You wake up one day and find yourself unable to control the movements your body makes. At random, your head shakes and you have since developed a stutter overnight. You then discover that you are not the only one experiencing these symptoms, as more around you start to manifest similar behaviours.
This outbreak happened in 2011 at a school in Le Roy, New York. Several adolescent girls displayed involuntary neurological tics in an almost domino effect. The rapid onset raised concerns, but public health investigators ultimately found no infectious cause, categorising the cluster as a mass psychogenic illness.
An echo of this phenomenon occurred during the pandemic; later informally referred to as "TikTok Tics". Doctors were noting a spike in Tourettes, which spread faster among teenage girls in anglo-countries. The rise was partially attributed to social media, tracing its influence to British online personality Evie Meg.
Meg has suffered from seizures and was at a point paralyzed from the waist down for a month. However, the subsequent cases exhibiting Tic-like effects proved otherwise. While usually common between the ages five to 10, of which 80 per cent are boys, these young female patients showed no trace of the disease in childhood.
More uncannily, instead of manifesting in randomised mannerisms, had spasms that mirrored one another. Stress, understandably high during the COVID era, is cited as a factor that incites underlying syndromes.
Yet, it’s intriguing how afflictions like Dissociative Identity Disorder, body, social and mind dysphoria grew widespread in the past two decades alone. Did the soar of societal stress levels coincide with the advent of video-content platforms or did the latter influence the former?
There will be a plethora of factors that we can’t directly compare, but it’s strange that one of the two types of nations will have a laundry list of allergies to deal with. I won’t even need to specify which for you to draw your conclusions.
How can we account for the intricacies of the effects of socioeconomic status and degree of urbanisation on dietary restrictions? Allergies are dynamic and change over time, with recent studies showing strong evidence that exposing children to a variety of foods at an early age reduces the prevalence of food allergies. On the flip side, avoiding potential allergens coincides with the increase of recorded food allergies.
A sample of the greatest hits: getting drizzled on induces a cold and sleeping with wet hair gives you a headache. Have we ever stopped to fact check for ourselves before passing along the information? And how much of it is the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon (cognitive bias of frequency illusion)?
Lest I get started on Medical Student’s Disease again, maybe we should all think twice before we fall for lore or unquestioningly accept the latest plight plaguing the internet.
