Psych Term Paper

Potyka 1
Antonia Potyka
Mrs. Knight
Intro Psychology
1 May 2015
Understanding Tourette Syndrome
In the recent movie The Road Within (2014) a young mann, who has been living with
Tourette Syndrome (TS) for the most part of his life, has to go into a psychological facility to try to control his behaviour. In the middle of the movie, Vincent, the main character and Tourette's patient, says “Relaxing is pretty much the one thing I can not do.” This sentence describes very well the internal struggle of TS patients, because this disease “is a neurological disorder characterized by repetitive, stereotyped, involuntary movements and vocalizations called tics.” (National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke) What many people unfortunately do not know, is that TS is incurable. Even if only 10 to 15 percent of people having Tourette's, actually live with it into adulthood, the tics may come back at any time.
TS has a long history, and goes all the way back to the year 1825. That is where we find the first reported case of TS in medical literature. It describes the case of Marquise de Dampierre, who was a wealthy and noble women and known for regularly bursting out obscenities to her high society friends. The next time anything like the today known Disorder was mentioned, was in 1885 when Dr. George Gilles de la Tourette (1857 – 1904), who was indeed the one who gave it its now known name, made a study on nine cases, similar to the one of the Marquise. He was a french neurologists and describes these nine cases in which patients jerked and twitched uncontrollably, and like in the Marquis' case, says things they did not plan on saying. During his time he named this disease “maladie des tics”. A fun fact is that the disease was at that time actually only so widely accepted because most of Gilles de la Tourette's patients were young males. Apparently when conditions like that were seen in females, it was considered hysteria. Gilles de la Tourette's teacher,

Potyka 2
Jean-Martin Charcot, renamed it “Gilles de la Tourette illness” from which it gets his name as which it is known for today.
Already in these early days the symptoms of TS were mostly known to the same level as they are today. Tics, as they are called, are classified as either complex or simple. Simple motor tics are sudden repetitive brief body movements that involve a limited number of muscles. Some common simple tics are blinking or other eye movements, facial grimacing and shoulder shrugging.
Simple vocalizations might include repetitive throat-clearing, sniffing, or grunting sounds. Complex tics are coordinted movements including several muscle groups, which means multiple simple tics at once, such as facial grimacing combined with a head twist and a shoulder shrug. More compley vocal tics include words and full phrases. These tics might go to the level where they result in self harm such as punching oneself or coprolalia (which means saying socially inapropriate words such as swearing) or echolalia (repeating the words or phrases of others). Some might describe the need to complete a tic in order to relieve the urge. One might also describe like the feeling of having to sneeze. Other symptoms of TS are: difficulty of consistetly inhibiting thoughts, and tending to blabber out comments due to non-existent 'mental breaks', the tendency to be more immature and act younger than one's age, refusing to get help as they do not like it to be singled out, the tendency to have stronger responses to the enviroment, problems with transitions, and reading and writing dificulties. Although these mentioned tics may vary and come and go over several periods of time. It usually first appears during childhood, with the average onsent between the ages of 3 and 9 years.
The diagnosis is made by doctors “after verifying that the patient has had both vocal and motor tics for at least 1 year. Although, Many patients are self-diagnosed after they, their parents, other relatives, or

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