[HN Gopher] Many young people diagnosed with Tourette's after wa...
___________________________________________________________________
Many young people diagnosed with Tourette's after watching a
YouTube channel
Author : mellosouls
Score : 163 points
Date : 2021-09-04 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wired.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wired.co.uk)
| mFixman wrote:
| Are tics really that big of a deal?
|
| I had an abnormally large amount of visible tics when I was
| growing up as a teenager. This got my parents worried despite
| assurances from doctors, but they all went away when I grew up
| along with my raspy voice and terrible propensity for acne.
|
| This seems like a moral panic like fidget spinners back in 2017,
| and it doesn't answer an important question: what's the problem
| if teenagers are subconsciously copying tics from a YouTube star?
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I've had diagnosed tourette's for 23 years and yes, tics are a
| big deal, then and now. Maybe your experience was different
| from mine, but mine was hardly positive.
|
| Teachers hate you.
|
| Classmates hate you.
|
| You get detained and questioned by airport security.
|
| You get detained and questioned by police.
|
| Weird pentecostal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc exorcism
| rituals.
|
| Weird liberal* ladies subject you to ad-hoc herbal cleansing
| rituals.
|
| Weird foreign* ladies pop random pills in your mouth thinking
| you're having an epileptic attack
|
| Everyone finds you annoying and thinks you're looking for
| attention.
|
| Even when people understand you and try to accommodate you, you
| are slowly wearing away their patience and you KNOW it.
|
| I would not wish that on my worst enemy.
|
| -------
|
| * no shade meant to non-weird pentocostal people or religious
| people in general (I'm religious myself); just this one
| particular one
|
| * no shade meant to non-weird liberal people
|
| * no shade meant to non-weird foreign people
|
| * no shade meant to ladies in general, it's just a coincidence
| it's always been ladies; mostly probably because they're just
| trying to help and that's sweet in its own way
| exolymph wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this. Interesting and unexpected. I'm
| sorry that you've had to deal with all these frustrating
| experiences.
| bserge wrote:
| That actually sounds interesting. I've had breakdowns in
| public, crying and yelling, I've stood on a bridge trying to
| jump, I've been drunk off my ass stumbling, been talking to
| myself and kinda barking at strangers, sleeping on benches
| and _not once_ has anyone talked to or approached me. Which
| is normal, who in their right mind would do that. Just kinda
| paints a different picture of humanity in your head than
| someone who 's been helped.
| standardUser wrote:
| I've had various tics since adolescence, but your explanation
| helped me realize how minor they have been compared to some
| people since I can't relate to most of your struggles. Though
| it also reminds me how much of mental health is a gradient,
| and not a on/off switch.
| ewanmcteagle wrote:
| Sounds related to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_psychogenic_illness
| fouc wrote:
| Some parallels between people with this "condition" and anti-
| vaxxers/anti-maskers
| post_break wrote:
| There is a subreddit called fake disorder cringe full of people
| faking stuff. Makes my stomach turn seeing it all while they
| fleece for donations.
| nailer wrote:
| There's a school in Brighton where 76 students - 1/20 of the
| entire student population- declared themselves trans or gender
| fluid.
|
| https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-groups-under-fire-f...
| input_sh wrote:
| Well fortunately those aren't comparable to tourette's, since
| they're not illnesses.
| toiletaccount wrote:
| At least tourette's is involuntary.
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account for posting flamebait and
| unsubstantive comments. Please don't create accounts to
| break HN's rules with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| input_sh wrote:
| Yes, because feeling discomfort with your own gender is
| totally voluntary. You've nailed it!
| dang wrote:
| " _Don 't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them
| instead._"
|
| a.k.a. please don't feed the trolls
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| toiletaccount wrote:
| gender?
| input_sh wrote:
| Yes, a social construct of how one wishes to express
| themselves (from masculinity to femininity to anything in
| between).
|
| At-birth, it matches your sex. Once you grow a bit, they
| may diverge in a small amount of cases.
| toiletaccount wrote:
| i guess i don't have a need for that hypothesis.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| > _At-birth, it matches your sex._
|
| Are we even sufficiently social that young? I'd rather
| assume it's ill-defined. (How would you even test that?)
| MillenialMan wrote:
| That's sort of an arbitrary distinction. Both are abnormal
| presentations that cause significant problems in day-to-day
| life and consequently have clinics set up to treat the issue.
| Whether the issue is voluntary for a particular patient is
| also similarly important in assessing an appropriate
| treatment modality.
|
| Putting the obvious political agenda aside, I _would_ argue
| teenage girls faking tourettes is pretty much the same
| phenomenon as teenage girls faking gender dysphoria. It 's
| not helpful to pretend that faking tragic mental conditions
| isn't a phenomenon among teenagers.
| standardUser wrote:
| "Both are abnormal presentations that cause significant
| problems in day-to-day life"
|
| The same was one-hundred percent true about homosexuality
| for nearly all of human history in most societies. If the
| "day-to-day problems" are because other people are
| mindlessly hateful and intolerant, who exactly has the
| mental health issue? In terms of homosexuality, we now
| largely agree it is the bigots, not the queers, who have
| the problem.
| erklik wrote:
| Gender Dysphoria is considered a Mental Disorders and is in
| the DSM-5 from the American Psychiatric Association.
| input_sh wrote:
| Gender dysphoria =/= being trans.
|
| Gender dysphoria is feeling uncomfortable in your gender-
| at-birth. Therefore, transitioning or rejecting the concept
| of the gender isn't the disease -- it's a cure for the
| disease.
| toiletaccount wrote:
| Without dysphoria the trans crowd is no different than
| otherkin or that Rachel Dozel woman.
| meowface wrote:
| I'm not taking a side in this debate, but: many do argue
| that you don't need gender dysphoria to be trans/non-
| binary/gender non-conforming, and many do argue that
| Rachel Dolezal actually did suffer from dysphoria.
| input_sh wrote:
| Again, the dysphoria is caused by not feeling comfortable
| with your gender. Trans people solve that by
| transitioning. That's why you don't see trans people
| regretting it or trying to undo it in any significant
| amount. Once they've transitioned, they feel comfortable
| with their gender, therefore problem solved.
|
| Of course, that transition also usually leads to other
| types of discomforts caused by other people not
| respecting their decision, but hey, it's not trans
| people's fault other people are dickheads.
| pitaj wrote:
| You don't have to transition to be trans.
| input_sh wrote:
| Oh I don't mean transition as in sex-reassignment-
| surgery-exclusively. Sometimes it's as simple as changing
| clothes and growing/cutting/painting your nails and hair.
| standardUser wrote:
| So was homosexuality for the first 20 years of the DSM.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| It is convenient to categorize things into as few buckets as
| possible, but most things in nature (and human behavior) is on
| a continuous distribution. Yes, some are bimodal distributions,
| but that 5% fall in between humps is unsurprising to me.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| So what? As long as they don't start taking hormones or cut off
| their genitals, I'd say let them be! They'll grow out of it,
| like we grew out of being emo.
| standardUser wrote:
| I hope and believe we will see an ever-growing number of people
| rejecting traditional gender roles because we are developing
| new ways to think about gender that give people a way "out".
| That doesn't mean they are mentally ill in any meaningful
| sense.
| nynx wrote:
| I've been noticing a lot of anti-trans rhetoric on HN recently.
| I wonder if there's an astroturfing campaign.
| seattle_spring wrote:
| There are a surprisingly high number of hateful people on HN.
| The community is still worth it, but man it's tiring to wade
| through the ignorance sometimes.
| [deleted]
| snaut wrote:
| That's not more anti-trans than OP is anti-Tourette's.
| fortran77 wrote:
| What about the parent's comment was "anti-trans rhetoric?" Is
| the New Yorker article "anti-Tourette's rhetoric?"
