Analysis of Tourette’s Syndrome: A Medical Essay Exploration

This medical essay delves into the complexities of Tourette's Syndrome, a neuropsychological disorder characterized by compulsive behaviors and tics. The essay explores the impact of the disorder on individuals, highlighting the challenges of social interactions and the experience of dis-inhibition. It references the work of Dr. Carl Bennet, portraying the co-existence of a calm demeanor with repetitive involuntary movements. The essay examines the doctor's obsessive tendencies, specifically his concern for dogs and glasses, as an example of the disorder's impact. The author references relevant studies to support the analysis of the syndrome. The essay explores the experience of the syndrome by the subject with the help of the author to portray a real-life scenario, which allows the reader to develop a deep understanding of the disorder and its effects on the affected individuals.

RUNNING HEAD: MEDICAL ESSAY
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Name of Student
Name of University
Author note

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The author describes “Tourette’s syndrome’ as a complex neuropsychological
disorder that often makes a person compulsive, obsessive and estranged with the ways of life.
The subjects gets extremely impulsive from the continuous social and sociocultural testing
that often leaves him restless while showing a deviant responsiveness to the stimuli and a
range of hyper stereotyped behaviors (“restless reacting to the environment, a lunging at and
sniffing of everything, or a sudden flinging of objects; and yet others an extreme stereotypy
and obsessiveness”). The author goes on explaining the compulsiveness aspect (Mataix-Cols,
David, et al.) of this neuropsychological disorder and to express the severity of what level of
compulsion is meant – he uses the phrase ‘a multitude of explicit compulsions.’ The chapter
explores the horrendous experience of being possessed with Tourette’s syndrome. The dream
like hallucinating associations are often experienced by Tourette’s subject (Huisman-van Dijk
et al.) which make it an intricately complicated neuropsychological condition.
The author proceeds by humanizing the so discussed Tourette’s with example of a
bizarrely stirring man named Dr. Carl Bennet who is described or pictured as a calm,
dignified man with sudden display of tic struck of gestures. The author tries to project a
certain imagination in our minds that how two contrasting states of a tranquil character and
attacks of repetitive involuntary movements can co-exist in a single person. Then the story
takes a journey into the psyche of the doctor who display astounding display of preservative,
compulsive tendencies and he exhibits an extreme a state of extreme attentive concern toward
dogs and glasses (beings and things) at the time (“He instantly began touching his glasses
(top, bottom, left, right, top, bottom, left, right), centering and re-centering them in a fury”).
He processes everything – all the stimuluses’ – all at the same time and this what is referred
by the author as the ‘disease of dis-inhibition.’ The doctor with an exquisite mindfulness of
conscious knowledge coupled with a state of ‘symmetric compulsions’ (“And, I thought, are

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patted together: did he get two dogs partly because of his own symmetrical, symmetrizing
compulsions?”) made him quite an extra-ordinary character to read about.

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References
Huisman-van Dijk, Hilde M., et al. "The relationship between tics, OC, ADHD and autism
symptoms: a cross-disorder symptom analysis in Gilles de la Tourette syndrome patients and
family-members." Psychiatry research 237 (2016): 138-146.
Mataix-Cols, David, et al. "A total-population multigenerational family clustering study of
autoimmune diseases in obsessive–compulsive disorder and Tourette’s/chronic tic
disorders." Molecular psychiatry (2017).