Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of Unchanging

Truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Spongebob Street.

One of the strangest stories of the last couple years is how teenage girls have been

stricken with facial ticks after browsing the video sharing app TikTok.

Earlier this month, Azean Gareci published a deep dive on this strange phenomenon at

the New York Times.

Looking back at the puzzling explosion of TikTok ticks during the pandemic, she reported that

contagious outbreaks of strange behavior are not new and have a technical name, quote,

mass psychogenic illness.

For example, long before TikTok, back in 2011, 18 girls at a high school in LaRoy, New

York broke into twitches and headsnapping after one of their peers suffered a sudden spasm.

The incident became a legend in medical literature and history's full of stories of patients,

mostly women who seem to catch tremors, seizures, paralysis, even blindness from each other

like a contagious disease.

Such mass psychogenic events used to be limited to real life social circles, but social media

has now, quote, dissolve the boundaries that once kept outbreaks geographically contained.

Now, anyone with a smartphone can catch these behaviors.

Most interesting about Gareci's piece is the correlation between social media inducemental

illnesses and LGBTQ identities.

In fact, she wrote, doctors at a recent conference in Switzerland admitted that quote, a surprising

percentage of their patients with the ticked tic, also identified as transgender or non-binary.

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