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| The article is matter-of-fact and not anti-trans, at least
| from the free preview.
|
| People here are intolerant of comparing the situations of
| the two articles.
| nailer wrote:
| It could just be that HN had an article on people finding a
| trendy malady and I posted a factual comment about other
| people finding a trendy malady.
|
| There doesn't need to be a conspiracy, nor is mentioning this
| occurrence "anti trans".
| input_sh wrote:
| Yup, same, but I don't really remember HN ever being pro-
| trans. It's just talked about more.
| edgyquant wrote:
| Definitely something. There's 3-4 comments in this thread
| relating this to being trans.
| nailer wrote:
| Why would posting evidence of a massive increase in people
| declaring themselves trans be evidence of a conspiracy
| versus, say - an example of an on-topic relevant comment?
| edgyquant wrote:
| On its own perhaps it wouldn't be. It would be a stretch
| and not an exact equivalency. But I could, perhaps, see
| someone using it as an example. But considering how
| political it is, and how many other examples you could
| find to use I can't help but think: Maybe the half a
| dozen comments throughout the thread, trying to make the
| two situations seem the same, aren't exactly in good
| faith.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| It was an obvious-enough thought to me that I searched
| the page to see if anyone had made the comparison. I was
| not, of course, paid or otherwise influenced to do so.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| I find it deeply concerning that even considering a parallel
| betweem the situations is deemed "anti-trans".
|
| This hits close to home because there's a reasonable
| likelihood I would have attempted a transition if the social
| climate were like this when I was a teen. How I am now as an
| adult I am happy with my sex, and I'm not sure how that would
| have went.
|
| Obviously there's no way to know, but I'm primarily concerned
| with how easy and how common it is to shut down discussion
| surrounding the issue. Especially with how volatile teens
| are, and how high the suicide rates are for these
| demographics, I feel like these issues deserve to be
| explored. Should all this really be hidden behind "show
| dead"?
|
| I happen to have a very stigmatized mental health issue with
| an absurd suicide rate (5-10%?), and I'm happy to come across
| people discussing it, even if a few of them regard everyone
| afflicted with it as incorrigible.
|
| Back to the topic, I also went through a phase of convincing
| myself I had DID/schizophrenia, and did expend my mom's and a
| doctor's time with it, then just clammed up.
|
| In my case one experience was a lot more "real" than the
| other; I strongly felt closer to another gender, it was never
| about attention or identity, it was just a mild internal
| struggle. On the other hand I might have latched onto being
| severely neuroatypical purely for it seeming "cool", wanting
| it to be part of my identity, as well as garnering attention
| from my parent.
|
| Now that I'm older, I'm blessed to be happy with my body and
| my sex/gender, despite the stronger feelings I had when I was
| younger. That came with time and perhaps from landing in a
| loving relationship. Of course not everyone will be this
| fortunate, but I do worry about people like me who might be
| directly or indirectly encouraged to make drastic changes
| they might not be ready to make.
|
| I also of course recognize that severe mental disorders can
| be very impairing, and aren't something to wear as fashion.
| (However I would be lying if I said I didn't think
| schizophrenia is a beautiful form of suffering.)
|
| In conclusion,
|
| I guess I think transgenderism is rarely cut and dry--despite
| people often seemingly treating it that way--and I can't
| speak from experience but I assume fashion sometimes plays a
| role.
|
| I find it a bit absurd to label that notion as anti-trans, so
| long as it isn't accusing an individual or writing-off the
| entire phenomenon.
|
| Even when fashion does play a role, does it invalidate
| anything? I reckon it would just muddy the already-muddy
| water that is identity. It's up to individuals to sort
| through it if they choose to.
|
| Forgive the novel.
| refurb wrote:
| How is that statement anti-trans? It literally provides a
| statistic.
|
| What are you reading into it?
| aaron-santos wrote:
| Context.
| zepto wrote:
| That isn't clarifying.
| uuddlrlr wrote:
| "If you think fashion could ever play a role in
| transgenderism then you are against transgender people."
|
| It's just people continuing to become intolerant of even
| the slightest hint of intolerance.
| aaron-santos wrote:
| What do you think the context is?
| MillenialMan wrote:
| It would probably be upvoted if it was astroturfing. Hacker
| News doesn't have a huge commentariat, I think it's just a
| few people with an axe to grind.
| antattack wrote:
| We all make gestures, look left, right up or down, squint, have a
| narrator in one's head, sometimes clap, smack forhead when trying
| to get a thought formed, access memory, formulate a sentence, or
| express feelings.
|
| Perhaps what we diagnose as Tourette on the low end is like above
| but overwhelming and more involuntary?
|
| Perhaps people who acquire it via mimicry are in the category
| where movements are not entirely involuntary, but perhaps feel
| good and help them think or function maybe to relief stress or
| anxiety on subconscious level.
| h2odragon wrote:
| In the 70's, many young people behaved in incredibly odd and
| harmful ways after seeing similar behaviors on TV. it was called
| "Disco".
|
| Fortunately, after a few years, the symptoms faded and the
| victims took up more socially useful behaviors, like snorting
| cocaine and creating stock market scams.
| swayvil wrote:
| David Langford explores this idea a bit in his scifi short story
| BLIT
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Sounds familiar. In the UK, young people referred for "gender
| treatment" has increased from 97 in 2009 to 2,510 in 2017-2018,
| an over 4,000 percent increase in 10 years.
| wallmountedtv wrote:
| This has more to do with the growing acceptance of being
| transgender rather with there suddenly being more transgender
| individuals. Its a very common pattern to see in healthcare as
| acceptance grows around a health related issue.
|
| An example would be autism. It had the same kind of "sudden
| growth" back in the 1980s when diagnosis became more accepted
| and practiced. But there didnt suddenly exist more autistic
| people than before. Just more people who got it diagnosed and
| help from their doctors.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| "That which is rewarded will be repeated".
|
| Imagine if the catholic church approved stigmata as a way of
| showing one's devotion. I suspect the number of people
| suddenly getting scars on their hands would sky rocket. Doubt
| any of them would actually be channeling Jesus.
| kongin wrote:
| I have a theory of signalling for mental health.
|
| There are very few conditions that are real and they have
| easily detectable and unambiguous physical signs, e.g.
| epilepsy.
|
| The rest of them are ways for people to show distress,
| either positive or negative. The positive side would be
| stigmata 'look at me and how holy I am' the negative would
| be witches 'look at me and how unholy I am.
|
| Transgenderism moved from the negative distress to the
| positive distress pile in less than 5 years last decade and
| people are having a hell of a time dealing with it.
|
| The 'acceptance' of deviancy isn't helping, it's just
| pushing people to become more extreme in what they do to
| show their dislike of current society.
| input_sh wrote:
| Wow, I was not aware! That's awesome! I hope my country will
| catch up with you one day.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Offer a monetary reward? A bounty for a penis head, would go
| a long way.
|
| * Fixed spelling
| [deleted]
| input_sh wrote:
| Sex reassignment surgery isn't a requirement for being
| trans. That's not what skyrocketed in the UK either, what
| skyrocketed are hormone treatments and puberty blockers,
| both of which will not make your penis disappear one day.
|
| Also most of them are female-to-male, not the other way
| around.
| watwut wrote:
| > Also most of them are female-to-male, not the other way
| around.
|
| Do you have a source on that? It is interesting because
| it use to be that transsexuals were said to be more
| likely the other way round.
|
| But it was unclear whether it was due to diagnosis
| practices or really difference in rates of condition.
| input_sh wrote:
| I just looked up those numbers and saw this:
|
| > Most strikingly, among girls, the figure is up from 40
| to 1,806, meaning girls are currently far more likely to
| seek to become boys than vice versa.
|
| https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1018407/gender-
| transition-...
|
| Granted, it's not a source I would normally trust, but
| every non-paywalled link I've opened pointed back to it.
| rito_ wrote:
| Hey @dang , why am I shadow banned, and how do I get it lifted?
| themgt wrote:
| A similar one I just became aware of is Dissociative Identity
| Disorder, or multiple personality disorder. There seems to be a
| huge surge of people doing TikToks etc showing themselves going
| through identity changes (often "rapid switching"), some with
| hundreds of thousands or millions of views and seemingly a lot of
| supporters. There's a whole huge sort of jargon/ontology to this
| intersecting with other ideas and people identify as a "system"
| e.g:
|
| _Systems, Collectives, and /or Plurals are those who experience
| being more than one entity in one physical body [1]. Systems are
| under the neurodivergent umbrella, and are not inherently LGBT+,
| but being plural can impact sexuality, romantic orientation,
| attraction, identities, and/or gender (such as with systemfluid).
| Systems can also commonly intersect with LGBT+ experiences[2].
| The experiences may overlap to the point of ones queer identities
| being a large part of headmates, such as within queergenic
| systems._
|
| I am not quite sure what to make of all this, but we live in
| interesting times.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=rapid+switching
|
| https://lgbta.wikia.org/wiki/System
|
| https://www.inputmag.com/culture/dissociative-identity-disor...
|
| https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-did-influencers-of...
| rdimartino wrote:
| Yes, I stumbled upon some of these same community discussions
| happening on Twitter and Tumblr. It was really interesting to
| read about the in-fighting about traumagenic vs endogenic DID.
| This discussion of real or imitated Tourette's reminds me of
| that.
|
| https://pluralpedia.org/w/Traumagenic
|
| https://pluralpedia.org/w/Endogenic
| xerox13ster wrote:
| As someone with DID who is a part of that community (founded
| two subreddits and moderated /r/DID for a time), I look at at
| the traumagenic vs endogenic debate as a sad case of ironic
| community amnesia.
|
| One of the core features of the disorder is the dissociative
| amnesia that protects us from having to deal with the
| consequences of the trauma we faced at all times. Systems
| that have lower dissociative barriers who deal with more
| trauma symptoms can be understandably upset when they see
| people seemingly functioning fine, claiming the same disorder
| with few of the same symptoms. I personally believe that
| endogenics are systems that have successfully repressed their
| trauma to the point that they really believe they didn't face
| trauma, or their trauma was more of an emotional or
| neglectful nature and their parents matured as they developed
| so it was safe to totally forget. Many endos will get mad in
| defense if you try to tell them they have trauma (as a mod
| the fighting can get unexpectedly emotional), because they
| have to believe they don't have trauma to survive.
