Ed's Tourette's

     For Entry 1 of my series on Tourette in Popular Media, I decided to go with the infamous South Park episode, "La Petit Tourette". I'm going with this first because of all the things I'll be talking about in these posts, this single episode of South Park might be the one I have to personally reckon with the most, and certainly the one that I most need to come to terms with. I want to investigate not just how the average person thinks of Tourette's, but what I myself thought of it before my own diagnosis. This is a good place to start because, up until a few years ago, I truly loved South Park.      Not everyone reading this is as old as my old self, but back around 1997, when I was seventeen, South Park was the absolute bomb diggity for people (boys) of a certain age (teenagers). Here on TV, finally, at long last, were four cartoon boys as crude and vulgar as my friends and I believed ourselves to be in real life. I was not a particularly self-aware seventeen

     Hey everyone! I've decided to try a little experiment with my blog. I don't remember how the idea came about, but I thought it would be a fun exercise to go through depictions of Tourette Syndrome in popular media to examine how they've influenced how the average person might perceive TS. While this is a purely academic exercise, it's awfully personal to me and I imagine it is to some of you as well. A person's beliefs about TS and TS patients can profoundly affect those of us who suffer from it, from personal relationships and dating to college admissions and job hunting, not to mention, as I'm discovering, parenting.      I know I have a tendency in my blog posts to ramble, but I want these entries to be accessible, pointed, and relevant. I'm going to do my best to keep these pieces laser(ish)-focused on what effect the media in question might have had on viewers' beliefs about TS. I will surely digress here and there, and I want to leave space t