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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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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