A couple of years ago I was in Portland, Oregon performing at a festival. We were over there for a couple of weeks and had an incredible time. This was partly because of the place and the people, but also because cannabis is legal in Oregon.…

Last year I wrote about an approach to help manage challenging situations that I’d been introduced to – it had as its acronym: STOP. I created a drawing to go with it to help me and my support team remember it.…

While I was working on a post last night a stream of tics burst into life, so I decided to record them on my phone in case they were interesting. Here’s what emerged:

“I wish I was a duck-face, I wish I was a mule, I wish I was a Haribo bag of undecided yule.…

We’re a year into a global pandemic and it’s disrupted most people’s lives significantly. It’s been a period of sustained uncertainty, with the way our society works repeatedly and abruptly changing.

While this will have been tricky for most people there are some specific new challenges for people with tics, as guest blogger Serena touched on at the end of last year.…

This year it will be a decade since I started experiencing daily tic attacks – these are episodes of intense tics that look seizure-like and need similar management.

During these episodes I nearly always lose communicative speech. This means I can’t choose the words I say, but I still have vocal tics, which range from simple repetitive noises to complicated sentences.…

So we’re in 2021 and the New Year is often a time to reflect on the changes we’re going to make in the year ahead. Eleven years ago it was the New Year that prompted me to start writing this blog, and it will be ten years ago this year that I started being open and honest about the episodes of intense tics I was experiencing.…

For me, Tourettes means I have strong oppositional impulses – the automatic urge to do exactly the opposite of what I want to do. This is why I shout ‘I’m over here’ during games of hide and seek,’ why I shout ‘bomb’ in airports, and why 400 Australians in a theatre knew Fat Sister was pregnant before our mum did.…

It’s half term week and families across the UK will be looking for ways to keep everyone entertained. In non-pandemic times the Touretteshero team travel a lot and, in the process, we’ve developed some tic-inspired games to pass the time. Our favourite game is Phil Mitchell, so to celebrate the holiday I thought I’d share our game with you.…

I was chatting earlier with a friend who’s having a tough time, and it got me thinking about affirmations, by which I mean positive statements that you say out loud to help overcome negative thoughts.

I looked some up, and then my tics immediately responded with their own suggestions.…

At the start of lockdown I was sent a short story about the experience of growing up with a parent with Tourettes by a young writer called Yaska Sahara. I found the piece incredibly moving and it was a perspective that I hadn’t encountered before so I reached out to Yaska asking if she’d be up for writing a guest post about her family’s experiences.…