For those who don't have time to read, this article presents finding and evidence that mass sociogenic illness can spread online without physical interaction, and proposes a name for this phenomenon "mass social media-induced illness".
The article also provides an analysis of the current outbreak of Tourette's like syndrome in teenagers in Germany following the rise of a specific Youtuber.
Can't this kind of focus get really dangerous towards those who actually suffer from these challenges? I've already been accused of faking various illnesses/psych symptoms that I've been diagnosed with so this is a bit scary to me, that it's already a problem that providers dismiss symptoms, and when they read something like this they're going to be more likely to. There is supposedly a way to differentiate but I guarantee no GP is going to be doing that, and with doctors visits now 15 mins in the us (with as little as 5-8 being just for the patient) it's very difficult to get anything done.
I come from a place where specialists are hard to come by and when I finally got in to see someone about my condition she accused me of seeking pain killers (I was not, opioids are not going to help what is wrong with me) and then told me the symptom I was experiencing was my body "getting better". I went probably 4 years longer undiagnosed because of her. She eventually left the area and went to a teaching hospital to TEACH. When I told her what condition I believed I had, she literally laughed at my and ridiculed me for thinking I could self-diagnose. Meanwhile, I was diagnosed with this well after the damage was done and I experienced neck and lumbar fusion. Let's just there is a wide range of compentency in doctors, even specialists.
Doctors are no better or worse than car mechanics. Some are meticulous and think about the end result, others follow Mitchell’s or whatever and feel threatened whenever customers try to tell them what they think is wrong.
1) mechanic-like workmen in the classic mold of the "blue collar" work ethic but don't pretend to be better/worse than others. Often produce better results that the "IQ" tests would suggest.
2) Usually competent but imposter syndrome people that sometimes lose focus due to lack of faith in training and ability. Capable of high achievement (probably better than #1) but often struggle with consistency in end results. Often undersell themselves, so it's hard to tell if they know what they are doing.
3) Status seekers that hide subpar ability or even downright incompetence with degrees and arrogance. Kind of a high functioning "Dunning-Kruger" subtype with conman/sociopathic /social abilities.
4) The frighteningly competent that case #3 pretend to be, #2 might be able to do, and are basically #1 combined with real talent.
Sounds like you ended up with #3.
Whenever I encounter an "expert" in a field, it comes down to diagnosing whether they are a 3 or a 4.
I considered my experience with doctors and with programmers and middle managers (plus there was the Apple abuse story mulling through my head) and came up with that.
I'm a programmer and I'm an average #2.
#3s in programming are kind of different. Incompetents get weeded out quickly from true programming jobs and punted up to management likely where they become part of the Middle Management Machiavelli perpetual war.
#3s express themselves as moderate technical competence, a typical one would be someone that gets to declare greenfield to the specific stuff they have enough ability to do, gain sheen of competence, and then aggressively assume the role of "expert" based, since to management they "produced".
Next thing you know, some guy that could rapidly stand up a PHP site is in technical leadership and pushing for PHP to serve as a big data platform because it is (rolls another dice to determine buzzword) "agile".
Then they have as much or more organizational pull as a legit #4 and your organization is in TROUBLE.
This is one of my concerns with what I've seen of the recent fetishizing of mental illness, it seems to many people I talk to or interact with, especially younger people, it is popular and cool to have some sort of mental illness, such as anxiety or depression, or something else.
Of course many of these indivudals are self diagnosed but that doesn't stop them from talking about it constantly and holding themselves up as a "suffering soul". Meanwhile those who legitimately struggle with issues like depression or anxiety now get either brushed off, or have people that "totally understand" when really they don't at all.
I think a big issue is that mental illness diagnoses are yes or no, but people experience actual mental illnesses on a spectrum. for example, you can be mildly depressed or completely hopeless, slightly traumatized or full-out PTSD with hallucinations, controllable or uncontrollable OCD, etc.
Also, the same mental illness could have 20 different causes, and a method which cures one of those causes is ineffective against others.