|
| For everyone else in the thread talking about it like it's a
| curiosity or a psych fad please don't, yeah teens are picking
| it up and faking it, but some are actually coming to terms
| with it early--those are rare but they happen--most will lose
| interest in it after some months or years. People who fake
| this also aren't psychologically normal. People who claim to
| have created head mates are engaging in tuplamancy, which is
| NOT Dissociative Identity Disorder, and does not function in
| the same way in the slightest.
| xerox13ster wrote:
| I moderated the DID subreddit for about two years and there was
| incredible controversy over this constantly in the community
| and in the mod team. The mod team wanted to have absolutely no
| discussion of it, while most of the community wanted to either
| complain or fight with DID youtuber followers. I don't miss
| moderating that community.
|
| The general consensus in the wider text and image based DID
| community is that most of them are faking, but we don't have a
| way of knowing for sure or how many because of just how
| inconsistent the presentation of the disorder can be in real
| life. You'd never know I had DID if you met me in person, but I
| have a good friend who is disabled because she can't function
| on her own.
|
| The important thing to remember about DID is that it's caused
| by childhood trauma, abuse, and long term patterns of neglect
| as simple as "crying it out" or as significant as parentifying.
| It's not interesting times we live it it has been this way this
| is often generational, psychology is just finally catching up
| in this regard.
|
| I was raised (and abused) by my aunt who was only continuing
| the cycle of her and my mom's abuse that she faced, continued
| by her father who was abused because of traumas his parents
| faced on the Trail of Tears. They both described feeling like
| they had more than one person in them, that their age was not
| aligned with their body, and the stories of abuse they both
| told me align. My dad was abused by the Boston Archdiocese, his
| psychiatric records claimed he referred to himself in turns by
| John, Jack, and other names, claiming they would act on his
| behalf. They called it schizophrenia then because of a backlash
| against diagnosing DID after Sybil and other films reached
| mainstream.
| phkahler wrote:
| My understanding of DID and its origins matches your. While
| dont have it, I did find IFS therapy useful in fixing myself
| and recognizing similar in other people. It makes sense (to
| me) that DID is an extreme on a continuum of splitting of the
| self.
|
| IMHO most people flaunting their DID online, bragging about
| their others, claiming to be systems, are just attention
| seekers that are an insult to those with a real problem. The
| second "D" stands for disorder after all. It's like the
| teenagers running around claiming all sorts of odd variations
| on their sexuality - while being virgins. It's cool to be
| different, but not to falsely claim someone else's
| difference.
| pfarrell wrote:
| I'm wondering if this is a modern extension of the old
| "psych-101 syndrome". Where undergrads, upon learning of the
| existence of various mental health diagnoses, suddenly realize
| they too are OCD or have depression, etc...
| twic wrote:
| You may be interested in tulpamancy:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/exmqzz/tulpamancy-internet-s...
| evv555 wrote:
| >A similar one I just became aware of is Dissociative Identity
| Disorder, or multiple personality disorder.
|
| Is it really crossing over into a MPD however? Voice dialogue
| is a therapeutic modality where you take a 2nd person
| perspective on your psyche components in addition to 1st/3rd
| person. There's something to it but it's not MPD. The most
| popular example is the "inner child" complex which people often
| reconnect with when they empathize with their own child.
| themodelplumber wrote:
| I'm glad you pointed that out. There are many related
| therapeutic functions.
|
| While journaling I have a random personality picker which
| draws from a list of subjectively helpful archetypes. From
| favorite actors to inner child and future self, and more.
| Then I interview them or converse with them intuitively, with
| the aim of exploring the situation or problem from a new
| perspective.
|
| Related is a theory that by taking the perspective of a given
| personality, we essentially become that personality (not
| person, but personality) for however short a time period,
| giving ourselves access to their tools for problem-solving...
| evv555 wrote:
| Beyond therapeutic I would argue that this capacity is at
| the heart of great literature and its psychoactive
| potential.
| sildur wrote:
| I sometimes discuss things with myself, taking two sides and
| having a conversation in my head. I see it as something like
| when you discuss something with someone in a dream. Is that
| voice dialogue?
| evv555 wrote:
| Yes voice dialogue is a structured engagement/analysis of
| this capacity. Give structured labels/names to these 2nd
| persons and your mind will naturally frame the world as a
| system of 2nd persons on top of the usual 1st/3rd person
| perspectives of self.
|
| If you find this interesting I highly suggest looking at
| the "Big Mind" process that's been incorporated into
| western Zen Buddhism.
| marcan_42 wrote:
| It's a spectrum, like everything else, and the idea has existed
| for ages, it's just that people are now coming up with
| terminology for it. And yes, just like this (faux-)Tourette's
| story, it is possible to push oneself around in the spectrum; I
| know a few people who have deliberately and consciously done
| that (that can of course change how you classify things, if
| root cause is part of the definition).
|
| Think of it as ranging from acting differently in front of
| family and in front of your boss, to being an actor in
| character, to having that character evolve on its own, to full
| blown DID with amnesia.
|
| The fields of psychology, neuroscience, etc are sadly still in
| their infancy; we really have very little idea how the brain
| truly works. Doctors tend to like to put people in boxes, but
| the brain isn't digital, it's analog, and there isn't a boolean
| flag somewhere in your head that determines if you have a
| condition or not. People are different. The medical community
| usually concerns itself with cases where the condition impacts
| people's quality of life, i.e. only the more extreme ones, but
| that doesn't mean anything below that doesn't exist and hasn't
| since the dawn of humanity.
| 0xdeadb00f wrote:
| Fascinating.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| This used to be thing back in the LiveJournal days; I remember
| people claiming to have a baby personality and typing in mock
| baby talk, as well as a bunch of "otherkin"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin).
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's not just an internet thing; since Sybil, multiple
| personalities became an identity to aspire to. What the
| internet adds to it is that all of these individuals network
| together and start setting up a common lexicon, demands that
| the condition be treated as what they say it is, and a bunch of
| rules dividing "authentic" MPD from fakers. At some point an
| industry arises to prey on them.
|
| It's like fandom, basically, except with medical treatment and
| the sense of being an oppressed, abused minority.
| tbalsam wrote:
| We have DID, and I think some YouTube systems may be real, but
| it's like the social popularity syndrome where you have to
| completely cast away every part of yourself that doesn't live
| up to the previously manufactured spec.
|
| Most systems that we know who have DID are generally A.
| Wonderful people with B. very hard emotional struggles and C.
| tend to have very painful private lives. It's generally an
| incredibly painful disorder, in my experience and in seeing
| those near me. I think the very concept of having different
| selves in a body... This creates all sorts of deeply painful,
| existential crises, as well as I think lifestyle dysphoria.
|
| So I think there's a lot of popcorn-y debate about DID
| YouTubers, but I think that might be like using Logan/Jake
| Paul's channel as an argument for/against certain parts of
| California culture. I think there's parts that do line up, most
| are grossly exaggerated or left out due to popularity reasons,
| and I think there's one final piece to it. I think for me, the
| maturation process on this issue seems to start with confusion,
| followed by some level of agreement/disagreement/potentially
| strong emotions, and that may go on for a while.
|
| I think I'm starting to come to the point where I can see these
| systems as real systems, and whether they're more plural or
| more singular, just being able to have compassion. If a 2-5
| year old is going through the emotional/developmental phases
| they do, oftentimes it's not wise to mock or deride them for
| it. Their growth phase has little do do with my wellbeing as an
| individual, but I can be compassionate and caring regardless.
|
| That, or I could move to popcorn debating the intentions of
| people popcorn debating the intentions of DID YouTubers. At
| that point, I'd probably set myself up for popcorn debate too.
|
| I don't know, hopefully that's not too discombobulated. I can
| say that systems that can live well with DID have to have
| extraordinary leadership and diplomatic skills internally. It's
| like having a random greyhound bus of people picked randomly
| all over the world and having them function as a good,
| moving... I don't know, for the sake of example, performative
| group. One can sit and be upset about D'Je'be, who seems to be
| intent on harassing the female members of the crew, or Sarai,
| who seems to have a personal need for everyone in the crew to
| dote on her, and so on. All of those things can happen inside
| of a DID system, and they generally do.
|
| So seeing DID YouTubers, if they are a system, this is part of
| their journey. It may not even be a bad thing! It's just a
| thing. But my deepest respect to the systems who can find a way
| for the D'Je'be's and Sarai's of the world to both
| authentically be themselves and feel cared for + have their
| needs emotionally met, while that's being done in a way that
| doesn't hurt the needs and emotional desires (+needs too, I
| suppose!) of others in the system.
|
| It's certainly NP hard, and in the class of NP hard that's an
| NP-hard for NP-hard problems, I'd contend.
|
| Alrighty, enough of me long-form expressing myself here! Happy
| to answer any questions below. <3
| oxymoran wrote:
| The problem with TikTok is that it promotes the silly and the
| stupid. At scale, that makes society silly and stupid.
| Karunamon wrote:
| People have been saying the same thing about TV since its
| inception, and that has a larger scale than the internet. So
| far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a
| documentary.
