ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

While the term is often avoided for fear of ridiculing something more serious,mass psychogenic illness (MPI) -- also known as mass sociogenic illness (MSI) or mass hysteria -- is a real occurrence that can cause a variety of physical symptoms to manifest in groups of people despite the lack of any physical cause. Often compared toconversion disorder, in which emotional issues are "converted" into physical problems, MPI tends to occur among people who share anxieties, fears, and a sense of community. In the right group of people, it can spread like a virus.

A curious case of the condition related to TikTok videos shows both how imagined conditions can spread and how our modern media landscape presents new problems never even dreamt of in a time before the internet.

In 2019, a strange slew ofnew Tourette's cases made its way into hospitals all over the world. Oddly, these were suddenly occurring in children well over the age of six, the age of typical onset. Most peculiar of all, many of the patients were exhibiting identical symptoms and tics. While many cases of Tourette's are similar, these symptoms were precisely the same.

As it turned out, the tics were also identical to those exhibited by one Jan Zimmermann, a 23-year-old YouTuber from Germany with Tourette's. On his channel,Gewitter im Kopf, he documents his daily life with the condition. All of the patients who suddenly claimed to have tics were fans of his or of similar channels on YouTube and TikTok.

There was nothing physically wrong with the large number of people who suddenly came down with Tourette's-like symptoms, and most of them recovered immediately after being told that they did not have Tourette's syndrome. Others recovered after brief psychologicalinterventions. The spread of the condition across a social group despite the lack of a physical cause all pointed toward an MPI event.

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