TikTok was also launched in October last year linked to the spread of tics† Doctors in the US and the UK in particular have seen a sharp rise in the number of patients with twitches that resembled Tourette’s syndrome from the beginning of 2020. This involves repetitive, involuntary statements and physical movements. However, the cause would not be Tourette’s, but a combination of underlying psychological complaints, the corona pandemic and the video app TikTok.
The number of patients with such ‘functional’ tics has risen sharply, says a neurologist at the Children’s Hospital in the American city of Cincinnati. The Wall Street Journal† One in eight children who came to the movement disorder clinic last year suffered from such tics. In 2019, before both the pandemic and the surge of TikTok, that number was below one in fifty.
Stopping watching TikTok would be effective, but many patients would now suffer from eating disorders, for example, instead of tics – reinforcing the theory of underlying psychological forces.
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No warning on videos
Via TikTok, young people would come into contact with videos of people with Tourette’s. The young people would then take over those tics, copying behavior that is partly fueled by pressure from stress and because of untreated psychological complaints.
A new study from the Australian Journal of Paediatrics and Child also points to that. Rising stress and uncertainty during the coronavirus pandemic would have increased the susceptibility to tics among already vulnerable young people, especially girls.
The number of TikTok videos with the hashtag #tourettes has increased by one billion since last fall, to 5.6 billion. That hashtag is not provided with a warning on TikTok and a link to aid agencies. Those warnings are there in films about, for example, eating disorders and suicide: TikTok users are referred to authorities for those topics.
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TikTok: ‘Correlation is not causality’
TikTok says in a response that it has reached out to experts, who warn that “correlation does not mean a causal relationship.” TikTok says its app is a way for patients with Tourette’s “to express themselves authentically, find community and fight stigma”.
The Dutch psychiatrist Louise Smallenburg recently wrote: an open letter in the newspaper Trouw† Smallenburg also points to things such as stress and corona as fueling possible copying behavior of tics on TikTok. But she warns: “However, making a distinction between Gilles de la Tourette, a tic disorder, or flirting with #tourette on the basis of a TikTok video, is not a thorough diagnosis.”
‘It makes little sense to discourage’
While TikTok discouragement seems to work under clinical conditions, Smalleburg says it’s not a good solution. “It is better to emphasize the positive influence that social media can have,” writes the psychiatrist. “For example, in anorexia nervosa, good initiatives like Proud2Bme are increasingly displacing the negative influence of ‘pro ana’ sites, which promote anorexia as a lifestyle.”
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