10 ms·
It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness
- pierre 5y agoFor those who don't have time to read, this article presents finding and evidence that mass sociogenic illness can spread online without physical interaction, and proposes a name for this phenomenon "mass social media-induced illness". The article also provides an analysis of the current outbreak of Tourette's like syndrome in teenagers in Germany following the rise of a specific Youtuber.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoThis is no different than a massively popular movie coming out and everyone quoting it in the following weeks.
- s1artibartfast 5y agoIt is a little different in that they admitted to the medical system and being treated with different drugs including antipsychotics.
- Rd6n6 5y agoI’m glad parents didn’t do that after jackass came out
- toxik 5y agoInteresting connection to this comment thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222108
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- miej 5y agoreminds me of a few old-ish horror movies I've seen, particularly from Japanese cinema, where the concept of a social contagion has been explored a few times. eg: Infection https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection_(2004_film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infection_(2004_film) or Suicide Circle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Club_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_Club_(film) to name a few.
- xtiansimon 5y agoFor those of us who subscribe, these are called memes
- h2odragon 5y ago"All your Base" was the first instance of this, no?
- anm89 5y agoCan anyone link to a video of the influencer displaying the symptoms? Im curious to see the source
- treesknees 5y agoHere is an example video from his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGYHmWsmxak https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGYHmWsmxak You can see he demonstrates these "random" tourette symptoms. The linked research states how experts looking at these videos have identified them as way beyond the normal tics of someone with Tourette's, and they change and have context across videos. They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied. The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics" and the popular ones are even sold on merchandise like T-shirts. If I'm reading the paper correctly, they've attempted to treat teens demonstrating these symptoms as if they were treating Tourette's and it didn't work. It's some type of illness related to identity and attention-seeking enforced by social media. So they're saying teens see these types of videos and start imitating the behavior as part of a mental illness.
- pajamanaut 5y agoDid the paper say it was caused by attention-seeking? My takeaway was that it was a stress-reaction that spread through groups, not something intentional
- treesknees 5y agoFrom the abstract it's a little bit of both but I didn't mean to make it sound like people are intentionally doing it. It's a stress reaction but that reaction ends up being attention-seeking behavior. > they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
- SamBam 5y agoPerhaps I've read too much William Gibson, but there's definitely a part of me that thinks if I watch that video I will come down with some kind of Tourette's syndrome.
- mantas 5y agoSo stupid trends are now an illness? Shall we hospitalise people who repeat things they see online?
- MichaelGroves 5y agoThe people following this particular stupid trend wanted people to believe they had an illness. They got what they wanted, though perhaps not quite in the way they wanted.
- phaemon 5y agoNow? You've clearly never heard of the 1518 Dance Plague: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_plague_of_1518
- s5300 5y agoIf you're poor and say that you speak to God, you're labeled as somebody with a severe mental illness and possibly institutionalized, potentially for life. If you're rich and say you speak to God, you can run a church, funnel a ton of money into your pockets, and evade taxes.
- UncleOxidant 5y agoSeems like some heavy editorializing for a research paper: "Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
- s1artibartfast 5y agoKeep in mind this is a paper about behavior and psychology, not physics or engineering.
- debacle 5y agoGood sociology papers are just as scientific as physics or engineering papers, they are just as a percentage in their field more rare.
- tgv 5y agoSuper rare then, because I don't know of any quantitative sociological theory that holds under all (reasonable) conditions. Nor of a qualitative one, by the way. And this paper stems from psychiatry.
- Retric 5y agoWhat would you say where the best papers in the field then and where did they fail?
- njarboe 5y agoPossibly, but in physics the standard for stating something is "true" is 5 or 6 sigma while in sociology, maybe 2 sigma. In the first case, you can take the finding as a fact and it is very unlikely to change in your lifetime, in the second case, one needs to constantly keep in mind the conclusion might not be true. Not really that useful, actually.
- Animats 5y agoIn Germany, current outbreak of MSMI is initiated by a “virtual” index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Will Google turn off his monetization for this?
- s1artibartfast 5y agoWhy should they?
- pierre 5y agoThese videos have now be proved to directly inflict harm to some viewers in the form of being diagnostic with the wrong condition and being administrated the wrong drug. The argument could be the same for video triggering epileptic stroke, should they be allow on a video platform, accessible to children or monetized?
- s1artibartfast 5y agoI find the videos distasteful, unfunny, and frankly lame, but think the harm is self inflicted and inflicted by the parents. I think it is more similar to if a child watches a racing video, then steals the parents keys and gets in a crash, than an epileptic trigger.