| Hoasi wrote:
| > So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a
| documentary.
|
| The jury is still out on that, even for the optimistic
| amongst us. Current events/culture/elections/social
| commentary beg to disagree...
| sva_ wrote:
| I think there's also an effect that when some trend is new,
| it seems overwhelming, but people tend to get used to it
| and cultivate a natural defense to whatever new bullshit
| came around, and push against it. So there's some kind of
| societal immune response to it. Like waves of the ocean
| that came suddenly but slowly recede. At least that's my
| hope with some of the stuff going on nowadays - but part of
| it will probably always be around.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >So far, Idiocracy remains a cynical comedy and not a
| documentary.
|
| Many of us hold the opposite opinion.
| whymauri wrote:
| The algorithm promotes what you want to see. If you're not
| interested in silly or stupid things, you can nudge the
| algorithm towards content you find engaging. It's kinda "one-
| size-fits-all", but yeah, the average user is looking for
| entertainment you'd probably classify as 'silly'.
| underwater wrote:
| Can you really train it to be healthier? It uses implicit
| signals to figure out what you like watching.
|
| That's like having a machine that detects which foods you
| find tastiest, and starts serving you only those things.
| bsksi wrote:
| That's a problem with social networks at large. At least
| before the stupid or degenerate were ashamed of themselves.
| Now everybody can find a circus of freaks to belong to, which
| makes them believe their behaviour to be appropriate.
| krustyburger wrote:
| I'm not sure Linkedin has quite the same effect on people
| that Tiktok seems to. Certain social networks have a
| culture of amplifying drivel.
| junon wrote:
| Have you seen LinkedIn recently? It's all of the Facebook
| garbage just moved to a new home. Most of the content on
| there has little to nothing to do with the professional
| world.
| derefr wrote:
| No, just unmoderated social networks. One of the longest-
| running types of "social network" (going for centuries
| now!) is the academic journal--but those have the explicit
| goal of sanity cross-checking anything submitted to them
| before allowing it in, so they result in something else
| being promoted.
|
| (I don't want to say it's "good, rational discourse" that
| journals promote, because that doesn't seem to be exactly
| what comes out of journals; they do have their own
| incentive structures that bias "the conversation" in
| specific directions, even besides the ones that are
| extrinsically imposed upon them by academic hierarchy.)
| numpad0 wrote:
| TikTok is heavily moderated, just algorithmically and not
| in a generally favorable direction.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| I think it's a matter of time before the copy-cat stuff
| is going to get us one of those weird Japanese suicide
| pacts. They are already starting with the new crate
| challenge (which is dangerous as fuck).
|
| https://youtu.be/4bFK6EBz8VY
|
| I saw kids doing this on concrete recently. On concrete.
|
| Tiktok is literally an at-scale sorority/fraternity,
| which means people are taking part in an at-scale hazing
| ritual - to fit in. The problem with this is the same
| problem that arises if you are 20 and watch Sesame Street
| every day still. There's a time and place for this
| behavior and we are not setting any cut offs for when
| it's time to stop the nonsense.
| XorNot wrote:
| People already died from planking. And tide pods. People
| have been ongoingly dying from drinking bleach. People
| dying due to social trends isn't new though: perhaps more
| notable is that it's easier to know it's happening in an
| age of instant global communication, and since we all
| have quick and easy access to all the knowledge needed to
| avoid these entirely preventable outcomes.
|
| The milk crate challenge on concrete is hardly different
| to any other dangerous behavior engaged in by
| (principally) young men: i.e. what's the difference
| really between this and say, street racing? Which has
| been a thing pretty much since car's became affordable to
| 20 year olds.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| There is a voyeurism here. At risk of entering extreme
| levels of armchair psychology, it's the bystander effect
| at scale.
|
| You are free to Google milk-crate challenge death and see
| for yourself (how guilty am I for the thing that I
| condemn). They fall on their necks.
|
| I certainly don't have the answer, but this can't be
| normalized, and sadly I think we are just at the
| beginning.
|
| Kids abusing the medical system, disrespecting a disease,
| walking on shaky crates six feet off the ground. It's
| hard for me to say it's kids being kids, or the weak in
| natural selection being handled. Something is up.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| You can also Google "jackass copy cat deaths" for an
| earlier example of kids getting themselves killed doing
| obviously dangerous activities
| learc83 wrote:
| I ran into a person in a technical forum recently who kept
| referring to the themselves as we and us.
|
| I was very confused for a while until someone asked them about
| it. Turns out they had purposely created a "head mate" and now
| insisted on being treated as multiple people.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Or probably an insecure entrepreneur that doesn't want to
| look like a one person company.. :D
| [deleted]
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| HN folks here are proposing that countless young kids could
| universally mimic a specific symptom set so precisely, that it
| concerns actual experts.
|
| I've been to endless elementary school plays; I've seen that kids
| really don't have the refined performance skill to pull this off.
| One might but not scores.
| batch12 wrote:
| The article suggests that the cause is psychological. It isn't
| suggesting that this is a performance, but something
| involuntary and not Tourette's.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I was referring to HN'rs reaction to the article, not the
| article itself.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| From the paper:
|
| > Although some patients indeed suffered in addition from mild
| Tourette syndrome, for all newly emerged symptoms, it could be
| clearly ruled out that they were tics for several reasons: (i)
| onset was abrupt instead of slow, (ii) symptoms constantly
| deteriorated instead of typical waxing and waning of tics,
| (iii) "simple" movements (e.g. eye blinking) and noises (e.g.
| clearing one's throat) were clearly in the background or
| completely absent, although being the most common and typical
| symptoms in Tourette syndrome, (iv) movements were mainly
| complex and stereotyped and predominantly located at arms and
| body, instead of at eyes and face, (v) overall, the number of
| different movements, noises, and words was "countless" and far
| beyond the typical number of tics in Tourette syndrome, and
| (vi) premonitory feelings were reported with atypical location,
| quality, and duration compared to tics in Tourette syndrome.
| Thus, worsening of pre-existing Tourette syndrome, for example
| due to COVID-19 pandemic as suggested elsewhere 4,5, can be
| clearly ruled out in our patients.
|
| I've been diagnosed with Tourette's for 23 years and the above
| is not what I would describe as "universally mimicking a
| specific symptom set precisely"
|
| That doesn't mean this kids aren't dealing with something real,
| but it means it's unlikely to be Tourette's. The lack of low-
| level background tics (blinks, throat clearing, facial
| grimaces) is a huge tell.
|
| The worst case scenario here is they get misdiagnosed with
| Tourette's and start treatment that a) won't help them and b)
| will give them terrible side effects. I've been through the
| roulette wheel of powerful brain meds, you do not want to go
| down that road if you don't have to.
| viraptor wrote:
| > One might but not scores.
|
| Keep in mind the scale of TikTok. What is the sample size where
| one might? One out of a school? There's still millions of them
| available.
|
| I'm not saying this is true or not, but being worldwide
| accessible changes perspective a bit.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Humans are constantly unconsciously mimicking patterns of
| behavior off each other. This happens even with adults, but
| more so at early ages (presumably because there are fewer
| established patterns).
|
| It doesn't apply to long explicit patterns like a school play,
| but happens with pieces of behavior that are much shorter in a
| context-specific way: unless you observe a suitable situation,
| you wouldn't know A unconsciously mimics B in behavior X.
| Additionally, the role of B in A's life can make behavior
| mimicry strongly intrinsically motivated, which is a rare
| chance with a school play.
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| The notion that little kids can mimic this symptom set with
| coordinated precision and not look like a bunch of little
| kids poorly trying to do the same - this seems unrealistic.
| strogonoff wrote:
| Try paying attention to how a teenage person unconsciously
| mimics small components of the behavior of a parent or a
| person they (again, possibly unconsciously) consider of
| importance. Things like a bad habit, such as smoking
| (including the finer mechanical details of the process);
| accent/[mis]pronunciations; usage of idiomatic words or
| phrases; motions when driving a car; etc. tend to
| look/sound _extremely_ natural.
| [deleted]
| bmc7505 wrote:
| "You're a hacker, that means you have deep structures to worry
| about, too." "Deep structures?"
| "Neurolinguistic pathways in your brain. Remember the first time
| you learned binary code?" "Sure." "You were
| forming pathways in your brain. Deep structures. Your nerves grow
| new connections as you use them - the axons split and pushed
| their way between the dividing glial cells - your bioware self-
| modifies - the software becomes a part of the hardware. So now
| you're vulnerable - all hackers are vulnerable - to a nam-shub.
| We have to look out for each other." "What's a nam-
| shub? Why am I vulnerable to it?" "Just don't stare
| into any bitmaps..."
|
| -- Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash. (1992) "The
| paraphrase of Godel's Theorem says that for any record player,
| there are records which it cannot play because they will cause
| its indirect self-destruction."
|
| -- Douglas R. Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden
| Braid. (1979)
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Sure, and see also
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLIT_(short_story)
|
| But, uh, any evidence that that's real? We should be careful
| with Godel's results here; the Godelian incompleteness of the
| human mind is that a human cannot consistently believe that
| everything they believe is true. It has nothing to do with
| sanity and perception:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doxastic_logic
| twic wrote:
| The mere idea of basilisks was enough to make the rationalist
| community self-destruct.
| aaaaaaaaaaab wrote:
| How rational of them!
| bmc7505 wrote:
| I think if you take these parables literally, there probably
| isn't a single input that will reliably cause the mind to
| self-destruct, but they are a cautionary warning. The
| internet gives plenty of evidence to support the theory that
| memetic hazards (1) exist, (2) are more transmissible than
| widely believed and (3) repeated exposure will cause
| cognitive malfunction.
| dang wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210904142459/https://www.wired....
