February 2019 · YouTube

The Tic

A twenty-two-year-old German man named Jan Zimmermann launched a YouTube channel called Gewitter im Kopf. Thunderstorm in the Brain.

He had Tourette syndrome and the channel showed his daily life: cooking, going out, having conversations, interrupted by involuntary tics. He shouted words. His body jerked. He gave the tics a name. He called them Gisela.

He hit a million subscribers in less than three months. Teenagers loved him. He was funny, open, unashamed. He made a condition that frightened many people look like something you could live with. Something that made you interesting.

Then teenagers began arriving at the Tourette clinic at Hannover Medical School with sudden-onset, complex tic-like behaviour.

They twitched. They shouted. Some used words and movements seen in Zimmermann's videos. Some called their symptoms Gisela.

Professor Kirsten Müller-Vahl and her colleagues said the symptoms differed from typical Tourette syndrome: they began later, were unusually complex and could change rapidly. The researchers proposed a name: mass social media-induced illness.

The symptoms were real. The patients were not pretending. But a functional symptom can be real without being Tourette syndrome, and exposure to social-media videos appeared to be part of the pattern.

Later research made the picture less tidy. Social-media exposure mattered, but so did stress, anxiety, the pandemic and other vulnerabilities. A screen was not the whole explanation. It could still carry a behaviour between people who had never met.

Zimmermann had brain surgery in 2022 to reduce his tics. He returned to social media in 2025. On 18 November he died after an epileptic seizure. He was twenty-seven.

His channel had helped millions of people see Tourette syndrome with less fear.

It had also become the centre of a phenomenon nobody had expected.

The screen did not merely show a symptom.

Sometimes, it taught the body a language.

Sources: Müller-Vahl and colleagues' 2021 paper · the later cohort study · Zimmermann's death reported by Tagesschau.