© Brian Moore/AlamyResearch shows prolonged social media use is exposing young people to videos about self-diagnosed tics, Tourette syndrome and other disorders.
There is an "urgent need" to investigate the increasing number of children and teenagers self-diagnosing with neurological conditions, mental illnesses and personality disorders, a trend being driven by social media and difficulty accessing healthcare, psychiatrists and paediatricians say.
A paper published in January in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry describes how prolonged social media use, especially on video-sharing platforms including TikTok, is exposing young people to a growing number of content creators making videos about their self-described tics, Tourette syndrome and other self-diagnosed disorders.
"This uptick has coincided with increasing numbers of youth who have presented to clinical providers or psychiatric services during the Covid-19 pandemic with what have been termed functional tic-like behaviours," says the paper, led by Dr John Haltigan from the University of Toronto's psychiatry department.
"An increasing number of reports from the US, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia have noted an increase in functional tic-like behaviours prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic, coinciding with an increase in social media content related to Tourette syndrome and tics. Similar phenomenon has also been recently chronicled with respect to dissociative identity disorder."
Tourette syndrome is a complex disorder characterised by repetitive, sudden and involuntary movements or noises called tics. The paper says the modern functional tic-like behaviours young people are presenting to their doctors differ from classic Tourette syndrome.
These young people are presenting later in childhood and their tics often predominantly affect the upper limbs, "with complex movements of the arms and hands, including clapping, sign language, throwing objects, banging oneself on the chest, head or thigh, or hitting other people", the paper says.
They also describe being affected by vocal tics including involuntarily speaking random words, phrases or offensive statements, whereas less than 15% of those diagnosed with Tourette syndrome ever develop these. Young people are sharing videos of themselves while experiencing these tics, tagging their posts with labels such as #tics and #TS.
The authors of the paper conclude there "is an urgent need for focused empirical research investigation into this concerning phenomenon that is related to the broader research and discourse examining social media influences on mental health". The phenomena largely affects adolescent females, a core user group of TikTok, the paper says.
The problem with computer games and social media is that they are controlled by special interests who want children to be addicted to their software or platform. Think about facebook that gathers friends together to share their experiences, interests and photos. It is built to create an atmosphere of connection, but a fake connection of "thumbs up". The computer game fortnite is a game about killing others indiscriminately, based on no principles. Is it addicting? Of course; it was designed to be that way.
If science were free, the social media companies and computer games companies would be forced to fund studies of how the social media and computer games affect socialization, compassion, beliefs, rebellion, cordiality with parents. Will it happen? Not in our current world.