Endless Thread - TikTok Tics
Episode Date: June 3, 2022When Ben hears a rumor about kids "catching" tics from watching too many TikTok videos, we set out to investigate. We hear from neurologists and TikTok influencers to get to the bottom of this so-call...ed "medical mystery". ****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Nora Saks with mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski. Ben Brock Johnson and Nora Saks (who is filling in for Amory Sivertson) are the co-hosts.
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Hello, Ben.
Wait a minute, you're not Amory.
That's a very astute observation.
This is Nora.
I'm one of our producers.
And today, Ben, I'm keeping the co-host chair warm for Amory,
who is allegedly off a fjording in Norway.
And you're also helping us understand
a mystery that I've been spreading rumors about ever since I heard about this mystery at a dinner
party at a relative's house.
So a few months back, I was hanging with some of my best friends who also happened to be
members of my family, Will and Emmy.
If you want to be technical, it's a step situation.
Yeah, we're siblings.
So Will is technically my stepbrother-in-law and Emmy is Will's wife.
Am I your sister-in-law?
Step-brother sister-in-law.
Will and Emmy both do what I would.
described with some bias is very important work. Will is a physician's assistant who works
in an emergency room at a big hospital. You're keeping people alive on a daily basis.
And Emmy is a high school educator with lots of impact on what kids learn and how.
And both Will and Emmy had seen something or heard about something in the course of doing their
work that they started telling me about something that raised the hairs on the back of my neck.
Will it just come off a shift in a pediatric ER?
And during that shift, a medical student mentioned that the hospital had just admitted a young patient who might have a TikTok tick.
So I asked, I was like, well, what are TikTok ticks?
And I think the explanation they gave was it's this non-epileptic, uncontrolled movements that kids have after,
I'm watching too much TikTok.
I think that's the explanation I got.
Yep.
And of course, we were all like, that's crazy.
So also, Emmy interacts with teenagers in her classroom all the time.
And as Will started to talk about this,
Emmy weighed in and said she had noticed students
with a lot of the same mannerisms.
It's like different gestures and things that they do with their hands
that is similar amongst different groups of kids.
that I have also seen online, whether it's TikTok or YouTube or whatever.
Will and Emmy were talking about different things,
but generally speaking, the ideas are connected.
One of the most popular and addictive social media apps in the world, TikTok,
is influencing not just how kids talk and move,
but it's also maybe creating involuntary reactions in kids.
These are sudden, repetitive, uncontrollable movements and sound.
Ticks, something involuntary, like a hiccup.
And people are seeing this more and more, and they don't yet have a full explanation.
When you first told me about this, Ben, it sounded like maybe anyone can pick up some sort of tick just from binging TikTok, which was a pretty vague, undefined rumor.
Nora, that's not my job to just like, you know, pass off vague and undefined rumors in conversations with people anecdotally and call that journal.
That's not what we do here.
You can do whatever you want, but that is not what I did when you told me about it.
That's why you're a star.
In my defense, of course, I wanted us to report this out in a responsible way because there's
been a lot of this TikTok tick hysteria rippling around over the last year or so.
And journalists admittedly have been amplifying it.
Could social media be causing an epidemic of Tourette like ticks?
TikTok may be the blame for a role.
rise in ticks in teens.
But can videos trigger ticks?
The story we found with Nora's help is a lot more complicated than one might find on the nightly news.
And as more and more people are showing up in school or at the hospital with this bizarre disorder, studies are being conducted.
And parents like you are getting a little panicky.
Not just panicky. I was like borderline, I was getting clammy.
The cynical, dystopian part of me is like, oh yeah, of course.
Of course, this app is like changing the way that people move in the world.
I shared your cynicism, Ben.
And I'm guessing that's probably because we're both elder millennials.
Hey, kid, get out of my chat room.
Yeah, get your hands off my avocado toast.
But luckily, one of our teammates was able to connect us old millennials to the culture of the youths.
Jen Zier, or Jen Zetter, since she's Canadian, Mira Raman.
You're on TikTok, right?
Oh, yeah. I'm on TikTok. Too much.
Mira says when she first heard about this whole TikTok ticks thing,
I'm going to be honest. I was pretty freaked out because legitimately I was like, do I have this?
Full stop, no joke.
Because my friends and I who watch TikTok and listen to trending audios all the time,
we use those audios in our day-to-day speech.
So I was like, is this what we do?
We, of course, wanted examples.
