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Part 5: The Mind-Body-Tech Connection
Body Electric
The TikTok Tik Incident and Information Overload
Exploring the role of social media in spreading mass psychogenic illnesses and the impact of information overload on mental and physical health, with a focus on the TikTok Tik phenomenon and its link to depression, anxiety, and challenges faced by teenagers in the digital age.
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An outbreak of a malady with no clear medical reason is often referred to as a mass psychogenic illness. And they have been documented through the ages. There
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was the dancing plague of 1518 when people in a French town danced until they literally dropped dead. In 1962, an epidemic of laughter swept through a handful of girls' schools in Tanzania.
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More recently, Havana syndrome, the
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mysterious illness that hit dozens of U.S. embassy staffers in Cuba
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has been put in this category too. But the TikTok tick incident? Well,
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it's kind of like those contagions, but
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with a high-tech upgrade. Because
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social media, of course, made it possible for the symptoms to spread further and faster. And in some cases, even send kids to the emergency room. Which brings us to
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episode five. So far in this series, we've talked about the effects of sitting and being stuck looking at screens for hours, what that can do to our bodies. But this episode is about what information overload does to our physical and mental health. Think of it as the mind body tech connection. I'm Anu Shizamaroti, and this is
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Body Electric, our special series from NPR, investigating the relationship between our technology and our bodies. For years, we've been hearing about the connection between social media and rising rates of depression and anxiety, especially in teenage girls. It's been freaking us all out for a while now. So it probably won't surprise you to hear that when researchers started piecing together the puzzle of the TikTok Tik phenomenon, they found, yup, most of those teens were girls, with a history of depression or anxiety. Their theory is that going through adolescence during a pandemic, and spending lots of time online looking at these videos, well, the combination was just too much for some of
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them. I mean, who hasn't
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felt sick or worried or overwhelmed after spending time online? But the TikTok story shows that the right cocktail of stress, circumstance, and content well, it can hit certain people hard. So
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what makes some people, especially
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young people, so
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vulnerable? And what can we do about it? Perhaps the key clue to this mystery when we come back.
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This message comes from NPR.
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When voters talk during an election season, we listen. We ask questions.
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We follow up. We bring you along to hear what we learned. Get closer to the issues and people and your vote at the NPR Elections Hub. Visit NPR.org slash elections.
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Okay, we're back. So we don't know exactly what was going on in the brains of the young people in that TikTok story. Because there is no one-size-fits-all, we each respond to information and emotion and
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feeling things differently.
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