I was watching videos on YouTube last night, when I saw a video of a young high school girl in Canada who has Tourette Syndrome.  For those of you who don’t know, a person with Tourette Syndrome will make spontaneous involuntary movements or verbalizations.

One of the most noticeable and problematic aspects of Tourette Syndrome, is that people who have this disorder can spontaneously and unintentionally utter the worst possible words and statements, at the worst possible time, such as appearing to call people “nigger”, “cunt”, “whore”, “slut”, or announcing “I like to have sex”.

The first video that I watched from this young lady, Claire Sophia, was about twenty-six minutes in length.  She was home in bed, and she woke up at midnight to make this video.  She read from her notebook, the phrases that she commonly spoke and she demonstrated the movements that she commonly made.  Though she was calm, relaxed, and comfortable in her own bedroom, demonstrating her common phrases and movements often led to her involuntarily repeating these phrases and movements in the video.

From this first video that I watched from Claire Sophia, I got the wrong impression.  I thought that she had some control over her spontaneous phrases and movements, that she could suppress it or catch it if she was paying attention.  As I watched several more of her videos, I saw that she sometimes had very severe fits that lasted for half an hour that she was unable to stop.

It is important for people to watch several of Claire Sophia’s videos for the following reasons.  Although many people know or think that they know what Tourette Syndrome is, they may not really know how upsetting, insulting, embarrassing, and provoking the verbalizations can be unless they see it.  Also, the verbalizations and movements could lead observers to mistakenly believe that they have some kind of mental illness or psychosis such as schizophrenia or hallucinations.

The video below, is an example of a moderate occurrence of involuntary verbalizations and movements in Claire Sophia.  In other videos, she has much more severe effects.

In the second video below, this shows a more severe period of Tourette’s for Claire Sophia.