How to NOT give someone mental illness
If you wanted to give someone mental illness, how would you do it? You might think to lock someone in a padded room and throw away the key, but is there an easier way? Is it possible to do so just by talking to them, maybe with just one word? You shouldn’t actually do this, but in looking at some recent studies, the answer seems to be a resounding yes. In each of the examples below, all it took was mere exposure to a mental concept to cause mental harm.
The most graphic example is the recent wave of “TikTok tics.” Three years ago, thousands of teenagers — mostly girls, transgender, or non-binary — randomly broke into convulsions. One 16-year-old was described as having her “head snapping and arms swimming, sometimes letting out high-pitched whistles and whoops.” Doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with these teens. MRIs and lab results turned up nothing. But one surprising common factor emerged: these teens had watched videos on TikTok of people claiming to have Tourette’s syndrome.
How could watching a video of Tourette’s syndrome cause convulsions? To those who study mass hysterias (now called mass psychogenic illnesses), TikTok tics come as no surprise. History is full of baffling stories that have been re-evaluated in light of MPIs, such as the dancing plagues of the 1500s when people across Europe seemed to literally dance themselves to death, or…
