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.

She and her colleagues began noticing that the tics arriving in their clinic did not look like Tourette’s. They were dramatic in a theatrical way that Tourette tics almost never are. And the tics the patients had developed were the tics he performed on camera. A group of teenage girls at a high school in LeRoy, New York, in 2011, who developed Tourette-like tics with no organic cause. Functional symptoms of this kind are physically real to the person experiencing them, and the involuntary quality is genuine.