Tic outbreack receding, apparently

I will gift this lengthy New York Times feature talking about the Tik Tok tic outbreak, which fortunately, seems to be receding.   

It talks about past outbreaks of psychogenic illness, including examples I hadn't heard of before:

Historians looking back thousands of years have come across stories of patients — most often women — with tremors, seizures, paralysis and even blindness that could not be explained. The ancient Greeks called it “hysteria” and blamed a wandering uterus. Sigmund Freud deemed the condition “conversion” and theorized that it was caused by suppressed traumatic experiences.

In more recent decades, scientists have gained a greater understanding of how anxiety, trauma and social stress can spur the brain to produce very real physical symptoms, even if body scans or blood tests show no trace of them. When these illnesses interfere with day-to-day life, they are now called “functional disorders.”

“We all recognize that the mind can make the body do things,” said Dr. Isobel Heyman, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health in London, who published the first report on the pandemic tics. Most people, after all, have experienced fear that makes their heart race or anxiety that ties their stomach in knots.

“But when the symptoms are quite bizarre and quite intense — like a seizure, or not being able to walk, or ticlike movements — we think, ‘How on earth can the brain generate symptoms like this?’” Dr. Heyman said. “It just can.”

These sudden symptoms can also spread in clusters, reflecting the shared pressures on a group. In the Middle Ages, a period when many Europeans feared being possessed by the devil, nuns living in a French convent began meowing like cats. In the 2000s, hundreds of children of asylum seekers in Sweden became mute and bedridden for months to years.

It makes repeated reference to how this is something that spread much more commonly amongst females than males;  and it also notes how folk claiming to be transgender issues are disproportionately represented in the current outbreak too.  (I'm willing to bet there are thousands of indignant transgender activists tweeting as I write, upset at the obvious conclusion many will draw that believing you are transgender can itself be largely due to a social contagion.)   

 In one key paragraph:

Eighty-seven percent of the patients were female, a sex skew that was also found in previous outbreaks of mass psychogenic illness. No one knows why girls are more susceptible to this kind of social influence. One theory is that women may seek out belonging more than men do, and may empathize more strongly with others’ suffering. Women also experience higher rates of depression, anxiety and sexual trauma than men.

And as for the connection with transgender issues:

At a conference on tic disorders last summer in Lausanne, Switzerland, doctors from several countries shared another observation: A surprising percentage of their patients with the TikTok tics identified as transgender or nonbinary. But without hard data in hand, multiple attendees said, the doctors worried about publicly linking transgender identity and mental illness.

“These kids have a tough enough life already, and we don’t want to inadvertently somehow make things even worse for them,” said Dr. Donald Gilbert, a neurologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, whose adult daughter is transgender.

All interesting....