlation between the emergence of tics and TikTok: “The content on tics and Gilles de la Tourette syndrome has increased dramatically, as has the number of patients. suffering from tics in neurology clinics.

We believe this is an example of a mass sociogenic disease, which involves behaviors, emotions, or conditions that spread spontaneously in a group.

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For now, it is difficult to determine why young women are more affected than young men by this strange phenomenon, and if TikTok is the only social network to be implicated in this story.

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  • Application

  • Teenager

  • Covid 19

  • Health

  • Social networks

  • TikTok