The people with mild illnesses need help too. The people with more serious issues need more serious help. But when someone says “I’m depressed” you don’t know if they’re a little upset or genuinely miserable. You don’t know if it’s because they’re life is boring right now, their dog died, or there’s a serious chemical imbalance. So in essence, saying “I’m depressed” no longer means much unless you state the symptoms.
I read the abstract and had the same concern. In fact I was ready to reject the whole thing, partly thanks to the blunt wording. However, I downloaded the PDF and... yeah, that's not Tourette's.
I have/had Tourette's (like most, I grew out of the worst symptoms after adolescence) and the media portrayal of it is pretty awful. These symptoms align with the portrayal, not the reality. Tourette's should be diagnosed by a neurologist, not a GP, and this doesn't sound hard to distinguish.
My concern being, once GPs start seeing this media, they are less likely to be referred to a neurologist at all. Another example: a hospital near me is denying my neuropsych referral despite a valid reason because my doctor isn't in their network. Getting to a specialist is getting harder and harder even when you do have a sympathetic GP.
Yes, many streamers on Twitch, and content creators on YouTube have faced such accusations, some of them have been extensively harassed, to the point they even provided evince, medication signed by doctors out of desperation for the harassment to stop, needless to say in some cases it didn't.
> Can't this kind of focus get really dangerous towards those who actually suffer from these challenges?
Suicide is also a social contagion. So are eating disorders, depression, gender dysphoria, cutting. All documented occurring online and obviously occurred offline pre-internet, perhaps not as well documented offline.
These people are all suffering.
You can't not talk about it. You have to work out how to treat each disease correctly.
Social contagion can result in surprisingly self destructive behavior.
> For the first time that I am aware of, we are seeing clusters of people seeking voluntary amputations of healthy limbs and performing amputations on themselves.
That was in 2000 and since then it's only increased in scale. Tumblr alone saw widespread suicidal ideation, depression, self-harm and a host of identity crises.
Amputation. Powerful memes. Where have I seen this combination before?
Addressing it head-on: Galatians 6:13.
Explicitly fighting it by redefinition (how pomo!): 1 Corinthians 3:18-19; Colossians 2:11.
Saying that it is beside the point: Galatians 5:6.
Dismissing the practice as exclusionary: Romans 3:1,28-31.
It shows up again and again.
Christianity deals with it thus: The old blood sacrifice is obsoleted by the new sacrifice -- the sacrifice to end all sacrifices, the Lamb of God.
Surely if we look in other faith traditions we will also find, in some of them, efforts to combat this sort of thing. It seems to crop up again and again with memes. They want to mark people.
It makes me wonder if for many years parents knew what they were doing by keeping their kids away from “bad crowds”. It wasn’t just to keep them away from bad behaviors but also bad ideas. Certainly difficult to do today without alienating your kids.
I find it ironic that so much of what is “social” today was built by nerds who I assume had a difficult time socializing and everyone else that did not have a problem socializing for thousands of years are now using these weird social tools.
But what if all the potential members of my tribe are still plugged into… oh my god it’s the matrix, we have to go find the people we want on our side and flush them out of the machine! Perhaps by fooling the machine into flushing them out for us, ie get them banned from social media :o
A friend of a friend is currently pretending to have Tourettes on TikTok and amassed quite a following. This person seems to have shown attention seeking behavior in the past. I'm not sure one would call this an illness, but it depends on your definition.
Seems like some heavy editorializing for a research paper:
"Moreover, they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man."
Possibly, but in physics the standard for stating something is "true" is 5 or 6 sigma while in sociology, maybe 2 sigma. In the first case, you can take the finding as a fact and it is very unlikely to change in your lifetime, in the second case, one needs to constantly keep in mind the conclusion might not be true. Not really that useful, actually.
Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.
Doing sociology is hard and physics is, in some ways, absurdly easy. As a physicist, you can generate an endless supply of particles. They are all identical, and so behave in the same way. They do whatever they do, regardless of the experimenters' expectations, social pressures, or the like. The results can be slotted into a formal mathematical framework, which also helps you design better experiments. The work of these experiments is often difficult (e.g., holding a detector just about 0K), but the concepts are often relatively clear.
