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by boyanlevchev 1293 days ago
A freaky thing that this paper doesn’t mention is that in some cases these tics have gotten so extreme, that one patient began having almost constant seizures and became wheelchair-bound. Imagine being “infected” by watching a video on TikTok! It sounds like a horror movie.

From The Guardian: “Over the next few weeks, Wacek noticed that she was having tics. “They were just little noises,” she says. “Nothing to write home about.” She would scrunch up her nose, or huff. The tics escalated from sounds into words and phrases. Then the motor tics kicked in. “I started punching walls and throwing myself at things,” she says. By July, Wacek was having seizures. She had to stop work. “Being a chef with seizures is not safe at all,” she says. Her GP referred her to a neurologist, who diagnosed her with functional neurological syndrome (FND). People with FND have a neurological condition that cannot be medically explained, but can be extremely debilitating. “In a general neurological clinic, around 30% of the conditions we see are not fully explainable,” says Dr Jeremy Stern, a neurologist with the charity Tourettes Action. In Wacek’s case, FND manifested in verbal and motor tics, not dissimilar from how Tourette syndrome appears to lay people, although the two conditions are distinct. Wacek has up to 20 seizures a day and currently has to use a wheelchair.”

Source: https://amp.theguardian.com/media/2021/nov/16/the-unknown-is...

5 comments

This reminds me of "Blipverts" on the 80s TV show "Max Headroom". TV commercials that were so stimulating they would cause some viewers to explode.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekg45ub8bsk

> It sounds like a horror movie.

Might I interest you in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

So happy I found this comment! Yes Snow Crash is a mist recommendation and insanely relevant to mass hysteria and "babbling"
Yeah, I'm surprised on a forum like this people are using it as an opportunity to be like "ugh kids these days in $current_year seeking attention" and not "holy shit this is fascinating." Social media turned "picking up an accent" up to 11 in a way that actually manifests in tangible problems.
IMO the problem is that complex systems is not a field that is taken seriously yet. It got off to a bad start years back with that shitty James Gleick Chaos book.

We just don't have enough people thinking about this as a SIR model on a social graph to spark the conversation. We literally lack the critical mass of people understanding the language. Without the language the thoughts don't exist.

I am sure a 100 years from now people will look back at us as completely insane to be letting social contagions spread around to children as random graphs on a network.

They write 'people with FND have a condition that cannot be medically explained' as though it's just insufficient research, not understood yet. 'FND' is just polite for 'all in your head'. This article reads like 'they're being treated with a drug called Placebo'.
Panic attacks are all in your head too. You’ve obviously never had one or seen someone go through one.

Your brain is an organ just like other organs. If it starts malfunctioning it can cause serious even life threatening problems.

Both thanks, not that it's any of your business.

Panic attacks are a symptom, not a diagnosis.

'All in your head' is an expression; one I perhaps should have avoided, obviously there are ailments located in the head that have a 'real' cause.

Panic attacks I suppose may present in 'functional' patients, but there are physiological causes too.

Anyway, I didn't really make any sort of comment on FND itself or patients with that diagnosis, I didn't say 'they just need to pull themselves together' or whatever. I just commented on the way the article was written, that it didn't seem like the author understood.

Nobody’s being polite - just cognizant that “all in your head” doesn’t mean “fake.”
Ask a doctor.
Wow, This reminds me of the virus in Snow Crash