Bruce sent me a text the other day: Hey Jeff, the movie “I Swear” is opening in a local Baltimore theater. It’s the life story of Tourette Syndrome campaigner John Davidson. G and I are going to see it this weekend. Maybe it’s playing in your neck of the woods.

Bruce is one of my oldest friends. We met the day we moved into the dormitory for our freshman year of college forty-six years ago. For some reason I walked into his room and introduced myself. Maybe he was playing a song I liked. Maybe he had a wall poster the resonated with me. Maybe I had an uncharacteristic burst of confidence. Smart, strategic move though, he showed up at college with a massive bag of weed. Oh right, plus he’s been a great friend my entire adult life. I make it difficult. I just went through a ten-year isolationist period where I burned up most of my friendships, but Bruce is still with me. He once said, “Don’t worry Jeff, you’re stuck with me for life.” So far, this is true.

Maybe you heard about John Davidson and I Swear recently. Both were heavily in the news a few months ago. In case you missed it, Davidson was invited to the BAFTA awards (essentially the British Oscars) for his part in the creation of I Swear, which received nominations for several awards. Davidson, who has Tourette Syndrome, and specifically coprolalia, the uncontrollable utterances of words and phrases that are culturally taboo, shouted out the N-word as two black performers were presenting an award. BBC had the show on a two-hour delay. Reportedly, they edited the show heavily, slicing out several other disruptions, but they chose to keep the shouted slur in the broadcast.

As you can imagine, pandemonium ensued. I woke up the next morning to Facebook statements from the Tourette Association of America and Tourettes Action (the UK version of TAA). Both organizations acknowledged the hurt that black people certainly felt when the hearing the word shouted out in the middle of the presentation. And they doubled down on the fact that Davidson has no control over his coprolalia. The use of a racial slur is not indicative of his views.

Like most people with Tourette Syndrome, mine comes with comorbid (cooccurring) conditions. The most disruptive of these is obsessive compulsive disorder. At this point in my life, my OCD is a mild case, but I’m still compelled to metaphorically pick at scabs. And pick I did. After reading every news article I could find on the controversy, I read the comments sections to see how the populace felt. The hate was palpable. “Davidson shouldn’t be out in public.” “He needs to learn to control himself.” “If he wasn’t a racist, the n-word wouldn’t be cued up and ready to pop out.”

When Tourette is depicted in popular media, Coprolalia is almost always how the disorder is portrayed, even though only about ten percent of people with Tourette Syndrome have coprolalia. People find it egregious, and therefore funny. Non sequitur cussing is an easy way to get a laugh. I don’t swear. I grunt. I make faces. I blow my breath up and across my wide-open eyeballs. I lick my lips. I scratch my skin raw. These vocalizations and movements are called tics, and they constantly change. They come and go with no obvious trigger. Many are static for years and others pop up for a few weeks and then disappear. My biggest fear is one day, I’ll develop coprolalia.

Near the end of the BAFTA week, someone asked me about Davidson’s use of the N-word. Maybe, he said, Davidson couldn’t can’t control his Tourette, but because he said THAT word, he’s clearly racist. I tried to explain that because of coprolalia, his brain grasped onto the most offensive word for the situation. My friend seemed to consider this, and then, while he didn’t say it out loud, he seemed to dismiss my explanation as incorrect.

A couple of days ago, while talking with my friend Karen, she mentioned that one of the reasons she often skips our yoga class is because she’s worried that her glucose monitor will disrupt the people around her. She’s a Type 1 Diabetic, and her glucose requires continual observation. Turning off her monitor for ninety-minutes isn’t an option, and neither is her cell phone pinging during class. Another woman frequently neglects to silence her phone, the whole class seethes at the continual disruption of incoming texts. Fortunately, I’ve only needed to grunt a few times during yoga, and I’ve managed to keep it fairly quiet. The remainder of my tics aren’t audible, so I let them fly as necessary. Probably the most obvious is a full body torque in an attempt to loosen up my torso muscles that aren’t actually tight. My mind just tells me to torque.

Like many with Tourette, I disrupt people in my orbit all the time. I attend meetings at work and scrunch my eyes together repeatedly. People don’t look me in the eye when they talk to me. I’m sure they are trying to save me embarrassment, and I suppose they are, until I realize that people change their behavior to make me and especially themselves more comfortable. I also sit at my desk and grunt all day. Some of my assistants over the past several years have listened to music and podcasts with headphones while they work at their desk. The baby boomer in me gets agitated by this practice, but I recognize they are just trying to hear something else besides my grunting.

Sometimes when my tics are escalated, I’ll ask my wife, “What do you suppose people think when I’m ticcing so much?” After reading the John Davidson comments in various publications, I now know exactly what people think.

I’ve already decided to skip seeing I Swear. Watching and reading Tourette content is triggering for me. It increases my tics, and it makes me feel bad about myself. When I read the book Motherless Brooklyn, I walked around in a terrible mood for weeks afterwards assuming everyone I knew considered me a freak (the insult used repeatedly in the book). Stupidly, I then tried to watch the movie. I only made it though ten minutes before I needed to turn it off. I ticced so hard and so relentlessly, I could barely concentrate.

I ran into an author friend a few weeks after the BAFTA debacle. He also has Tourette Syndrome, and he wrote a novel with a Tourette plot. His book triggered me as well, but I gutted through it because I wanted to support him as a writer. I asked him how he faired during the weeks after BAFTA. He said, like me, it had caused him a lot of distress. Then he said something that I hadn’t considered. He believes that BBC left the offensive remark in their broadcast to create buzz. All press is good press, they say, and at least in my online feeds, the press was nonstop.

He probably has a point. I never heard of the BAFTA awards before the Davidson incident. Now I know all about them. Just one more example of media exploiting Tourette Syndrome to grab attention.

Tourette Syndrome Awareness Month runs from May 15 through June 15. Please take some time this year to read up on Tourette and imagine what your life might look like if you couldn’t control your movements and sounds.

A Tourette reading list:
https://jefftcann.com/2025/05/19/so-much-more-than-tics
https://jefftcann.com/2023/03/28/torque
https://jefftcann.com/2021/02/27/motherless-brooklyn

Photo by Markus Winkler