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- tantalor 5y agoMass sociogenic illness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness e.g., dancing plague
- seriousquestion 5y agoSocial contagion can result in surprisingly self destructive behavior. > For the first time that I am aware of, we are seeing clusters of people seeking voluntary amputations of healthy limbs and performing amputations on themselves. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-way-to-be-mad/304671/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2000/12/a-new-w... That was in 2000 and since then it's only increased in scale. Tumblr alone saw widespread suicidal ideation, depression, self-harm and a host of identity crises. Now the question is, what's the solution?
- analognoise 5y agoTurning off the internet and finding your tribe in person.
- nemo44x 5y agoIt makes me wonder if for many years parents knew what they were doing by keeping their kids away from “bad crowds”. It wasn’t just to keep them away from bad behaviors but also bad ideas. Certainly difficult to do today without alienating your kids. I find it ironic that so much of what is “social” today was built by nerds who I assume had a difficult time socializing and everyone else that did not have a problem socializing for thousands of years are now using these weird social tools.
- analognoise 5y agoThat is ironic; and the weird social tools give them anxieties and complexes like they never had before. Wild.
- jazzyjackson 5y agoBut what if all the potential members of my tribe are still plugged into… oh my god it’s the matrix, we have to go find the people we want on our side and flush them out of the machine! Perhaps by fooling the machine into flushing them out for us, ie get them banned from social media :o
- 5y ago
- teeray 5y agoThis kind of emergent behavior reminds me of my time in high school. My friends and I eventually developed a small patois through tons of inside jokes that fed on themselves and morphed into inside jokes of their own. None of this was intentional—it was just copying things that were funny and changing them slightly in more hilarious ways. We could basically freely utter nonsense that would otherwise get us detention. I feel like this is similar, where one behavior is seen, then altered by someone else, etc. It’s like an in-group signifier that you understand it, and that you can modify it in a meaningful way.
- cjv 5y agoKubernetes did it first.
- cupcake-unicorn 5y agoCan't this kind of focus get really dangerous towards those who actually suffer from these challenges? I've already been accused of faking various illnesses/psych symptoms that I've been diagnosed with so this is a bit scary to me, that it's already a problem that providers dismiss symptoms, and when they read something like this they're going to be more likely to. There is supposedly a way to differentiate but I guarantee no GP is going to be doing that, and with doctors visits now 15 mins in the us (with as little as 5-8 being just for the patient) it's very difficult to get anything done.
- zikzak 5y agoI come from a place where specialists are hard to come by and when I finally got in to see someone about my condition she accused me of seeking pain killers (I was not, opioids are not going to help what is wrong with me) and then told me the symptom I was experiencing was my body "getting better". I went probably 4 years longer undiagnosed because of her. She eventually left the area and went to a teaching hospital to TEACH. When I told her what condition I believed I had, she literally laughed at my and ridiculed me for thinking I could self-diagnose. Meanwhile, I was diagnosed with this well after the damage was done and I experienced neck and lumbar fusion. Let's just there is a wide range of compentency in doctors, even specialists.
- toxik 5y agoDoctors are no better or worse than car mechanics. Some are meticulous and think about the end result, others follow Mitchell’s or whatever and feel threatened whenever customers try to tell them what they think is wrong.
- AtlasBarfed 5y agoFour kinds of professionals: 1) mechanic-like workmen in the classic mold of the "blue collar" work ethic but don't pretend to be better/worse than others. Often produce better results that the "IQ" tests would suggest. 2) Usually competent but imposter syndrome people that sometimes lose focus due to lack of faith in training and ability. Capable of high achievement (probably better than #1) but often struggle with consistency in end results. Often undersell themselves, so it's hard to tell if they know what they are doing. 3) Status seekers that hide subpar ability or even downright incompetence with degrees and arrogance. Kind of a high functioning "Dunning-Kruger" subtype with conman/sociopathic /social abilities. 4) The frighteningly competent that case #3 pretend to be, #2 might be able to do, and are basically #1 combined with real talent. Sounds like you ended up with #3. Whenever I encounter an "expert" in a field, it comes down to diagnosing whether they are a 3 or a 4.
- yellow_lead 5y agoA friend of a friend is currently pretending to have Tourettes on TikTok and amassed quite a following. This person seems to have shown attention seeking behavior in the past. I'm not sure one would call this an illness, but it depends on your definition.
- alisonkisk 5y agoClinically speaking, if it hurts the individual, it's a disorder. If it hurts the people around the individual, it's a personality disorder.
- grillvogel 5y agoSnowcrash is becoming real
- stevespang 5y agothe second most successful YouTube creator in Germany ? Symptoms of this disease are quite vague . . . .
- omegaBroom 5y agoI'm sure this is a controversial thing to say but I think the same thing is happening with all the transgender people on social media.