None of this is true in 'softer' sciences. Every person (or animal) is different and you often can't even test the same subject twice because the very act of doing so changes them. People often don't know what they want or why they do something. When they do know, they sometimes lie about it, for myriad reasons. This makes designing, analyzing, and interpreting experiments conceptually hard, even if the actual work is pretty easy.
>>> Good sociology papers are just as scientific as physics or engineering papers,
> Snobbery about the conventional levels of significance (etc) is almost entirely beside the point.
It seems like entirely the point. Also, the difficulties you describe are reasons sociology can't be as scientific as physics, not reasons to pretend sociology is just as scientific.
I think the problem is conflating being scientific with numerical. This paper is not very numerical, but is scientific. It lays out observations and a hypothesis that might explain those observations.
> It lays out observations and a hypothesis that might explain those observations.
The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested. A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does, regardless of how much effort is expended. A field being more scientific than another isn't a matter of researchers trying harder. The quality of their results, independent of the magnitude of their effort, is what really matters. If researchers dutifully follow the scientific method by the textbook and, due to the subject of their research, can only get slipshod results, their field is less scientific than one in which researchers easily get high quality results.
This definition seems very idiosyncratic to me, and wrong in more than a few ways.
Science is usually defined as a process of systematic exploration, rather than a set of results. One goal of that process is to make predictions, but it’s not the only one. Even if it were, I don’t see how you can aggregate the quality of predictions within and across fields.
Physics is a perfect example. It’s true that some phenomena have been measured with exquisite precision and can be used to make extremely accurate predictions (relativity, say). Other phenomena turn out to be immeasurable: chaotic systems are, by definition, virtually impossible to predict even though they are generated by simple rules. I find those rules more interesting than yet-another decimal place on the fine structure constant. Plus, it seems incoherent to argue that particle physics is more scientific than biology which is more scientific than atmospheric physics but…
Finally, even if science were defined by predictive accuracy and there were a sensible way of comparing them across fields…the alpha levels/confidence intervals from individual experiments certainly aren’t the right way to do it! They’re a mishmash of the intrinsic variability of the thing under study, then resources devoted to studying it, and the assumptions baked into your design. In 2011, OPERA reported a six-sigma detection of faster than light neutrinos. This was, of course, not really true: a loose cable that was not included in their model was responsible instead.
The scientific process is a means to an end. The only reason it has any value at all is because it gets better results than other processes. But this process is not equally effective in all fields of inquiry. Those fields in which the process is more effective are "more scientific". Fields in which this method are less effective are less scientific.
>The part you're missing here is where those hypotheses are tested.
There is no rule that every science paper needs to do testing and cover the whole scientific method from start to finish. Some can just be building blocks; data, hypothesis, ect.
>A field that consistently makes accurate predictions is more scientific than one which rarely does
I couldn't disagree more. That just means the field is more predictable
Super rare then, because I don't know of any quantitative sociological theory that holds under all (reasonable) conditions. Nor of a qualitative one, by the way.
I think it is clear they have a strong personal opinion about something that want people to recognize.
I think this is clear from the title of the paper: "Stop that! It’s not Tourette’s but a new type of mass sociogenic illness"
I don't think that is inappropriate. Mass sociogenic illnesses are recognized and generally thought to be related to stress and psychological conditions. It makes sense that they would opine on what these stressors and conditions are, and back them up with a dozen references.
It doesn't make that clear at all, it's just an editorialisation.
The thrust of the paper, which is that behaviours seem to be on some level 'contagious' is an absolutely important issue.
If these can be contagious, imagine what other 'in the range of normative' types of behaviours are equally contagious?
Anyone who's around small children knows how immediately and intimately they observe and learn behaviour, it's definitely something we don't think of enough.
I'm not sure if I agree with the thesis in that attention-seeking is a fundamental driver for most, I think it is for a very large cohort and is a 'relevant factor' for further study. Though it's a tough one to decompose no doubt.