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| The phenomenon I find most baffling is the insistence that we not
| be concerned, in any way, about that percentage of apparent cases
| where the person is faking a condition / system / syndrome. As if
| this causes no harm whatsoever to the person (themself),
| families, and society. Isn't this its own condition which merits
| study and (separate) classification / treatment?
| swayvil wrote:
| To induce mental disease via the internet. That might be a
| thing now. It may already be happening to millions of people.
|
| That's a really big deal.
|
| A way bigger deal than a bunch of kids trying to get attention
| by faking whatever.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| That is also the premise of these three great films, inducing
| disease/mind-control via digital communication:
|
| 1. Videodrome
|
| 2. They Live
|
| 3. Pontypool (which heavily references SnowCrash, the book)
|
| It would not surprise me if this becomes a concern this
| century (e.g., digital manipulation of the brain remotely).
| swayvil wrote:
| I totally agree. And I have watched all 3 of those.
|
| Pontypool. Woo! What a crazy idea.
|
| Bookwise, I recommend QNTM's "There is no Antimemetics
| Division" and Langford's BLIT.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _The phenomenon I find most baffling is the insistence that we
| not be concerned, in any way, about that percentage of apparent
| cases where the person is faking a condition / system /
| syndrome._
|
| I don't know who you're talking to or what exactly you're
| referring to. If you read the article, phenomena is neither
| "faking it" nor is it "really Tourettes syndrome". IE, mass
| sociogenic illness is not "fake" but a result of humans being
| social organisms.
|
| Edit: And no one in the discussion I can see is expressing
| unconcern.
| jollybean wrote:
| I don't think 'faking' is the right word here, as in kids
| conscientiously trying to mislead others by practising tics,
| calculating the performance etc..
|
| But from the study it seems that it's not Tourettes either.
|
| The Placebo Effect is very real as well, and people weren't
| faking being sick in the first place, it's just that we're not
| as 'consciously in charge' as we might think.
|
| My armchair hunch that this is real phenom, and that we are
| much, much more impressionable than we imagine, and that so
| many of our attitudes, behaviours and ideas are grafted onto us
| as opposed to being choices we make.
|
| As noted when doctor's diagnosed kids as 'not having
| Tourettes', for many, the symptoms just disappeared - as though
| a more rational authoritative voice overcame some 'inner
| constructed belief'.
|
| I think this reaches into more than just behaviours, but all
| those complicated issues of 'identity' as well.
|
| It's an amazing thing it would be very fun to study.
| UWillOwnNothing wrote:
| Once mental diseases became a virtue, faking them quickly
| become a vice.
|
| Vast swathes of the West are stuck playing status games under
| the guise of social justice.
| standardUser wrote:
| Which begs the question, what should one do if they genuinely
| desire social justice and don't want to play games? It
| sometimes sounds as if the nay-sayers think this is an
| impossibility.
| BTCOG wrote:
| Actually physically go and affect change, rather than
| talking emptily on the internet?
|
| Seems a silly question to even ask such a thing.
| standardUser wrote:
| That prognosis strikes me as odd since so much social
| change occurs form organizing, communicating, writing and
| debating. All activities that benefit tremendously -
| incomparably! - from the internet.
| monkeydreams wrote:
| There is nothing in the article which suggests that the
| patients are faking it. It is an unconscious response.
| nightcracker wrote:
| It's a bit of a catch 22. On a surface level one might say that
| they are faking having Tourette's, and that they are completely
| healthy. But look a bit deeper and you realize that a mentally
| sane person would not copy the tics from a YouTube personality
| and keep the schtick up all the way to the doctors. So no, it's
| not Tourette's but yes, these people need help.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > and keep the schtick up all the way to the doctors
|
| It's perfectly normal to keep up a lie alive to an extreme
| degree just to avoid having to awkwardly admit you were lying.
| Think about the rape accusers who take it all the way to court
| before eventually admitting they made it up, or all of the
| married people who keep up the pretence of religion to avoid
| awkwardness with their actually-religious partners.
|
| On a more innocuous level, every one has bullshitted to avoid
| revealing that they don't know someone's name because it has
| got to the point that saying "sorry I don't know your name"
| would be too embarrassing.
| totetsu wrote:
| To some degrees sanity is defined by alignment with surrounding
| norms. If your peers Norms are going to extremes to do things
| for the lols, you might end up at the doctor's.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > a mentally sane person would not copy the tics from a YouTube
| personality
|
| A sane adult, sure. Kids? Hell no. Doing stupid things is a
| basic right of childhood. Kids always need help from adults in
| general, but I would not read to much in this single case.
| Overall from the kids perspective this seems rather harmless as
| nobody was harmed.
| stinos wrote:
| _you realize that a mentally sane person would not copy the
| tics from a YouTube personality_
|
| Food for thought. Is there really such a thing as a mentally
| sane person? Anyway the first thing which came to my mind when
| I read this was not 'mentally insane' but 'oh, puberty'. I'm
| not claiming all of this is completely normal, or all of these
| are pre-adult (heck even adults are still known to copy other's
| behavior) but I'm also quite careful of leaning towards the
| claim that all these people need help.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| > Is there really such a thing as a mentally sane person?
| Yes.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Everyone I know can receive a series of true facts and come
| out of that _believing something false_!
| ptoo wrote:
| I don't think mimicking someone's Tourette's, which is what
| these children are doing, makes them mentally unwell.
|
| It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking or
| enjoy the idea of being special. It reminds me of the
| relatively new phenomenon of a community on YouTube where kids
| faking multiple personality disorder upload videos displaying
| their "systems", and each persona in the system has some time
| on the camera before being taken over by other competing
| personae.
|
| Most people are in agreement that these kids are faking it, and
| it doesn't necessarily follow that they shouldn't be deemed
| "sane". It's more likely that they don't value the time of
| medical doctors and are willing to mimic a YouTube celebrity's
| tics for self-serving reasons, even if it is wasting their
| parents' money and the time of others.
| rasz wrote:
| Let me mimic mental disorder so I can be a punchline to
| weekly idiot doing stupid things mashup videos? or worse pr0n
| mashups like Sweet Anita? I dont see it.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I know I've inherited
| personality quirks, tics, and ways of speaking from notable
| figures because either I thought they were funny or simply
| because their tics and catch phrases have a quality much like
| that of an "earworm". Mimicry certainly doesn't have to
| indicate a psychological condition beyond perhaps having a
| bad habit, which everyone has every now and then. The
| internet is just amplifying some of these inate human
| characteristics at the same time that we have gotten really
| good at pathologizing everything and labeling ourselves.
| darkerside wrote:
| meme: (n) an element of a culture or system of behavior
| that may be considered to be passed from one individual to
| another by nongenetic means, especially imitation
| [deleted]
| jl6 wrote:
| They're smart, not insane. They have figured out how to use
| YouTube to monetize the "everything is valid" wave.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > I don't think mimicking someone's Tourette's, which is what
| these children are doing, makes them mentally unwell.
|
| > It's very possible that they are simply attention-seeking
| or enjoy the idea of being special.
|
| It depends on what you mean by mentally unwell. If mentally
| unwell means that they are unhappy, a danger to themselves or
| others, or having difficulty functioning in the world in an
| acceptable way - then being attention-seeking to that degree
| is also clearly being mentally unwell.
|
| If mentally unwell means that there's some physical problem
| with their brains, then very few people who are mentally well
| are _provably_ mentally unwell. I would prioritize for help a
| malingering Tourette 's sufferer whose life is falling apart
| because of that over an "authentic" Tourette's sufferer who
| has found strategies to cope with the disease in their daily
| life.
|
| The question shouldn't be to determine if they're really
| mentally unwell, but to determine whether their illness
| springs from the same causes that treatments that assume this
| is a physical problem are effective on, or from different
| causes (e.g. lack of/need for attention) which might yield to
| different treatment.
| mc32 wrote:
| Maybe doing a cross cultural study would help determine if
| it's mimicry (a social phenomenon) or there is something else
| by going to cultures that are different from ours and seeing
| if some of their kids get affected. Indonesia, Congo,
| Kazakhstan, Mongolia, etc.
| atatatat wrote:
| Why would they want that?
| ezconnect wrote:
| I had a classmate in elementary that faints almost everyday
| when the teacher is not around and gets well very fast once a
| teacher is called or get nears. We are all just kids and we
| thought she was very unwell. She likes being attended to we
| didn't knew it back then.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| This has also become a debate/problem in some segments of the
| aspergers/autism community where you have kids on TikTok
| pretending to be autistic.
