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They saw a YouTuber with Tourette – then they accepted his ticks

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He had Kirsten Müller-Vahl the main mystery in his hands. It was June 2019 and Müller-Vahl, a psychiatrist at the German Medical School in Hannover and head of his outpatient clinic in Tourette, was flooding patients with tics unlike the ones he had seen before.

In addition to the complex nature of the tick, it involved several muscle groups, even more bizarrely the symptoms of the patients were very similar. “The symptoms were the same. Not only are they similar, they are the same, ”he says. Although other doctors were formally diagnosed with Tourette, Müller-Vahl, who has been working with patients with Tourette’s syndrome for 25 years, was confident it was something completely different. Then came a student who knew where he saw those tics.

All patients showed the same tic-like behavior as the star of a popular YouTube channel. Storm storm in the head (means thunderstorm in the head) Jan Zimmermann, a 23-year-old German, documents his life with Tourette. The channel’s ongoing reason is to talk openly and humorously about Zimmerman’s mess, and it has proven to be a success, attracting more than 2 million subscribers in two years.

Some of Zimmerman’s are accurate. It can often be seen saying the phrases “Fliegende Haie” (flying sharks), “Heil Hitler”, “Du bist häßlich” (you are ugly) and “pommes” (chips). Other ticks include breaking eggs and throwing pens at school.

Patients who visited Müller-Vahl’s clinic imitated Zimmerman’s ticks. Many referred to their condition as Gisela, a nickname for YouTube because of her condition. In total, about 50 patients at his clinic presented with similar symptoms to Zimmerman. Many patients readily acknowledged that they had seen their videos. Zimmerman did not respond to a request for comment.

Müller-Vahl argues that although Tourette’s spectrum of symptoms is broad, similar symptoms recur repeatedly. Classic tics tend to be simple, short, and violent. They are mainly located in the eyes, face, or head, such as blinking, pulling, and on the shoulders. The syndrome usually appears around 6 years, and much more frequently in boys“An average of only three or four boys.” What comes to mind when you make an image of Tourette — an uncontrollable urge to say obscenities in public — is very rare, he says.

But if it wasn’t for Touret, what was it? According to Müller-Vahl, these patients suffered from functional movement imbalance or something called FMD. This may be similar to Tourette’s, but when the latter has a neurological basis (although the cause is not yet known, it is thought to be related to abnormalities in brain regions such as the basal ganglia), the reason for FMD is psychological. In FMD, the hardware is intact, but the software does not work properly, while with Tourette, the software works well, but it is the hardware. People with FMD have the ability to physically control the body, but have lost their locks, creating abnormal unwanted behaviors.

In the case of some patients, all symptoms disappeared when Müller-Vahl explained that what they had was not Tourette. For others, the psychotherapy course significantly improved symptoms. However, the number of patients with the same symptoms surprised Müller-Vahl and his colleagues.

Massive sociogenic disease – also known as massive psychogenic disease or historically known as massive hysteria – is spreading like a social virus. But instead of the perceptible viral particle, the pathogen and method of contamination is invisible. Symptoms spread to vulnerable people through unconscious social mimicry are thought to be caused by emotional distress. (Not included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, although it closely resembles conversion disorder, which causes emotional distress to become a physical symptom.) Historically, massive sociogenic diseases affect women more than they do. men. This is an unknown reason, but one hypothesis is that women generally have higher levels of anxiety and depression, which can make them more susceptible to the disease.

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