“Over the past 2 years, a remarkably high number of young patients have been referred to our specialized Tourette outpatient clinic presenting with symptoms closely resembling the ones Jan Zimmermann shows in his videos. All these patients had been prediagnosed with Tourette syndrome, even partly as treatment-resistant Tourette syndrome after having received pharmacotherapy with different drugs including antipsychotics. Remarkably, in none of these cases, neither the correct diagnosis of functional (Tourette-like) movement disorder (FMD) had been made, nor had the interrelation with and influence by social media been recognized.”
Read paper published Aug 2021 in Brain: https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/145/2/476/6356504?login=false#350101844
Supplemental article from Harvard Health Publishing: Tics and TikTok: Can social media trigger illness?