Shortly after the first Covid lockdown ended, doctors began to notice something so strange that at first they struggled to explain it. There appeared to be a sudden rise in the number of children being referred with Tourette’s syndrome.
Tourette’s is a rare neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by repetitive, involuntary movements or sounds called ‘tics’. While mild tics are relatively common in children, specialists suddenly started seeing large numbers of children displaying complex and debilitating symptoms. Dr Alasdair Parker, president of the British Paediatric Neurology Association, said in 2021: ‘The most severe tics disorders I have seen over the past 20 years have all presented in the last five months to my practice.’ Specialists were using the word ‘explosion’ to describe the numbers they were seeing. There were reports of adolescent psychiatry units that would expect to see four or five new cases a year recording that number in a week.
The more people developed tics and posted it online, the more people saw it and developed tics themselves
Even stranger, although Tourette’s is usually more common in boys, young girls accounted for most new cases.
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