academic.oup.com
In Germany, the current outbreak of mass social media-induced illness is initiated by a ‘virtual’ index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people. Affected teenagers present with similar or identical functional ‘Tourette-like’ behaviours, which can be clearly differentiated from tics in Tourette syndrome.
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patients often reported to be unable to perform unpleasant tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily completely disappear while conducting favourite activities.
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Notes -
I wrote a comment for the general CW thread, but noticed this dedicated thread here, so I'll just post it here:
This little bit of news made it through my feeds recently:
A mass sociogenic illness is later defined as "a constellation of symptoms suggestive of organic illness, but without an identifiable cause, that occurs between two or more people who share beliefs related to those symptoms"
The symptoms of this illness present like those of Tourette syndrome:
However, when diagnosed by an experienced professional, it turns out that these symptoms are only a shallow mimicry of Tourette syndrome:
So, in other words, what we're seeing is a memetic infection, aka infohazard.
What other memetic infections are floating around us? It would be too easy to point to grand political or religious ideas. But what about something smaller? Could things like "black pill", "gender dysphoria", "trad-life", "degrowth" be examples of sociogenic illness?
Think about it: faux-Tourette syndrome is an aesthetic that plays out as a social behavior. The things I listed above are often played out as aesthetic-based social behaviors--anecdotally, I know of few people with similar "lifestyle" beliefs that adhere to them as a result of deep self-reflection and research.
Looking toward the future, what other sociogenic illnesses can we expect given that social media is worming its way deeper and deeper into society?
I think this and other online things could be and it took something like this to awaken people to the possibility. Also the flat earth movement, alien abductions (this one predates the internet a bit), "incels", etc.
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Humans are social creatures that engage in social learning and mimicry. This is just basic psychology, sociology, and ethology. I don't see what calling these things infohazards or sociogenic illnesses adds. Obviously if the behavior is obviously disordered like adopting the behavioral patterns of a legitimate illness that makes sense, but would we consider religious behavior generally an infohazard or sociogenic illness?
To take it even further would uncontroversially productive, but socially learned behaviors like studying diligently or practicing for a sport be considered the same. Social media seems hardly unique and there have been countless cults, secret societies, civil religions, and arbitrarily learned taboos, norms, fads and crazes for as long as human history.
I guess there's an element of choice in mimicry, but no choice when it comes to illness? It's not specified in the source whether the affected people decided to imitate a popular youtuber or just found themselves replaying the youtuber's behavior.
But you do mimic those around you subconsciously all the time, both short term and long term. Nothing about this makes this phenomenon in general a mental illness more than the fact I dress in blue jeans and speak English with an accent similar to that of my local region a mental illness.
I also doubt these people are less agentic in their mimicry than most people. The whole point of the article was that they had plenty of agency. They did the tics more when it was convenient for them and less when it wasn't.
I think this reduces the phenomenon that was described in the article. Perhaps I'm reading too deep into but, here's my take: you statement misses the "illness" part, which I take to mean something undesired, and the "remote" part.
Mimicking others wearing jeans around me doesn't harm me in any physical or sociological way. Plus, the impulse to wear jeans is immediate--real people around me wearing them seem happy and comfortable.
Fidget spinners were a fad. People were using them around me and I probably saw people using them on TV or youtube (the "remote" part). But they had no negative influence on my state. They also died out after a few weeks.
Youtube-Tourettes has propagated fully remotely via youtube. It also has negative consequences for the individuals, such as putting them in conflict with others around them, and the mechanism for the consequences seems to be that these individuals make it a part of their identity. None of jeans, pokemon, harry potter, or fidget spinners ever became a core part of someone's identity. Even hardcore fans of these fads have been mostly able to contain their fascination so that it doesn't interfere with their lives (work, school, community, family, etc.)
I don't think this is evidence for agency, because correlation doesn't imply causation. Humans are not rational creatures, especially adolescents, so I can quite easily entertain the idea that they tricked themselves into believing they had Tourettes to the point of losing agency over this. People who speak in tongues sincerely believe they have become vessels of God. I suspect they had previous beliefs that made it possible to wake up one day, have a funny feeling in their brain that caused them to babble a little bit, and completely miss the moment to make a decision because their faith allowed them to see only a single path forward: to claim they've become a vessel of God. Similarly, Youtube-Tourette's sufferers probably already had a bunch of agency-robbing views that made them certain they were afflicted with Tourette's.
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