A Disorder Similar To Tourette Syndrome That Is ‘Contagious’ Through Social Networks

Psychiatrists at the University of Hannover have discovered a new disorder that has great similarities with Tourette syndrome , a disorder in which the person suffering from it cannot avoid performing certain actions or gestures. or uttering expressions or words, sometimes of an obscene nature, that find their means of propagation on social networks .

It is about the disorder induced by social networks (MSMI, for its acronym in English), with which professionals have found after comparing the new cases diagnosed with Tourette with the symptoms that the German youtuber Jan Zimmermann presents in his videos, collects Gizmodo .

“All the patients had almost identical movements and vocalizations that not only resembled Jan Zimmermann’s symptoms, but were in part exactly the same”, among them, shouting certain expressions such as “French fries”, “Heil Hitler” or “You are ugly “, and behaviors such as throwing pens, throwing plates or crushing eggs, they explain in the article published in Oxford Academic .

In this sense, they point out that this reproduction of expressions and actions is accompanied by the influencer’s own tonality as well as a name with which they refer to these manifestations, as Zimmermann does. They have also found that they used the disorder to avoid doing “unpleasant tasks” but “the symptoms temporarily subside completely” when they did their “favorite activities . ”

To conclude, they have explained that the gestures that patients suffered did not respond to ‘tics’ since they began suddenly, the “simple movements” and “noises”, two of the main symptoms of Tourette syndrome, remained “in a in the background or completely absent “and” complex and stereotyped “actions were performed, in addition to the fact that the number of gestures was” much higher than the typical number of tics “.

Thus, psychiatrists have determined that the youtuber is one of the “index cases” of this disorder, since those affected were in “indirect contact” with him through his videos, which in this case served as a channel of “extension of our eyes and ears “and replaced” the need to be in direct visual or verbal contact for contagion. ”

Zimmermann has not been the only one, as there are also cases in the United Kingdom , Canada , Denmark , the United States and France , where other content creators from platforms such as YouTube or TikTok have started an outbreak of MSMI through their videos .