|
| Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
| OneEyedRobot wrote:
| >Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
|
| Oooh, I think I'm going to steal that.
|
| To be fair, maybe it's just another mechanism for culture
| transfer. Hours per day on a phone filled with highly
| evolved addiction algorithms are proving their value, God
| knows what the future will bring.
|
| If kids never absorbed silly things, we'd never have had
| bellbottoms.
| fortran77 wrote:
| > we'd never have had bellbottoms.
|
| Those were appropriated from the Navy. See
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell-bottoms
| [deleted]
| faeriechangling wrote:
| This is a direct consequence of society giving aid to
| autistic people while reducing stigma, it is practically
| obvious that more people are going to consequently try and
| fit that label.
|
| What we see is this phenomena where autistic people today
| have less actual impairments, who might even take offense
| to the idea that they are impaired, but with more tiktok
| videos of "stimming" and flapping their hands on YouTube.
| An emphasis on the preformative over the substantive. There
| has even been a counter-backlash in this community that too
| much funding is going towards people with few impairments,
| and too little funding is going for people so disabled
| they're completely unable to be independent.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Stimming isn't performative, it's performs an important
| role in sensory regulation. Of course, that doesn't mean
| that there aren't kids who are acting out autism on
| TikTok. There probably are. But Autism is still greatly
| under-diagnosed, and I think you should also take into
| account how many people might be able to put a useful
| label on something that they'd previously just considered
| a personal quirk.
| totony wrote:
| >might be able to put a useful label on something that
| they'd previously just considered a personal quirk.
|
| Is that useful though? I disagree with this need people
| have to categorize themselves. It seems just going on
| without labels would be better
| nicoburns wrote:
| I think is is with something like autism that likely
| represents an underlying cognitive difference. It allows
| you to find other people like yourself, and calibrate
| your own experiences. To understand why you react to
| things in the way that you do. Otherwise you could easily
| end up going through life receiving advice and guidance
| that is completely inappropriate for you because it's
| aimed at an average that you diverge from significantly.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > with more tiktok videos of "stimming" and flapping
| their hands on YouTube.
|
| I do wonder why people view this as offensive or
| obviously fake though.
|
| I am a pretty well-adjusted adult who has not been
| formally diagnosed with anything, and I still "flap
| hands" when I am in private/can hide it from others. It's
| hardly performative.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I think what really strikes me is that the most common
| form of "stimming" I've seen in the wild is the leg
| bounce. I've seen various other kinds of "stims" from
| autistic people from verbal, to tapping their fingers, to
| playing with a pen, to using an actual toy, to squirming
| around a bit, to standing on their tiptoes. You also
| mentioned that you flap hands in private, that's the
| other thing, traditionally people have had this desire to
| "blend in" even when they DO flap their hands and avoid
| doing so.
|
| However if you go onto tiktok, you primarily are going to
| see the stim that everybody knows that real autistic
| people(tm) have. There is even some far-left advocacy
| within this community about having "loud hands", and even
| said activists have expressed discomfort with "staged
| stimming"
|
| https://www.autistichoya.com/2012/01/having-loud-
| hands.html
| https://www.autistichoya.com/2018/10/neurodiversity-
| needs-sh...
|
| It's just a very bizarre thing that when you're on
| tiktok, people desire to share what makes them look the
| most autistic. The other genre is incredibly attractive
| women getting indignant about people believing they are
| not autistic because they are incredibly attractive
| women. I get this sort of twilight zone vibe going into
| autism tiktok where everything seems slightly wrong.
| cannabis_sam wrote:
| > There is even some far-left advocacy within this
| community about having "loud hands", and even said
| activists have expressed discomfort with "staged
| stimming"
|
| I'm not trying to be contentious or combative, but what
| makes these people/trends far-left?
|
| (Absolutely agree about how people dismiss <<attractive>>
| women as not possibly being autistic tho, it's both sad
| and infuriating)
| faeriechangling wrote:
| Well regarding the specific person I cited they identify
| as "radical left" in their FAQ and they're probably the
| most prominent activist I can think of that makes this
| sort of advocacy.
|
| https://www.autistichoya.com/p/blog-page_19.html?m=1
|
| I don't mean to say all people who day people should stim
| openly are exactly far left. It's pretty mainstream
| especially in health/education nowadays to not suppress
| stimming so long as it's not unduly disruptive or harmful
| (i.e. stimming by screaming, smashing head into wall), as
| it's thought to be harmful for the suppressor.
|
| I would say that if somebody is stimming as a political
| statement or identity I'm almost invariably going to
| assume they're pretty left of center, because they're
| making an identity out of nonconformism and because of
| blog posts from radical leftists like the above.
| FooBarBizBazz wrote:
| "Stimming"? What in the fuck? Can't normal people fidget?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| > even said activists have expressed discomfort with
| "staged stimming"
|
| This is what I'm confused by - were the links you posted
| meant to shed light on that?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The first link was more straightup advocacy of stimming,
| the second is more of a reasoned followup after backlash
| to the first post 6 years earlier including the
| phenomenon of performative stimming. I'll jump to the
| blurb I was referencing in the 2nd link because the posts
| are quite long:
|
| "But sometimes I have also seen activists engaged in
| stimming that was not authentic -- stimming deliberately
| used to get attention or to make a statement. I'm not
| sure if this staged stimming is good and true: I'm not
| even sure if it could properly be called "stimming" (if
| stimming becomes divorced from its joy, its delicious
| rush, its natural high, is it still stimming?). And when
| we aren't stimming for joy, because our bodies want and
| need it, because it is physically releasing us from
| neurotypical oppression (the rule of quiet hands), then
| who or what are we stimming for?"
|
| Essentially making the point that stimming for the
| approval of others is still surrendering to ableism
| because you're performing for other people's acceptance
| when you should just be accepted. It's just that instead
| of trying to look more normal than you are, you try to
| look more different than you are.
|
| This is to me what gets at the heart of what bothers me
| about TikTok. It seems to create pressure on autistic
| people to confirm to stereotypes of autistic people.
| zepto wrote:
| > This is to me what gets at the heart of what bothers me
| about TikTok. It seems to create pressure on autistic
| people to confirm to stereotypes of autistic people.
|
| To me, this is a deeper problem with identity politics
| itself.
|
| When group identities are recognized over individuals,
| there is pressure is to display group identity,
| regardless of whether that is autistism, blackness,
| queerness, etc.
|
| TikTok is a Petri dish that amplifies the phenomenon.
| DoctorOW wrote:
| Depends on execution, in situations where I'm stimming,
| it'd never occur to me to turn on a camera. It's
| certainly not something that feels good or natural when
| forcing myself to do it.
|
| That said, even if hundreds of thousands of people upload
| videos indicating they are autistic that seems in line
| with the statistics on the matter.
|
| I could be convinced stimming videos are fake, but a high
| number of young people with ASD is consistent with the
| data.
| Morizero wrote:
| > Perhaps this is the end result of valorizing difference.
|
| What a weird way to try to tie this to modern politics. You
| do realize that the movie "Sybil" had a similar effect
| (people copying a mental condition) in _1976_ , predating
| any kind of acceptance movement?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I was worried that comment might be read this way, and of
| course copycat syndrome is something that has been with
| us for a long time.
|
| To be clear, this is an extremely small cost to pay for
| difference to be broadly accepted.
| [deleted]
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The article mentions one danger of potential misdiagnosis: the
| medications for treatment of Tourette's, if applied
| incorrectly, have sometimes severe side effects.
|
| But one other danger from this phenomenon is the overuse of
| already-stretched-thin counselors and therapists. If you've
| tried to acquire any mental health services over the past
| year... every counselor and organization seems severely
| overloaded and under-staffed.
| [deleted]
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Howdy, I've been diagnosed with Tourette's for 23 years.
| Including coprolalia and all the """fun""" symptoms (narrator:
| they were not fun). I read the paper behind this phenomenon last
| week and wrote some thoughts to a friend, reproducing here.
|
| From the paper:
|
| > Thirdly, patients often reported to be unable to perform
| unpleasable tasks because of their symptoms resulting in release
| from obligations at school and home, while symptoms temporarily
| completely remit while conducting favourite activities.
|
| I was conclusively diagnosed back in the stone age before smart
| phones were a thing and the internet was still dial-up, and even
| I got this neverending skepticism from teachers and classmates in
| the run-up to my diagnosis. "Hey Lars, how come your tics
| disappear when you're playing video games, but they flare up when
| it's time for a math test? PRETTY CONVENIENT!"
|
| Well, because tics are brought out by anxiety and vanish when a
| patient goes into a "flow state," -- this is super well
| established.
|
| On the other hand, the rest of the diagnostic criteria for this
| phenomena seems very reasonable to me, and I also am totally
| ready to believe that an induced faux tourette's syndrome would
| absolutely present this way.
|
| And then there's this one:
|
| > Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission
| occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
|
| So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these people
| they definitely don't have Tourette's, the behavior stops?