So Mira, good sport that she is, played a game with her friends,
where she started to say the beginning of a TikTok audio.
And I wanted them all to complete it.
Okay, ready?
Don't be suspicious.
Don't be suspicious.
Don't be suspicious.
Don't be suspicious.
Immediately?
No.
Immediately no.
Immediately no.
Bullying.
Knock it off.
Racism. Knock it off.
Bigotry.
Knock it off.
Crime.
Mira and her buds say this stuff incessantly, almost as a reflex.
Now, did they all have TikTok ticks, she wondered?
Could they end up in the ER?
The answer to Mira and her friend's questions is, nope.
But TikTok ticks are real.
So is the hysteria.
And as we dug further into this social media,
medical mystery, we found a hodgepodge of real issues that some young people are dealing with.
That doctors, psychiatrists, and scientists are still trying to get their arms around.
And so are we. I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Nora Ruth Valerie Sacks.
Wow. Today I learned, Ruth Valerie Sacks. All right. I'm going to use that somehow. I don't know how yet.
You are listening to Endless Thread coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station.
He started ticking before TikTok, so it definitely wasn't TikTok that started my ticks.
This is TikToker, maybe Maya Adele.
Adele is currently in school in Florida.
And the way she makes a living?
I am a content creator slash influencer, I guess is what my title would be.
Love a fellow content creator.
Adele, though, has more than 400,000 followers on TikTok.
Her content, which is a lot of lip syncing.
acting and princessing videos, isn't super niche.
Everybody shut up. I think I finally figured out Enkanto.
And I just like to make my page and my family, my online family,
just like a really supportive, safe place.
At 19, Adele is already a veteran of social media.
But a few years ago, around the time she turned 16,
something weird started to happen.
Adele was taking a course in one of her favorite subjects, psychology,
which is why she was doing homework that hadn't even been assigned yet.
I was reading ahead one night, and I was reading about tick disorders and stuff like that.
Hungry to learn more, Adele hopped on YouTube and found creators sharing their stories about living with tick disorders like Tourette syndrome.
Yeah, so I ticked 102 times in a three-minute period. That's a normal day for me.
Intrigued, Adele began watching a bunch of YouTube videos like this.
She went down a rabbit hole.
I was doing that for like a few weeks, maybe a few months.
It was just something I did in my free time.
And then I remember one day I like woke up and had these weird like muscles spasms that really mimicked some of the ticks that I'd seen in the videos I was watching.
The first one she picked up.
It's like this jerking head motion, like almost like if you were to just turn your head to the left to like touch your shoulder, kind of like that.
But just much more violent because obviously you're not doing it.
voluntarily. I have like a clicking sound. They're honestly just all kind of random, which ones you
pick up. Can you, I guess it's weird. I don't want to like trigger the thing, but can you make the
click sound? Like, is this a sound you make? Or what? It's a sound. I will do it, but it might trigger it
after, which is fine. But just so like you guys know. Yeah, it's just like a little like, yeah, those were
those were a few.
I think I picked up the whistle as well.
Sorry.
I can't really remember.
Sorry, sometimes I forget my train of thought.
Well, that's happening.
But yes, that's what it sounds like.
Even though you can find this stuff on social media,
it was a little nuts to listen to Adele experience it in real time.
Seemingly, unable to control the clicking tick after opening the door.
and an involuntary addition that she couldn't suppress that whistle sound.
And Adele told us that other tick she experiences include hitting herself or throwing things.
She wants through her cell phone across the park.
And occasionally she'll develop a full-blown tick attack.
It's very violent. At least mine are.
Normally they last 10 to 15 minutes.
It's like if you were working out at the gym, like your muscles are going to get fatigued and then you stop because your muscle.
are fatigued, but it's like, in this case, like, we can't stop.
So it just keeps going.
And then you're just really run down after.
Adele seems pretty comfortable talking about this now.
But she says when this first started up, she had no idea of what was going on.
She had no history of ticks.
It was all so weird and random.
She wondered even if it was real.
Yeah, for a while, I would think that, like, maybe it wasn't like an actual disorder.
and I was just like making it up,
but then I would be like completely alone and doing it
and they would be like painful
or I would have a tick attack rather
in the middle of something that I,
that was important to me.
And I'd be like, okay, why would I be fake?
Clearly, this is not fake.
But this wasn't happening to Just Adele.
In 2020, year one of the pandemic,
doctors started seeing an explosion
of these kinds of behaviors in their clinics.
