Meme-Ticks no more
How the healing process from the social contagious "TikTok-tourette" revealed a surprising connection to identity politics.
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about the so-called "TikTok ticks", a memetic disease of non-functional Tourette's symptoms transmitted via social media contagion that has puzzled doctors and researchers for two years. Azeen Ghorayshi now writes in the New York Times about the healing process of most affected teenagers and the background of this first social media-induced mass psychogenic illness.
As with most mass hysterias in the past, most of the affected individuals are young women, in this case with a large proportion identifying as transgender. The specific background of the meme ticks seems to be stress and anxiety triggered by bullying, uncertainties about their own identity, and last but not least, the threat of a global pandemic. Most of these kids were cured through therapy, social media abstinence, and a more relaxed attitude towards their own identity:
Aidan hasn’t had a tic in a year. They no longer use TikTok — not because they’re afraid of getting sick, but because they find it boring. They still go on Instagram.
Aidan has learned to better identify and manage their anxiety. With the support of their psychiatrist, the teenager is planning to wean themselves off antidepressants early next year. Their stress about gender has also faded. They now believe that the tics were an unfortunate byproduct of an earnest, if futile search for definitive answers about their mental health and identity.
“After a year of therapy, I came to the conclusion that labels are stupid,” Aidan said. “I’m just out here.”
This now obvious connection to leftwing identity politics behind these meme-ticks, which came to me as a surprise, fits a pattern: a few months ago, a study examined the rise of mental health problems among adolescents in relation to their political affiliation. The result: left-liberal young women were the first group in the populace to show corresponding symptoms, followed by left-liberal young men, followed by conservative girls, and finally conservative boys. This wave of depression hit left-wing women up to two years earlier than conservative individuals. Why?
The obvious answer is provided by Jonathan Haidt in his article "Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest", which i already discussed here: Left-wing identity politics, especially in its social media practice of viral outrage, created a series of false "disempowering" assumptions in what Haidt and Greg Lukianoff called "Reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy":
They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1).
They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).
They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3).
For me, the rise of this teenage mental health crisis, with the meme ticks as the most extreme example, went as follows:
First, digital media changes social practices under attention-economic paradigms
then identity politics increases psychological stress for kids searching for themselves and subjects them to these attention-economic paradigms on social media even further
and finally, a deadly pandemic throws the whole world off balance.
As a result, numbers for depression first rose for left-liberal young women, then for everyone else as well, and the pandemic puts the final nail in the coffin.
When I first wrote about the TikTok-Ticks on another platform here, I didn’t make the connection to this teenage mental health crisis, but in hindsight it’s not very surprising. All of the affected had a history of mental health issues before, and some of them already showd tick-like behavior. What throws healthy teenagers into “normal“ mental health issues like depression and anxiety seems to cause more extreme symptoms in others with already existing conditions.
Personally, I developed a pretty hardcore stance on the psychological effects of social media: They are like drugs for social mechanisms, going so far as calling social media psychoactive, including a new ability of humans to manipulate their own flow of hormones: Feel down today? Just post some reaffirming virtual signaling to your peers and feel the kicks of sweet dopamine and oxytocine. (I wrote about the oxytocine-connection to viral outrage back in 2021 and on my old blog some years ago.)
And while there are good critiques on the statistics of studies claiming causation of depression by socmed, they are missing this bigger picture of the simultaneous rise of this outrage culture in close-knit communities built on oxytocine and echochambers in an attention economy, which has, in this context and complexity, as far as I know, not been subject to any research study by now.
As i already wrote two weeks ago:
It’s a tragedy for the left:
A movement that explicetly wanted to “wake up“ and make conscious structural discrimination and personal bias based on identity markers, which are undoubtly a real thing, working to organize it’s movements on social media, then unleashed memetic forces of viral outrage by creating incentives for victimhood and falling into the trap of the attention economy, which went so hard, that it’s participants got more and more depressed over time.
Or they develop tourette-like symptoms spreading via social contagion on socmed-platforms. I suspect Aidan was healed from those ticks by getting off a) social media influencers unintentionally gloryfying mental health issues and b) oxytocin-manipulation-mechanisms which reinforced insecurities regarding their identity. This, ofourse, is highly speculative.
We need better and more rigorous research on these phenomena, and we dearly need more transparency from social media platforms whose data silos are one of the biggest obstacles in such research.
I also think that the role of oxytocin, which is not only the so-called love-hormone bolstering close social connections, but also responsible for exclusion of the other, is completely underreported with little to no studies regarding social media. I do think that socmed-research is missing a large piece of the puzzle here.
I wish Aidan all the best in their recovery and in any case: Social Media are drugs and should be regulated accordingly.