Mass sociogenic illness
It's called a fad. Reducing exposure has always been the solution.
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2026
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It was more subtle and interesting than just a fad. It accidentally hijacked a number of our social instincts. In this case, it was disruptive and obvious. It's likely the effect is happening to everyone, just more subtly.
It becomes the mechanism through which a very old human phenomenon — the tendency of a stressed group to adopt a shared physical response to that stress
Basically, our stress responses are subconscious, but learnt. Think swearing when you hurt yourself. It's common, but it's not universal.
In this case, the girls, due to existing stress formed a pseudo social group. The group "leader" had an unusual 'stress' venting method (due to tourettes). The other girls synced to this without conscious involvement. It's the same mechanism that makes us pick up a local accent, or adopt local habits, when we move somewhere new.
In short, fads include this mechanism, but generally have a far more conscious aspect. This was an interesting short circuit, exposing some of the underlying mechanics of the human mind.
Thank you for that explanation. That was very helpful.
This is like something right out of a Southpark episode.
6 7
'had been watching a small number of Tourette influencers '
Yeah I remember this. At least one of the human cancers didn't even have tourettes and was just acting for views, to the complete surprise of no one with half a brain
For a second I wondered if you were talking about tourette guy.
FUCK SALT!
AH BOB SAGGAT
That is a LOT of words to say teenagers are fucking stupid.
Maybe I'm going out on a limb here but I'm not sure people on the fediverse are the best to be criticizing others because of a meme about beans.
What do you bean?
Hey, who and where are you?
I've been trying to figure that out for a while now.
Mass sociogenic illness happens when a group of stressed, socially connected people are exposed to a symptom template that the brain and body can, in a real physiological sense, adopt without any conscious decision to fake anything. The symptoms are genuinely experienced. They are not consciously produced.
No need to be condescending. Stupidity has nothing to do with it, which you might’ve known had you bothered reading some of those words in the article.
Müller-Vahl asked the obvious follow-up question. What she found was that almost every patient in the outbreak had been watching a small number of Tourette influencers with very large followings who documented their own tics on YouTube and TikTok.
Why the fuck do these influencers exist.
to help expose people with tourette's to those who don't know what people with tourette's live like so that more people can treat them with dignity.
When I read "influencer" I read it as like "grifter". I concede what you're describing may not be bad.
Yeah. Think of it like this : influencer is a broad stroke term for basically, internet celebrity. They are able to influence people within the audience they have built for themselves, and are aiming to get their influence to more people to say something.
Now, they usually make money by lending that voice to companies in exchange for money. But, some are doing it to further other agendas, positive or negative.
And sometimes, there's a synergy. For example, Northernlion can be seen as an indie games influencer. Sometimes, companies pay him to play a game during a stream. He's upfront about the sponsorship, but it can be an interesting game to want to play. And sometimes, he doesn't know what game to play, since he streams most days as a regular ass job. So the "paid suggestion" helps him fill the time.
Others are not so scrupulous, and are exploitative.
If you replace the word influencer by religion etc your post could belong to a history community
ow the edge
Because people with tourettes also have right to be content creators if they want to be?
So it was Munchausen's by internet?
Did you say Beans?
How ridiculous that people are taking their children all the way to the doctor before figuring out they saw some shit online.
Or, you know, talk to them.
Why are you saying beans? Where did you see that?
Exactly my point
Why would this mostly only affect people who happen to have genitalia inside their bodies?
Mass sociogenic illness is one of the oldest documented patterns in medicine. Historians have traced examples back to the dancing plagues of medieval Europe, when whole villages spontaneously began dancing to the point of collapse and death. Salem in 1692. The nuns of Loudun in the seventeenth century. A group of teenage girls at a high school in LeRoy, New York, in 2011, who developed Tourette-like tics with no organic cause. In every case, a group of people, almost always young, almost always female, and almost always emotionally connected to each other in some way, develop the same physical symptoms in rapid succession, and the symptoms cannot be explained by any physical illness the medical system knows how to diagnose.
Sounds like a dancing sickness.
Mass sociogenic illness is one of the oldest documented patterns in medicine. Historians have traced examples back to the dancing plagues of medieval Europe, when whole villages spontaneously began dancing to the point of collapse and death
Now I really don't know what an illness is.
Damn kids are dumb.
I think this says more about how people are influenced by video in general, than about tics
I just wish people would go to the doctor when they start talking about how evil China, antifa, vaccines, and communism are. That's worse influence from videos than shouting "beans!"