So, you know, I was getting sort of six referrals
a week for young people with this non-sit of these symptoms.
And I think that prior to that, I'd maybe see a couple people a year.
Dr. Tamara Pringsheim runs the Tourette Syndrome Clinic at the Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary.
She's a clinical neurologist, meaning she does research and she also takes care of patients,
kids and adults.
I think when a lot of people think about Tourette's, if they have any sense of it,
essentially they're like, yeah, it's when people swear and say really weird things very loudly in the middle of their sentences.
And that is sort of where the definition ends for the average person in some ways.
Can you give us a more nuanced or correct definition of what Tourette's is?
Yeah, so Tourette's syndrome is a childhood onset neurodevelopmental disorder.
It's very common.
It affects about 1% of boys and 1 in 400 girls.
That is four times more common in boys, for those of you who don't do maths all that well.
Ticks associated with Tourette's usually show up in early childhood and then wane in adolescence.
And they creep in gradually.
So typically it's one tick at a time, beginning with simple ticks involving the face.
Like a rapid eye blink or head nod or shoulder shrug.
So while people often equate repetitive swearing or offensive statements with Tourette syndrome,
it's one of the less common symptoms of the disorder.
Dr. Pringsheim quickly realized that what she was seeing in her clinic in 2020 was not an explosion of Tourette's syndrome.
It was an explosion of tick-like behaviors, symptoms of what neurologists,
call a functional neurological disorder.
The simplest explanation is that these are disorders of brain function rather than brain structure.
We think of them as sort of a software problem rather than a hardware problem.
To go a little further with this analogy, imagine the software that controls your nervous system has a glitch in it.
And that glitch makes your system go haywire, which can lead to physical symptoms, like verbal and motor ticks.
functional neurological disorders, or FNDs, are rare, and they're distinct from Tourette's syndrome in some key ways.
For one thing, these rapid onset tick-like behaviors tend to appear overnight.
And many patients can actually pinpoint the day that it started.
You know, it started on Easter Monday when I was at the mall, and it became incapacitating within the course of 24 hours.
hours or a few days.
Another big difference?
The ticks were more frequent.
They were more complicated.
They were more intense.
All of it.
Something else that was super unusual?
The symptoms that we were seeing between people were so similar.
So like one week I saw like, I think three or four people who are all saying the same
word.
They were all saying the word beans.
And I can tell you that, like, over the past 12 years, I never saw anybody who said that specific word.
Others were thumping their chest or hitting themselves in the head.
Some cases were so serious, Dr. Prangzheim got called to the ER.
Many kids weren't going to school because of it.
I had adults who couldn't work.
You know, it was interesting in the sense that the level of disability,
was so high, much higher than my patients with Tourette syndrome.
And this outbreak was also hitting a different demographic.
The majority of referrals Dr. Pringsheim was getting were for adolescent girls and young women,
between the ages of 12 and 25.
In other words, more girls and more Gen Z.
Dr. P and her colleagues couldn't explain the abrupt increase in these acute, functional, tick-like behaviors.
It's not that we had never seen this in the past,
but it was the scale or the magnitude of the problem that was really striking for us.
She figured there had to be some kind of external influence.
Actually, the first thing that we thought was that there must be something on social media.
I'm in my 50s.
So I went on YouTube and I'm like looking at on YouTube, I'm like looking up Tourette's ticks.
I'm not fine.
Oh, you're so old-fashioned going on YouTube.
What were you looking for exactly?
We were looking for like viral videos about Tourette.
That's what we were looking for.
And at first, that research was a fail.
Until Dr. Pringsheim brought it up at the dinner table one night with her family.
And her 14-year-old daughter piped up.
She said, Mom, people don't go on YouTube anymore.
It's TikTok.
And I'm like, what?
I'm like, no-to-tick-tock, right?
She's like, yeah.
So she, like, opened the end.
app, and then she typed in Tourette, and it was like a jackpot.
And I remember sitting there and my jaw was hanging open, and we found thousands of videos.
I have no idea where this came from, but I say, what a conundrum as a tick.
What a conundrum.
Dr. P's teenage daughter had just opened a portal to a whole corner of the social media app known as
Tourette TikTok.
where videos under the hashtag Tourette's have been viewed nearly six billion times.
It's not hard to see why these videos have such mass appeal.
A lot of the folks posting about their tics are funny and engaging.
