Many young people diagnosed with Tourette’s after watching a YouTube channel
Howdy, I&#x27;ve been diagnosed with Tourette&#x27;s for 23 years. Including coprolalia and all the &quot;&quot;&quot;fun&quot;&quot;&quot; symptoms (narrator: they were not fun). I read the paper behind this phenomenon last week and wrote some thoughts to a friend, reproducing here.<p>From the paper:<p>&gt;  Thirdly, patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely remit while conducting favourite activities.<p>I was conclusively diagnosed back in the stone age before smart phones were a thing and the internet was still dial-up, and even I got this neverending skepticism from teachers and classmates in the run-up to my diagnosis. &quot;Hey Lars, how come your tics disappear when you&#x27;re playing video games, but they flare up when it&#x27;s time for a math test? PRETTY CONVENIENT!&quot;<p>Well, because tics are brought out by anxiety and vanish when a patient goes into a &quot;flow state,&quot; -- this is super well established.<p>On the other hand, the rest of the diagnostic criteria for this phenomena seems very reasonable to me, and I also am totally ready to believe that an induced faux tourette&#x27;s syndrome would absolutely present this way.<p>And then there&#x27;s this one:<p>&gt; Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.<p>So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these people they definitely don&#x27;t have Tourette&#x27;s, the behavior stops?<p>They also kind of bury the lede with this one:<p>&gt;  While it appears that age at onset is very similar in different countries with a preponderance of adolescents and young adults, gender distribution seems to be different: while half of our patients are male, the group of Davide Martino and Tamara Pringsheim at the University of Calgary in Canada reports a female to male ratio of about 9:1<p>I&#x27;ve always heard that the sex ratio of Tourette&#x27;s diagnosis is like 1:10 skewed towards males (looking it up it looks like it&#x27;s actually 1:4.3 favoring males). So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that&#x27;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.<p>So I don&#x27;t have the medial training to validate the clinical methodology, but from knowing what real tourette&#x27;s syndrome feels like from the inside, this seems plausible.<p>TL;DR -- these kids aren&#x27;t getting tourette&#x27;s from the internet, but it does seem like they&#x27;re experiencing a real phenomenon that they need real treatment for. The correct first step is accurately diagnosing them with whatever this new thing is. Maybe some kids are just faking, maybe some others have genuinely convinced themselves they have something going on and this manifests in weird behaviors (which qualifies as a real condition in my eyes). Believe me, you absolutely do not want to be prescribed powerful brain medications unless you really need them.