Vor ein paar Monaten piqde ich einen kleinen Artikel über Tourette-artige Symptome, die sich memetisch über emotionale Ansteckung auf Video-Plattformen verbreiten, die wahrscheinlich erste über das Internet übertragene Krankheit, eine neue Form sogenannter Mass Psychogenic Illness (früher: Massenhysterie). Viele Tech-Kommentatoren konnten das nicht glauben und belächelten die Nachricht, während die Meldungen auf zwei wissenschaftlichen Veröffentlichungen ("papers") beruhten, die das Phänomen unabhängig voneinander untersuchten. Helen Lewis hat nun im Atlantic einen langen Artikel über die erste memetische Krankheit, Tourette-Influencer auf Youtube und die “Twitching Generation” mit einigen sehr faszinierenden Details geschrieben.

Tammy Hedderly, a neurologist at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, sometimes calls her new-style tic patients “Evies.” These girls “present thumping their chest, shouting beans, and falling to their knees,” she told the virtual conference. The nickname comes from a 21-year-old British influencer named Evie Meg Field, also known as @thistrippyhippie, who has 14.2 million followers on TikTok and nearly 800,000 on Instagram. Field has published a book called My Nonidentical Twin: What I’d Like You to Know About Living With Tourette’s.

Field’s signature tic—saying beans—is what alerted the British researcher Tara Murphy that the Tourette’s patient she saw on remote St. Helena must have been influenced by the internet. At the October conference, Murphy described how “LM,” a 16-year-old born and raised on the island, had tics from an early age but suddenly developed much more florid symptoms in early 2021: clicking, whistling, and saying beans. In other words, LM was an “Evie.”
Field herself has acknowledged her strange power. On September 25, she posted a video of herself looking sheepish with the caption: “me watching 95% of ppl with tics/tourette’s say the ‘beans’ tic knowing i’m the original source.” (…)

Categorizing the new tic-disorder outbreak as a mass psychogenic illness would explain many of its notable features, such as the age and gender profile of patients. Bartholomew says that out of the 3,500 likely cases of MPIs that he has identified through history, “I would say 98 percent of them are majority female.” (Two possible exceptions are Gulf War and Havana syndromes.)

Are girls simply more prone to such illnesses? Early research does suggest that they are more affected by social-media pressures, after all. Or are doctors and authorities more ready to describe women’s symptoms as the modern version of hysteria? What is clear, though, is that something new is happening in the history of mass psychogenic illnesses. Previously, an outbreak was limited to one village, one classroom, one nunnery. “It has always been said that it’s spread by sight and sound; in the past, that’s been a limiting factor,” Bartholomew told me. But now we are a global village, and if tics can instead be spread through screens, then that tells us something about how strongly teenagers feel about the people they interact with online.