And more importantly, they're not hiding their tics.
They're not saying, woe is me.
You know, like I'm the most, you know, unlucky person in the world.
They're saying, you know, look at me.
I have these symptoms, but I'm living my life.
And they're trying to break down stereotypes.
One insanely popular creator is British TikTok star Evie Meg Field,
a.k.a. This trippy hippie.
Hey guys, today I'm making sandcastles with ticks.
Oh, fuck.
Yeah.
Oh, fuck.
No.
This trippy hippie has more than 14 million followers.
One of her videos that went absolutely viral on the app,
take a wild guess.
Beans.
Beans.
Beans.
It's literally become part of my vocabulary.
They were all saying the word beans.
Beans.
Being the word beans.
Now, this did not go over well with you, did it, Ben?
Nope, not great.
Not great.
I'd even go so far as to say you experience some parental anxiety.
Yeah, I think that's right.
Like my four-year-olds are not on, you know, they're not on TikTok.
They're not, they don't have their own discord.
They don't have their own personal finstas.
But yeah, it was a little, it was scary.
To me, that's like somewhat terrifying that a video that my kid could watch could somehow like trigger them into having a tick-like behavior.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
And, you know, and again, this is, this is complicated.
But let's try and unpack this a little bit in the sense that, you know, we're social creatures and we are.
influenced by the things that we see.
If we're influenced by what we see, does that mean the rumors are true after all that just
watching a Tourette TikTok video can give you a tick out of nowhere?
Let's let Dr. Pringsheim tell us a little bit more.
Millions of people have watched those videos and never develop those symptoms.
Millions of people, right? So it's the minority of people who watch the videos and develop
the symptoms, right? We need to figure out who is susceptible. And that's what we're trying to do.
Who is, who can be triggered by watching these things. We're going to talk more about the mystery of who
can be triggered by watching TikTok ticks in a few. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out
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Okay, so a minute ago,
Canadian neurologist, Dr. Tamara Pringsheim,
was doing her level best
to reassure our paranoid millennial dad Ben
that when it comes to TikTok
or other social media platforms,
watching the video is not sufficient to develop symptoms.
So there's clearly a vulnerability factor here.
And in one of her early studies of this phenomenon, published in 2021 in the journal Movement Disorders,
her research team landed on some pretty big clues about who is more susceptible.
Like she said, the vast majority of patients suddenly showing up in her clinic,
were adolescent girls and young women, between the ages of 12 and 25.
But there was one more crucial thing they had in common.
Many had underlying generalized anxiety or social anxiety disorders or depressive disorders.
There's a lot that researchers still don't understand about what causes functional neurological disorders.
Or exactly why an underlying mental health condition, like anxiety or depression, can put you at a
greater risk of developing one.
There are theories. It's not just one thing.
Dr. Pringsheim says it's likely a mix of biological, social, and psychological factors and
stressors.
We're trying very hard to tease this out.
But imagine you're young.
You're having a hard time, whether you're aware of it or not.
And then, wham, the pandemic arrives.
And we all know about how hard that hit the youth.
The pandemic has taken a toll on mental health.
And that's especially true for teenagers.
So you add an acute stress, and it's like the straw that broke the camel's back, right?
That it's just you reach this critical load.
For TikTok creator Adele, that straw wasn't the pandemic.
It was a devastating loss in her family that happened a few years before COVID hit.
So my mom actually passed away when I was 16.
Adele says her tick showed up not long after her mother died.
and when she eventually saw her doctor?
She kind of told me like, oh, yeah, there are, you can get ticks from intense trauma, things like that,
an intense stress on your body.
And I'm not really a great processor when it comes to processing my emotions verbally or mentally, really.
And so basically, my body took my trauma and the stress that I was under because I was under a lot of stress at that time and normally am.
and so it took that and kind of manifested it into a physical response since I was refusing to process it mentally.
So.
To be clear, watching YouTube videos of other people's tics didn't give Adele a tick disorder.
But they were a trigger and an outlet.
Yeah, I think my body was looking for something and that was the first thing it found.
And so it latched on.
Adele's story tracks with what neurologist Dr. Pringsheim has witnessed.
Just like some kids get tummy aches when they're anxious,
a small percentage of distressed Jen's ears
can be triggered by watching other people's ticks on social media.
But any tick-like symptoms they present
tend to be a signal of something much deeper going on.
And this isn't just happening in North America.
