In 2021, thousands of teenagers suddenly developed the same violent tics, every medical test came back clean, and the real cause turned out to be hiding on their phones. - Space Daily

What the report says

Space Daily reported on a surge of abrupt, severe tic-like symptoms among teenagers and young women seen by neurology clinics in several countries during 2020 and 2021. The article centers on cases such as a 15-year-old patient in Hannover, Germany, whose vocal and motor tics appeared suddenly, while standard medical tests including EEG, MRI, blood work and psychiatric screening did not identify a neurological cause. Similar presentations were reported in Germany, Canada, the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom.

According to the report, Dr. Kirsten Müller-Vahl of Hannover Medical School and colleagues concluded that many of the cases differed from typical Tourette syndrome, which usually begins in childhood and develops more gradually. The clinicians noticed that patients were displaying matching phrases and movements, and that many had watched popular Tourette-related creators on YouTube or TikTok. A repeated example in the article was the word “beans,” associated with a widely followed creator who had a diagnosed mild form of Tourette syndrome.

The Hannover team published its findings in Brain in August 2021, describing the pattern as “mass social media-induced illness,” a form of mass sociogenic illness spread through online exposure rather than a shared physical setting. Space Daily also cited later work, including a 2022 Frontiers in Psychiatry study of 32 patients, which found that most had used TikTok, YouTube or both and that many improved after reducing social media exposure.

The article emphasized that clinicians did not characterize the symptoms as faked. It framed the outbreak as involving functional symptoms, pandemic-era stress, anxiety or depression, and online communities that may have offered identity and support while also reinforcing symptom patterns.