|
| They also kind of bury the lede with this one:
|
| > While it appears that age at onset is very similar in different
| countries with a preponderance of adolescents and young adults,
| gender distribution seems to be different: while half of our
| patients are male, the group of Davide Martino and Tamara
| Pringsheim at the University of Calgary in Canada reports a
| female to male ratio of about 9:1
|
| I've always heard that the sex ratio of Tourette's diagnosis is
| like 1:10 skewed towards males (looking it up it looks like it's
| actually 1:4.3 favoring males). So a sudden swing in the sex
| ratio for a disease that's long been presumed to have some kind
| of male-associated underlying genetic basis that lines up with a
| prominent female influence seems like pretty strong evidence for
| their theory.
|
| So I don't have the medial training to validate the clinical
| methodology, but from knowing what real tourette's syndrome feels
| like from the inside, this seems plausible.
|
| TL;DR -- these kids aren't getting tourette's from the internet,
| but it does seem like they're experiencing a real phenomenon that
| they need real treatment for. The correct first step is
| accurately diagnosing them with whatever this new thing is. Maybe
| some kids are just faking, maybe some others have genuinely
| convinced themselves they have something going on and this
| manifests in weird behaviors (which qualifies as a real condition
| in my eyes). Believe me, you absolutely do not want to be
| prescribed powerful brain medications unless you really need
| them.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Yeah, they give the following factors that excluded a diagnosis
| of Tourette's:
|
| > (i) onset was abrupt instead of slow,
|
| > (ii) symptoms constantly deteriorated instead of typical
| waxing and waning of tics,
|
| > (iii) "simple" movements (e.g. eye blinking) and noises (e.g.
| clearing one's throat) were clearly in the background or
| completely absent, although being the most common and typical
| symptoms in Tourette syndrome,
|
| > (iv) movements were mainly complex and stereotyped and
| predominantly located at arms and body, instead of at eyes and
| face,
|
| > (v) overall, the number of different movements, noises, and
| words was "countless" and far beyond the typical number of tics
| in Tourette syndrome, and
|
| > (vi) premonitory feelings were reported with atypical
| location, quality, and duration compared to tics in Tourette
| syndrome.
|
| Tourette's has fairly specific features. It's not a generic
| "behaving weirdly/antisocially and moving in funny ways" thing.
|
| Sorry to hear about your coprolalia. That sounds tough to cope
| with. It's annoying that it gets treated as synonymous with
| Tourette's in the media when it affects something like 10% of
| patients. Did it improve with adulthood? I grew out of the
| worst of my symptoms in my 20s as many do (diagnosed 30 years
| ago, some vocal tics but never coprolalia).
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Nope, still got it. Even have (thankfully rare) bouts of
| copropraxia, so I tend to keep my distance from folks. My
| symptoms never really faded with adulthood so much as
| controlling my environment to be as low-stress as possible
| helps me keep my symptoms low on a day to day basis. Working
| from home for the past 15 years has been a huge part of that.
| agumonkey wrote:
| reminds me of some people who don't stutter when they sing.
| brain goes into a different mode.
| comprev wrote:
| See "The King's Speech" (2010) for a wonderful film about
| this process
| matthewaveryusa wrote:
| My grandfather was like that. He got worked up easily and the
| more worked up he got the worse his stutter was, so in a
| comical way he had to switch to singing his grievances.
| technofiend wrote:
| It also works to switch someone else's mental state. When
| my wife gets really argumentative I'll switch to singing
| whatever I have to say and it often snaps her out of it.
| [deleted]
| derefr wrote:
| > So apparently when a doctor in a white coat tells these
| people they definitely don't have Tourettes, the behavior
| stops?
|
| I don't know if there's a general term for this, but there seem
| to be a category of syndromes where if you're high-functioning
| with the syndrome, then it's _possible_ to suppress the
| symptoms, and whether you 're _expected_ to suppress the
| symptoms depends on whether a doctor "grants you the
| privilege" of a diagnosis of having the disease.
|
| For example, Hikikomori in Japan--these people almost certainly
| have Social Anxiety Disorder, but it's their parents/caregivers
| that _enable_ them to live as recluses, and they only tend to
| do this if _they_ believe their child has some sort of clear
| mental illness. If they take their child to a psychiatrist and
| the psychiatrist says "nope, no social anxiety, they just like
| staying home to play video games", then the parents would
| likely stop enabling the child to stay in their room all the
| time, and instead would _force_ them to go out. Even if it
| turns out that the child really just has _high-functioning_
| Social Anxiety Disorder, to the point where it 's "masked" from
| a signs-and-symptoms based diagnosis; and so is still markedly
| _suffering_ when made to go out in public. Without the
| diagnosis, they 're no longer allowed to be _free from social
| approbation_ when they avoid people.
|
| I would think a similar thing could be at play in "high-
| functioning", able-to-be-suppressed-with-constant-effort
| Tourettes cases: without the diagnosis (or rather, with a
| negative diagnosis), nobody around you will _tolerate_ a
| Tourettes outburst from you, so you just have to "suck it up"
| and mask it as hard as you can. Also, given the negative
| diagnosis, your supporters will likely no longer associate the
| more subtle symptoms _with_ Tourettes, as they now "know" you
| don't have it; so they'll mentally categorize those tics, if
| they do show up, as being something else.
|
| In such cases, you'd also expect that if someone had _always
| known_ such symptoms were socially-unacceptable and so _had
| always been_ actively suppressing them, then finding out that
| there 's a disease they might have where presenting these
| symptoms _would_ be considered socially-acceptable in the
| context of having that disease, would mean they 'd suddenly be
| willing to start 1. claiming they have the disease, and 2.
| presenting the symptoms--but only _after_ people know and
| understand their claim to have the disease, as the whole point
| is to be able to finally "let out" the symptoms _while_
| avoiding social approbation for them.
|
| > So a sudden swing in the sex ratio for a disease that's long
| been presumed to have some kind of male-associated underlying
| genetic basis that lines up with a prominent female influence
| seems like pretty strong evidence for their theory.
|
| Charitable interpretation: women are underdiagnosed with
| Tourettes, because some combination of hormonal and social
| factors generally leads to them generally being higher-
| functioning -- i.e. "leaking" the symptoms less. But actually,
| they're still being impacted, just silently (i.e. their
| dopamine is being drained faster by having to "fight the urge",
| much like someone with OCD.)
|
| This is the current hypothesis for the gender disparity in
| diagnosis of childhood ADHD. It's very underdiagnosed in girls
| (which we know because a lot of these undiagnosed girls become
| adult women who go to a psychiatrist and find out they have
| adult ADHD, and then think back and realize they've always had
| the _internal experience_ of ADHD but were never diagnosed.) We
| think this is because girls are more trait-conscientious, which
| leads to them being more _motivated_ to not let (socially-
| unacceptable) hyperactivity symptoms "leak", while still
| internally suffering from those symptoms, and visibly suffering
| from the more socially-acceptable symptoms (which alone aren't
| usually enough for people to put two and two together and send
| them to a psychiatrist for diagnosis.)
|
| -----
|
| All that being said, yeah, I don't think this is really "high-
| functioning Tourettes." That isn't quite how Tourettes works;
| there's a lot of involuntary stuff in Tourettes that absolutely
| cannot be suppressed no matter how much you might want to, and
|
| But there _are_ a number of etiologies with related symptom
| profiles. My guess about what actual "property" these girls
| are actually noticing about themselves, is that they're high-
| functioning _on the autistic spectrum_ (another thing
| underdiagnosed in women!) and so find that stimming behaviors
| -- which can look a lot like Tourettes motor tics, but are
| actually voluntary, just _highly preferred_ to be executed when
| possible -- help to calm certain sensory processing problems
| they have.
| larsiusprime wrote:
| > I would think a similar thing could be at play in "high-
| functioning", able-to-be-suppressed-with-constant-effort
| Tourettes cases: without the diagnosis (or rather, with a
| negative diagnosis), nobody around you will tolerate a
| Tourettes outburst from you, so you just have to "suck it up"
| and mask it as hard as you can.
|
| Tourette's can't really be suppressed consistently, it comes
| out eventually, and suppressing it now just makes it worse
| later. It is very hard to hide -- believe me, I've tried.
| Also, see the comment in the above thread -- one pretty
| strong giveaway is an entire lack of facial tics and other
| classic tells. I have a ton of the "famous" Tourette's
| symptoms -- coprolalia, echolalia, palilalia, even a small
| touch of the dreaded copropraxia, not to mention at times
| extremely exaggerated arm movements (beating my chest like a
| gorilla is the most common). However, my first tics, and
| which continue as a constant background noise, are small
| facial grimaces, nose wrinkles, blinks, making tiny grunts,
| etc. It is extremely anomalous to see someone present with
| "Tourette's" and not have any of those low level tics, but
| all the "fancy" ones.
|
| > Charitable interpretation: women are underdiagnosed with
| Tourettes, because some combination of hormonal and social
| factors generally leads to them generally being higher-
| functioning -- i.e. "leaking" the symptoms less. But
| actually, they're still being impacted, just silently (i.e.