We found a number of studies on this topic from around the world,
published just in the last year or so,
including one from German neurologist and psychiatrist,
Dr. Kiersen-Mullerval.
So in German, we say Kirsten-Mullerfahl.
Dr. Mullerval has treated thousands of patients.
And back in 2019, so pre-pandemic,
she also noticed an influx of young people
coming into her Tourette outpatient clinic
who were suffering from tick-like symptoms.
And when she interviewed them,
to get to the bottom of what was going on,
one very popular German YouTube channel kept coming up.
The German name is Gewitter in Kopp
or in English, one would say, thunderstorm in the brain.
The influencer is a young man.
His name is Jan Zimmerman.
Even if you don't speak German, which I don't,
you can tell he is ticking when his voice drops to a lower pitch.
Jan Zimmerman has over two million subscribers on YouTube.
He uses his platform as a window into Leben Mit Tourette.
Life with Tourette.
And some of his tics, like yelling flying sharks, in German, of course, were identical to those popping up in Dr. Mullerval's outpatient clinic.
What's flying sharks in German?
I think I have it right here. One second.
Yeah, it's flaginda high.
Fligenda haia. All right.
And therefore, in our opinion, it's 100% clear that there's a relationship between these YouTube channels.
and the symptomatology seen in our patients.
In Dr. Mullerval's study, the gender distribution of patients was more equal,
but all patients presenting with functional tick-like behaviors had underlying mental health concerns.
However, the thing that really caught our attention about Dr. Mullerval's 20-21 study in the journal brain.
Her bold hypothesis.
This is as far as we know, the very first description of,
an outbreak of mass sociogenic illness that is spread solely via social media and via internet.
Mass sociogenic illness is a mouthful of a term for a phenomenon that used to be known as the
now unfashionable mass hysteria. There are mysterious incidences of MSIs documented way back
in the Middle Ages, like those nuns at one French convent who couldn't stop meowing.
Same, to be honest.
I bark, but I don't meow.
Up to the not-so-funniika laughter epidemic of 1962.
And many, many more have cropped up in recent years.
And it was clear that there's no underlying somatic disease, but it's a psychological symptom.
And here's where things get tricky.
Remember my stepbrother-in-law, Will?
Because he works in an ER, Will and his colleagues are often trying to make pretty
fundamental decisions with patients that come in. Because they're met with this whole spectrum of
issues with a similar wide spectrum of treatments. And one of the fundamental things they need to
figure out early on is whether something is going wrong with someone physically or whether it
might be more psychological or emotional. Of course, it can be both. But because there's a big
branch in the road with treatment, especially for someone who just showed up in an ER, it's an
important distinction. We should say that while experts are still hunting for a clear medical
explanation of what causes these kinds of sociogenic illnesses, whatever the cause, the suffering is
real. And what makes this extra interesting to us is that in the past, these infections
typically happen to people in the same place, often in the same social group. It was believed you had
to have close proximity to the patient zero, the index case. But now, it seems that
But use of social media makes at least to some patients let them have the same feeling
as meeting people physically.
Meaning there can now be a virtual patient hero, whose symptoms can spread to anyone anywhere
on the globe who has access to the internet.
It's too soon to tell how well Dr. Mulerval's theory about this new kind of social media-fueled
mass sociogenic illness will hold.
hold up or not. Regardless, she says most experts agree that these recent outbreaks are not
Tourette syndrome. They're functional tick-like behaviors. And most experts agree that there's a
relationship between these new phenomenon and the videos on TikTok and YouTube. Just like yours
truly, a lot of journalists were pretty blown away by this idea, that basically video,
Videos of ticks online were actually triggering ticks in other people who watched those videos.
And this can lead to problems in how things get reported by members of the media.
Do you remember that story from a few years back based off of a single study that suggested people were growing little horns at the base of their skull?
Because everyone was like craning their necks to look at their phones all the time?
I'm happy to say, Ben, I do not remember that story.
Well, it was like a huge story for a week straight, Nora.
Everyone freaked out.
It went viral.
And then it became clear that in their breathless intensity about a story that seemed both wild and kind of believable,
because we're all looking at our phone so much, right?
Some news outlets blew the whole thing out of proportion.
The study was real.
The headlines less so.
And this story is similar.
On the one hand...
There's like 100% a...
a social media-induced portion of this disorder.
It's not the whole story, though.
In Dr. Pringsheim's view,
initial news reports over-emphasized social media's role.
