For 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.
Can'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.
I 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.
Doctors 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.
This is one of my concerns with what I've seen of the recent fetishizing of mental illness, it seems to many people I talk to or interact with, especially younger people, it is popular and cool to have some sort of mental illness, such as anxiety or depression, or something else.
Of course many of these indivudals are self diagnosed but that doesn't stop them from talking about it constantly and holding themselves up as a "suffering soul". Meanwhile those who legitimately struggle with issues like depression or anxiety now get either brushed off, or have people that "totally understand" when really they don't at all.
I think a big issue is that mental illness diagnoses are yes or no, but people experience actual mental illnesses on a spectrum. for example, you can be mildly depressed or completely hopeless, slightly traumatized or full-out PTSD with hallucinations, controllable or uncontrollable OCD, etc.
Also, the same mental illness could have 20 different causes, and a method which cures one of those causes is ineffective against others.
The people with mild illnesses need help too. The people with more serious issues need more serious help. But when someone says “I’m depressed” you don’t know if they’re a little upset or genuinely miserable. You don’t know if it’s because they’re life is boring right now, their dog died, or there’s a serious chemical imbalance. So in essence, saying “I’m depressed” no longer means much unless you state the symptoms.
I read the abstract and had the same concern. In fact I was ready to reject the whole thing, partly thanks to the blunt wording. However, I downloaded the PDF and... yeah, that's not Tourette's.
I have/had Tourette's (like most, I grew out of the worst symptoms after adolescence) and the media portrayal of it is pretty awful. These symptoms align with the portrayal, not the reality. Tourette's should be diagnosed by a neurologist, not a GP, and this doesn't sound hard to distinguish.
My concern being, once GPs start seeing this media, they are less likely to be referred to a neurologist at all. Another example: a hospital near me is denying my neuropsych referral despite a valid reason because my doctor isn't in their network. Getting to a specialist is getting harder and harder even when you do have a sympathetic GP.
Yes, many streamers on Twitch, and content creators on YouTube have faced such accusations, some of them have been extensively harassed, to the point they even provided evince, medication signed by doctors out of desperation for the harassment to stop, needless to say in some cases it didn't.
> Can't this kind of focus get really dangerous towards those who actually suffer from these challenges?
Suicide is also a social contagion. So are eating disorders, depression, gender dysphoria, cutting. All documented occurring online and obviously occurred offline pre-internet, perhaps not as well documented offline.
These people are all suffering.
You can't not talk about it. You have to work out how to treat each disease correctly.
Social 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.
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.
Amputation. Powerful memes. Where have I seen this combination before?
Addressing it head-on: Galatians 6:13.
Explicitly fighting it by redefinition (how pomo!): 1 Corinthians 3:18-19; Colossians 2:11.
Saying that it is beside the point: Galatians 5:6.
Dismissing the practice as exclusionary: Romans 3:1,28-31.
It shows up again and again.
Christianity deals with it thus: The old blood sacrifice is obsoleted by the new sacrifice -- the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Lamb of God.
Surely if we look in other faith traditions we will also find, in some of them, efforts to combat this sort of thing. It seems to crop up again and again with memes. They want to mark people.
It 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.
But 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
A 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.
Seems 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."
This 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.
In 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.
These 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?
Readit News
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28222108
Deleted Comment
Of course many of these indivudals are self diagnosed but that doesn't stop them from talking about it constantly and holding themselves up as a "suffering soul". Meanwhile those who legitimately struggle with issues like depression or anxiety now get either brushed off, or have people that "totally understand" when really they don't at all.
Also, the same mental illness could have 20 different causes, and a method which cures one of those causes is ineffective against others.
The people with mild illnesses need help too. The people with more serious issues need more serious help. But when someone says “I’m depressed” you don’t know if they’re a little upset or genuinely miserable. You don’t know if it’s because they’re life is boring right now, their dog died, or there’s a serious chemical imbalance. So in essence, saying “I’m depressed” no longer means much unless you state the symptoms.
I have/had Tourette's (like most, I grew out of the worst symptoms after adolescence) and the media portrayal of it is pretty awful. These symptoms align with the portrayal, not the reality. Tourette's should be diagnosed by a neurologist, not a GP, and this doesn't sound hard to distinguish.
Suicide is also a social contagion. So are eating disorders, depression, gender dysphoria, cutting. All documented occurring online and obviously occurred offline pre-internet, perhaps not as well documented offline.
These people are all suffering.
You can't not talk about it. You have to work out how to treat each disease correctly.
COVID-19 related increase in childhood tics and tic-like attacks - https://adc.bmj.com/content/106/5/420.abstract
Deleted Comment
Among boys, even pre-covid, we had Fortnite related spastic dancing tics.
> 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-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?
Addressing it head-on: Galatians 6:13.
Explicitly fighting it by redefinition (how pomo!): 1 Corinthians 3:18-19; Colossians 2:11.
Saying that it is beside the point: Galatians 5:6.
Dismissing the practice as exclusionary: Romans 3:1,28-31.
It shows up again and again.
Christianity deals with it thus: The old blood sacrifice is obsoleted by the new sacrifice -- the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Lamb of God.
Surely if we look in other faith traditions we will also find, in some of them, efforts to combat this sort of thing. It seems to crop up again and again with memes. They want to mark people.
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.
"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."
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.
Will Google turn off his monetization for this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
e.g., dancing plague