| their dopamine is being drained faster by having to "fight
| the urge", much like someone with OCD.)
|
| I'm more than willing to keep an open mind, but look at the
| effect size.
|
| Swinging from 1:4.3 to 9:1 is a change of 38X. That is
| RIDICULOUSLY huge. I'm happy to postulate that women are
| undiagnosed to some degree, but a swing of that size, that is
| that sudden, and which lines up so closely with a specific
| group and a specific female influencer, based primarily on
| observed novel physical symptoms, charitably speaking at
| least merits a little scrutiny, wouldn't you think? A mere
| 1.5X change would be enormous, 38X is astronomical.
| derefr wrote:
| > Swinging from 1:4.3 to 9:1 is a change of 38X. That is
| RIDICULOUSLY huge.
|
| Those numbers would not be as bad if one postulates that
| there's a subset of men who _also_ have the right factors
| to lead to underdiagnosis, such that the right influencer
| with a male audience would make men 's numbers shoot up as
| well; and that such a mens' influencer just happened to
| have not shown up yet.
|
| > It is extremely anomalous to see someone present with
| "Tourette's" and not have any of those low level tics, but
| all the "fancy" ones.
|
| Is it possible that there is an undiscovered "diagnostic
| spectrum" on which Tourettes is the endpoint? Like how, at
| some point, we knew low-functioning autism was a thing, but
| only _later_ figured out that high-functioning autism (e.g.
| Asperger 's) was a thing?
|
| ----
|
| (That being said, I do think I agree with you that this
| probably isn't Tourettes of any kind; see the postscript in
| my previous comment. I just like to ask these Devil's
| Advocate kind of questions to see where they go, in case
| there's interesting science down one of these unwalked
| paths.)
| larsiusprime wrote:
| Yeah, so the thing is we don't actually know the
| underlying cause of Tourette's. It's just a syndrome -- a
| specific pattern of symptoms you draw a circle around and
| label it "Tourette's syndrome." Therefore, what is and is
| not Tourette's is fairly tautological. If you have these
| symptoms according to this pattern, you have it. If you
| don't, you don't. It's entirely plausible that Tourette's
| syndrome is caused by multiple different underlying
| pathologies, which actually wouldn't be super implausible
| given the wildly different ways in which different
| patients with similar symptoms respond to the same
| medications.
|
| But my point is, the diagnostic criteria are pretty
| clear, and (most of) these kids aren't matching them. And
| _any_ time you see a whopping big effect size like that
| your skepticism lights need to go off. Either you just
| discovered the find of the century, or you have a basic
| measurement error. In either case the proper course of
| action is to subject it to more scrutiny.
| derefr wrote:
| I have a feeling that what the people who are "diagnosing
| themselves with Tourettes" are really trying to say here,
| then (i.e. "what they'd say if they were all trained
| psychiatrists"), isn't that they think they have exactly
| the Tourette Syndrome symptom-cluster; but rather that
| they think they may have a lesser form of some
| _particular as-yet-unknown pathology_ that, in its full
| extent, would be an etiology underlying the syndrome of
| Tourettes; and that this is causing a cluster of symptoms
| for them that is similar-but-not-identical to the
| Tourette Syndrome symptom-cluster -- similar-enough that
| there 's nothing really better to describe it by than by
| comparison to Tourette Syndrome. (Though certainly
| doctors would come up with a unique name for it in the
| DSM-VI, _if_ it turned out to not be induced mass
| Munchhausen 's.)
| larsiusprime wrote:
| I don't necessarily disagree; I went undiagnosed with
| Tourette's as a kid while presenting symptoms for a good
| five years and I knew _something_ was going on with me
| but I had no idea what it could be.
|
| Also, a good ~10 years after my tourette's diagnosis I
| was further diagnosed with cataplectic narcolepsy. I knew
| I had always had these weird symptoms (going
| spontaneously limp) that weren't well described by
| Tourette's, but I was grasping at straws to figure out
| what it was, and trying to self-diagnose I took myself
| down all sorts of blind alleys convincing myself I had
| this or that. Once I was able to get a conclusive
| diagnosis and actually helpful treatment, my narcolepsy
| symptoms got very well controlled, and then with that
| stressor off my back my tourette's symptoms finally
| became manageable without medication. All the symptoms
| are still "there" but knowing what I actually have -- and
| what I _don 't_ have -- was crucial to getting the right
| treatment.
| okareaman wrote:
| Another strange internet phenomenon is Tulpas, or imaginary
| friends that are real to those that have them.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/Tulpa/
| bob229 wrote:
| This is fake news. We all know that social contagion like this
| doesn't hapen, the trans rights activists have made that clear
| effnorwood wrote:
| Fuck!
| [deleted]
| raffraffraff wrote:
| It's time to take the batteries out of the internet and put it up
| on the top shelf. The kids need to go outside and play in the
| dirt.
| nixpulvis wrote:
| I'll do what my Mom always did and blame the parents.
| api wrote:
| When I read the title I had the thought that someone had
| concocted some kind of adversarial neural network attack on
| humans that could be delivered by video, like in Neil
| Stephenson's Snow Crash.
|
| Reminds me of this oddity: https://rarediseases.org/rare-
| diseases/jumping-frenchmen-of-...
|
| Are there such things as mimetic diseases? We have definitely
| seen that alarmingly insane quasi-cults like Qanon or flat Earth
| can spread entirely via social media, so that isn't too far away.
| The jump would be to something not requiring conscious thought or
| belief at all, something that fully bypasses the neocortex.
|
| If that is actually possible I can see a future where everyone
| runs smart content filters (maybe AI powered) and curated
| whitelists before viewing things. Maybe there could be mental
| techniques for handling "cognitive hazards" that could be learned
| too. I feel like some mystical traditions have inklings of that
| like "visualize a white light around you" or "as I walk through
| the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." Maybe
| that stuff fires up some anti-malware in your brain.
|
| At least there is already a symbol:
| https://www.flickr.com/photos/arenamontanus/264113001
| jl6 wrote:
| Mimetic disease? If by that you include Bad Ideas, then yes,
| absolutely there are techniques for defending yourself against
| them. See things like Carl Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World#Balone...
|
| Or more generally, awareness of informal logical fallacies
| prepares you for spotting them in the wild (and they are
| _everywhere_ ).
|
| I'd also include texts such as Rudyard Kipling's If in the
| toolbox of defensive thinking, for its advocacy of balance and
| humility:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If%E2%80%94
|
| And pg's essay on small identity:
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/identity.html
|
| And thought-terminating cliches:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
|
| None of these are guides to having good ideas as such, but can
| help avoid falling into the traps of bad ideas.
| [deleted]
| robocat wrote:
| > Are there such things as mimetic diseases?
|
| A n article on a doco with good background info:
| https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/mar/29/carol-morley-th...
|
| "Ninety per cent of participants in reported epidemics are
| female. [] Studies that try to explain mass psychogenic
| illnesses have uncovered a familiar pattern. They are
| transmitted by sight and sound, so you have to witness the
| events happening to be affected. They often begin very suddenly
| and spread rapidly. Adolescents and pre-adolescents are
| particularly susceptible to them. They are also more likely to
| escalate if the people involved know each other. Seeing a
| friend who you admire becoming sick is the best predictor of
| getting symptoms. She faints and then immediately you start to
| feel shaky and sick too and it starts to spread. As Simon
| suggested: "Anxiety itself goes up and you get more symptoms.
| You get breathless, you start to shake, feel nauseous and sick.
| But instead of saying, 'I'm getting anxious', you think you're
| possibly getting poisoned."
| myWindoonn wrote:
| Humans lost the war against memes, if there could have been a
| war, millennia ago. We are now ruled by memes like "language"
| and "currency" and "justice".
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| And we like it.1 Is it "losing a war" if we weren't fighting?
|
| 1: To the extent we _don 't_ like it, we're still fighting.
| And if you're not, consider: why not? (There's a meme for
| you: one should fight against harmful ideas.)
| zdkl wrote:
| I was about to jump in with the term "cognitohazard", from SCP
| lore. Imagine a future where you'd hear something like "Welcome
| to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day."
| (@qntm is a terrific story writer and also brought us hatetris)
|
| https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| api wrote:
| We are so, so close to that. Political parties and nation
| states now effectively have memetic warfare arms in the form
| of very advanced and soon AI augmented PR and propaganda
| agencies. Where there is attack there must also be defense.
|
| Arms races tend to push innovation, which is why I now wonder
| about actual adversarial attacks on the brain that can bypass
| choice and thought entirely and even cause illness. That
| would be the logical endpoint, sort of like how the hydrogen
| bomb was the outcome of the bombing arms race. If it's
| possible I predict it will be discovered in the next 25
| years. We may see a video that sends people to the hospital
| that appears, say, right before an election and is targeted
| at the opposing side.
| [deleted]
| olingern wrote:
| It seems that the mind can absorb much more than we previously
| thought from observation. I wonder how the human brain perceives
| gameplay characters vs humans in a video
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