Like suggesting that that was the only cause,
that, you know, you're perfectly happy, secure teenager
could watch these videos and start ticking the next day.
I think we're sort of exaggerated.
we need to understand that this is, I think, a manifestation of underlying distress.
Yeah, so I'm no longer a young adult, I am sad to say,
but I am someone who has been diagnosed with anxiety and depression,
and so this point she made was really salient for me.
The way I've been picturing it,
the youth mental health crisis,
which the pandemic only made so much worse,
is like the liquid hot magma simmering inside a volcano.
I think you have to say liquid hot,
Magma.
I don't want to.
I know, but like...
Fine.
Liquid hot magma simmering inside a volcano.
And this eruption of these functional tick disorders is just the lava rushing down the side, just what you can see on the surface, actually.
Hmm.
So as far as these viral TikTok and Tourette's videos on social media go, are they the problem or the solution?
Maybe a bit of both?
It's possible that some of these videos are doing good and that, you know, it's helping people feel less alone.
I think it's a double-edged sword.
So what to make of all this?
Ben, I get the feeling that you're not totally convinced by Dr. Pring-Syme's argument,
that you're actually still tempted to keep your kids off TikTok until they've graduated from college, maybe longer.
Well, you know, I'll just say, like, you know, I guess my feelings about it,
were and are mixed.
I'm not trying to clutch too many pearls here, right?
But like, doesn't that freak you out?
Like, as a parent, you mean?
Or as a doctor?
I don't, either, either or both.
There's a, there is a, there's a form of media that is easily accessible on the internet.
That is, if consumed,
affecting a portion of the population of viewers
enough that they have to be hospitalized.
Yeah.
Every like, like full stop, that to me is what?
Yeah.
But I don't think we can escape these social influences.
But it wasn't happening before.
But people are influenced by the people around them.
Like, I'm thinking back to when I was in high school, okay?
It was a long time ago.
But, you know, the popular girls were smoking.
Other girls would start smoking too, right?
Who among us hasn't smoked in the bathroom?
You know what I mean?
Like, it's, it's, we can't escape those social influences.
They're part of being human.
Both specialists we talked to seemed less interested in social media being the origin
of the surge in tick disorders and more interested in helping people suffering from them
once they surfaced.
You know, with appropriate diagnosis and treatment, people can get better over,
a relatively short period of time.
Dr. Pringsheim's research team conducted a follow-up study of their patients in Calgary.
And the good news is that six months later, most of them are doing a lot better.
We found that especially in the adolescence, there's been a lot of improvement.
And some people, their tics are completely gone.
Nothing nearly as frequent or as intrusive.
They've responded to cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety and depression.
They've responded to medications for anxiety or depression.
I think that it's really important for patients and parents to know that there is help
and that our patients are getting better.
What about those patients' social media diet?
Should they keep binging Jan Zimmerman and Tourette's TikTok?
Should they stop cold turkey?
I think the message here is, is not.
You know, you should never go on TikTok.
Oh, man.
We were so close to having a good reason to ban TikTok, Ben.
So close.
I know.
But at least I can ban it in my household.
Oh, your kids are so lucky.
They're living with a tyrant.
In all seriousness, though, I hope we have solved this mystery in a measured way,
along with the people actually doing the science.
TikTok is not causing random people.
to have brain software glitches.
But certain content on social media depicting ticks
might trigger ticks in individuals
who have an underlying mental health issue.
And both of our experts say that, number one,
we're probably going to see more of this,
spurred by social media.
And number two, we need to pay attention
to what is triggering these issues
and treat the people who are triggered
without stigmatizing them.
So fine.
I will now officially stop spreading the rumor that TikTok is destroying the youth.
Maybe don't spread that one.
And maybe also get outside and don't spend too much time on TikTok.
But if you do and you find yourself having tick-like behaviors all of a sudden,
be sure to get some professional support.
Yes, absolutely.
All right.
See you next week.
Bye.
Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston.
This episode was raised.
written and produced by Norris Sacks, and it is hosted by me, Benbrock Johnson.
And me, Norrisax, mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.
Production help and TikTok audio completion hilarity from Mira Raman.
Our web producer is Megan Kattel.
The rest of our team is Amory Severson, Quincy Walters, and Dean Russell.
Endless thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities and beans.
Beans!
Beans.
If you've got an untold history, an unsold history, an unconstitutional.
solved mystery or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up. Email endless thread
at wbUR.org. And thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next week.
