Kirsten Müller-Vahl had an important mystery in his hands. It was June 2019 and Müller-Vahl, a psychiatrist at Hannover Medical School in Germany and head of Tourette’s outpatient service, was being inundated by patients with tics different from anything she had seen before.
The tics were not only complex in nature, with various muscle groups, although more strangely the patients ’symptoms were remarkably similar. “The symptoms were identical. Not just similar, but identical, ”he says. Although other doctors had formally diagnosed Tourette with other doctors, Müller-Vahl, who has been working with patients with Tourette syndrome for 25 years, was sure it was something else. Then a student showed up who knew where she had seen those tics before.
All patients showed the same tick-like behaviors as the star of a popular YouTube channel. Gewitter im Kopf (meaning “storm in the head”) documents the life of Jan Zimmermann, a 23-year-old German with Tourette. The channel’s raison d’être is to speak openly and humorously about Zimmerman’s disorder, and it has proven to be a success, amassing more than 2 million subscribers in two years.
Some of Zimmerman’s tics are specific. He is often seen saying the phrases “Fliegende Haie” (flying sharks), “Heil Hitler”, “Du bist häßlich” (you are ugly) and “pommes” (french fries). Other tics include crushing eggs and throwing pens at school.
Patients who visited the Müller-Vahl clinic almost mimicked Zimmerman’s tics. Many also referred to her condition as Gisela, the YouTuber nickname for her condition. In all, about 50 patients at his clinic had symptoms similar to those of Zimmerman. Many patients easily admitted to having seen their videos. Zimmerman did not respond to any requests for comment.
Although Tourette’s spectrum of symptoms is broad, similar symptoms tend to appear again and again, Müller-Vahl says. Classic tics are usually simple, short and abrupt. They are located mainly in the eyes, face or head, such as blinking, shaking and curling eyes. The syndrome usually manifests around age 6, and much more often in boys (an average of three to four boys for a girl). What comes to mind when you imagine Tourette’s, an uncontrollable desire to utter obscenities in public, is really weird, she says.
But if it wasn’t Tourette’s, what was it? According to Müller-Vahl, these patients actually suffered from something called functional movement disorder or FMD. This could be presented as Tourette’s, but when the latter has a neurological basis (although the root cause is not yet known, it is believed to be related to abnormalities in brain regions such as the basal ganglia), the cause of fever. foot and mouth disease is psychological. In FMD, the hardware is intact, but the software does not work properly, while with Tourette’s, the software works fine, but the hardware does not. People with foot-and-mouth disease have the ability to control their bodies, but they have lost the reins, causing abnormal and involuntary behaviors.
For some patients, all their symptoms disappeared when Müller-Vahl explained that what they had was not Tourette’s. For others, a course of psychotherapy significantly improved their symptoms. However, the large number of patients with the same symptoms baffled Müller-Vahl and colleagues.
Sociogenic mass disease (also known as mass psychogenic disease or historically called mass hysteria) spreads like a social virus. But instead of a perceptible viral particle, the pathogen and the method of infection are invisible. Symptoms transmitted by unconscious social mimicry to vulnerable people, which are thought to be triggered by emotional distress. (Not included in the Statistical and Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, although it bears a strong resemblance to conversion disorder, which involves the “conversion” of emotional distress into physical symptoms.) Historically, massive sociogenic diseases affect more. to women than men. The reason is unknown, but one hypothesis is that females tend to have higher levels of anxiety and depression, which may make them more susceptible to the disease.