Think of Tourette’s and you might think of involuntary swearing, gestures or noises, often portrayed in pop culture as something to be made fun of. In reality, only 10 per cent of people with Tourette’s have the ‘swearing tic’, coprolalia. In New Zealand, one in 100 young people live with the neurological disorder and the stigma that comes with it .
Here an Auckland-based father and son both living with Tourette’s explain what it’s really like, and what needs to change about the way it’s perceived in New Zealand. When Chris Henderson was 9 years old, a GP prescribed him “harsh” antipsychotic medication and told him to stare into a mirror to see how “crazy” he looked. It was 1987 and Henderson had just been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome.
He’d been experiencing some of the signs since he was as young as 3 or 4 years old, such as eye rolling and motor tics. “When you’re 9 and you’ve got a doctor telling you that, and you’ve got a mum and a dad and a sister that care and you don’t know what to do except stare in a mirror, you kind of have to figure it out yourself,” he tells the NZ Herald . Now 46, he’s the founder and CEO of Pita Pit New Zealand and a father of three.
But ever since his diagnosis, Henderson says, “it’s still always felt like I couldn’t talk about it, because of those early years.” Growing up, his friends knew he wasn’t “weird or odd” for having Tourette’s, but during his intermediate and high school ye.