It's unusual to editorialize in the abstract like that. It's not uncommon to puff up the merit of the work in the last sentence or two, but making sweeping generalizations about "modern man" is usually beyond the pale.
This kind of emergent behavior reminds me of my time in high school. My friends and I eventually developed a small patois through tons of inside jokes that fed on themselves and morphed into inside jokes of their own. None of this was intentional—it was just copying things that were funny and changing them slightly in more hilarious ways. We could basically freely utter nonsense that would otherwise get us detention.
I feel like this is similar, where one behavior is seen, then altered by someone else, etc. It’s like an in-group signifier that you understand it, and that you can modify it in a meaningful way.
In Germany, current outbreak of MSMI is initiated by a “virtual” index case, who is the second most successful YouTube creator in Germany and enjoys enormous popularity among young people.
These videos have now be proved to directly inflict harm to some viewers in the form of being diagnostic with the wrong condition and being administrated the wrong drug. The argument could be the same for video triggering epileptic stroke, should they be allow on a video platform, accessible to children or monetized?
You can see he demonstrates these "random" tourette symptoms. The linked research states how experts looking at these videos have identified them as way beyond the normal tics of someone with Tourette's, and they change and have context across videos. They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied. The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics" and the popular ones are even sold on merchandise like T-shirts.
If I'm reading the paper correctly, they've attempted to treat teens demonstrating these symptoms as if they were treating Tourette's and it didn't work. It's some type of illness related to identity and attention-seeking enforced by social media. So they're saying teens see these types of videos and start imitating the behavior as part of a mental illness.
Furthermore, they found that the symptoms often went away after the patients and families were told that they did not actually have tourettes. Reading between the lines, the behavior stopped when others no longer provided the level of attention and indulgence desired.
>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 favorite activities. Fourthly, in some patients, a rapid and complete remission occurred after exclusion of the diagnosis of Tourette syndrome.
Perhaps I've read too much William Gibson, but there's definitely a part of me that thinks if I watch that video I will come down with some kind of Tourette's syndrome.
I mean, obviously we're not going to see a physical virus that enters as sensory information --
Wait. ... Are COVID and anti-masking part of the same replicator-complex? ... I see how anti-masking helps COVID. But how would COVID help anti-masking? I don't see how. ... Ok, probably not.
-- but that book's concerns seem incredibly prescient.
What disturbs me most is how L. Bob Rife, the bad guy, in his one and only monologue, in a TV recording (weird how he never appears in person), seems to... basically be correct.
In Neuromancer and other Gibson novels, cyberspace bleeds into real life - Case becomes trapped in cyberspace by an AI, Armitage has a personality constructed by the same AI when he's actually a mental case named Cortez, etc
"They're not exactly calling the YouTuber a fake, but it's somewhat implied." - you can see it's clearly deliberate and controlled when he has a quieter conversation with the other guy. As you say: "The videos are cut and edited in a way that highlight the "tics""
Did the paper say it was caused by attention-seeking? My takeaway was that it was a stress-reaction that spread through groups, not something intentional
From the abstract it's a little bit of both but I didn't mean to make it sound like people are intentionally doing it. It's a stress reaction but that reaction ends up being attention-seeking behavior.
> they can be viewed as the 21th century expression of a culture-bound stress reaction of our post-modern society emphasizing the uniqueness of individuals and valuing their alleged exceptionality, thus promoting attention-seeking behaviours and aggravating the permanent identity crisis of modern man.
The people following this particular stupid trend wanted people to believe they had an illness. They got what they wanted, though perhaps not quite in the way they wanted.
If you're poor and say that you speak to God, you're labeled as somebody with a severe mental illness and possibly institutionalized, potentially for life.
If you're rich and say you speak to God, you can run a church, funnel a ton of money into your pockets, and evade taxes.
The article also provides an analysis of the current outbreak of Tourette's like syndrome in teenagers in Germany following the rise of a specific Youtuber.