Tourette Syndrome | What Is It?

Tourette Syndrome (TS) is a neurological disorder consisting on sudden tics, i.e., rapid movements or sounds that you can’t control.

Your body repeats those tics almost on its own. That’s why people with TS can’t stop doing them.

Motor Tics (movements)

The most typical are blinking, twitching your nose and shrugging your shoulders. Also, doing jerky moves with your head and obscene gestures.

Some people move their tongue inside their mouth, that’s their tic.

Sometimes, you’ll be able to stop a tic for a while, but you’ll get a really uncomfortable sensation, like you have to do it. Once you do the tic, the sensation goes away.

Verbal Tics (sounds and words)

The most striking tics are probably obscene words. People with Tourette Syndrome can’t stop saying bad words.

Also, they will grunt, bark and clear their throat again and again.

They tend to repeat words, too. Sometimes they’ll repeat the last word another person say.

– “I should get going, it’s getting late”.

– “LATE!”.

The problem about all these tics is:

• they can’t control them
• these tics come anytime, usually in inappropriate situations
• they happen over and over

Tourette Syndrome may be difficult to grasp if you’ve never meet someone with it. Why insults? That’s just how it works. The brain is a complex, enigmatic organ. For some reason there is a disfunction involving the area of “bad language”.

It’s important to understand people with TS don’t choose to do their tics. It’s not something they decide to do, but once it comes, it comes.

Some examples to help understand what it might feel like:

• when you get hiccups and you can’t stop
• trying not to sneeze when you are just about to
• trying not to yawn when you have to

I don’t know if these examples are fair ones, but the point is: people with Tourette’s can’t stop voluntarily their tics. It’s like their brain has a short circuit working on its own.

Tourette Syndrome has recently come to our attention because several artists have opened up about it in social media. The most recent examples are Billie Eilish and Lewis Capaldi, who recently had trouble finishing one of his great concerts.

Things That May Make It Better

Some people can cancel that short circuit by getting mega-focused on some activity. I read about this in the book “An Anthropologist on Mars” by neurologist Oliver Sacks.

It’s a great book where he describes several patients he met during his career. He chose patients with somewhat special conditions, and one of them was a Tourette’s patient.

This man was a surgeon. When he was home, he had sudden bursts of violence, yelling and throwing things against the wall. However, when he went to the operating room, the tics stopped. He entered a mental space with his own automatic routines, and that focus protected him from his own tics.

Things That Make It Worse

Tourette’s Disease usually start when you are around 5-10 years old. Sometimes tics are not too bad so nobody will realize there is something wrong.

It may get worse in the adolescence but it usually improves after that, especially once you turn into an adult (although it doesn’t always happen like this).

You will notice that your tics get worse when you are stressed and tired.

Can You Treat Tourette Syndrome?

Even though there are is no cure, there are ways to treat it. The best way is a combination of therapy and medication.

The role of therapy is, on one side, reducing anxiety and depression. With less anxiety, there’ll be less tics.

Also, with therapy you can learn how to counter some tics, for example using the opposite muscles to the ones involved.

As for medication, there are several drugs that help:

• Haldon and risperidone can be useful. They reduce anxiety and kind of block the “tic” pathway.
• Some antiepileptic drugs sometimes work, too.

Finally, some people can benefit from botox. If you have a very specific tic—for example, you turn your neck towards the right— then botox can be an option.

When we inject botox into a muscle, it becomes paralyzed. That means it won’t be able to move and won’t do the tic. Doctors have to identify the specific muscle that’s involved in your tic, otherwise it wont’ work.