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Caroline Gould
With the increased screen time among teens as one of many results of the COVID-19 pandemic, neurologists have discovered a new so-called pandemic emerging — teenage girls are developing anxiety tics from the social media app TikTok.
Tics can be both physical jerking movements or verbal outbursts, and have remained fairly uncommon in teenage girls in the past. This is why, according to The Wall Street Journal, neurologists were primarily confused as to why these occurrences were becoming more common. After months of studies conducted by researchers worldwide, they found a pattern between these cases — all of the girls reported watching TikTok videos of people with Tourette’s syndrome preceding developing the anxiety tics.
Doctors nationwide have treated an influx of patients for tics since the start of the pandemic. According to a Wall Street Journal post, Texas Children’s Hospital reports saw approximately 60 cases since March 2020. Before the pandemic, they’d see one or two a year.
The same goes for patients located at the John Hopkins University Tourette’s Center, where 10-20% of them describe having tic behaviors, which is 2-3% higher than before the pandemic.
Freshman Addie Moore recently became concerned after developing a case of these tics where she has difficulty taking deep breaths.
“It kept getting worse and worse to the point where my friends would text me in class like, ‘Jesus, Addie, are you okay?’” Moore said. “And I’m usually not an anxious person either, so when I wasn’t able to breathe I was really confused about what was happening.”
It eventually got to the point where friends and even her dance coach suggested that she go to the doctor, who told her she had the “TikTok tic.”
“At that point I was really confused and had never really heard of them,” Moore said.
Dr. Richard Dubinsky, a neurology professor at The University of Kansas Medical Center who specializes in movement disorders, has both read about and seen first-hand an increase in young women reporting tics after working with patients with tics since he joined the staff in 1988.
He attributes this rise in tics to TikTok influencers with Tourette’s talking about their tics online, causing otherwise neurotypical girls to pick up similar movements. Dubinsky says that this could be traced back to echopraxia.
“As a species, we tend to imitate those around us,” Dubinsky said.
He compares the situation to a lunch with friends. Say that one person reaches to take a drink, and everyone else follows. Only what’s going on with TikTok is much more extreme than that — users directly pick up tics from people with Tourette’s.
“I have no clue how this even happened,” Moore said. “I looked it up and it said something about watching certain types of videos, but I don’t even think I watched [videos of influencers with Touette’s]. My For You Page was normal, I just watched too much of it.”
East parent and licensed psychiatrist Dr. Miguel Stamati agrees with Dubinsky’s theory, also bringing up the involvement of mirror neurons as an evolutionary process. When a human being sees someone make a movement, mirror neurons register this and cause the person to copy it.
Stamati also thinks that TikTok has the ability to cause an adrenaline rush, or “hyper arousal,” in teenagers, caused by their screens and the serotonin-inducing videos they display. This adrenaline rush also has the ability to manifest tics.
“There’s this idea of being hyper aroused, manifested by sweaty hands and perhaps a changing heart rate,” Stamati said. “For an adolescent, the heart rate could increase. Part of this hyper arousal in the brain causes tic manifestation.”
As for Moore, she still doesn’t know exactly how her anxiety tic manifested, apart from TikTok being the cause for it.
Having spent an average of 16 hours per week on TikTok, Moore solemnly deleted it after deciding the chuckles and comic relief were no longer worth suffering when breathing.
“It makes me mad since I love watching TikTok and I spent so much time [watching] it that it’s sad that I can’t have it,” Moore said.
Research is still being developed by neurologists to find how exactly these tics are emerging — whether that be through an adrenaline rush or human’s primal instinct of imitation.
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