BANGKOK — Yet another cost has been added to the toll of shooting victims, burned buildings, and severe economic loss following Thailand’s worst political violence in two decades: a disease that cripples its hardest-working journalists, rendering them unable to communicate normally or even speak in sentences.
Following the months-long UDD protests that shut down Bangkok’s downtown climaxing with May’s violent army crackdown and chaotic aftermath of arson and gunfire, more and more Bangkok-based journalists have been diagnosed with what doctors are calling “Twittervitis,” with the most severe case yet just reported from Bangkok Hospital.
The patient, Australian expat freelance reporter Andrew Hillenbrand, was admitted late Thursday night at 2:45am, after his twenty-seventh consecutive night of one hour of sleep or less. According to attending physicians, Hillenbrand was delirious and appeared to have a uncontrolled spastic movement in the fingers of his right hand, which refused to let go of his Blackberry Pearl.
“The patient was physically unable to stop sending Tweets,” said Dr. Pornsak Chiavaroong, who treated Hillenbrand in the emergency room. “He kept muttering in half-sentences, omitting the vowels from his words, and never spoke more than 140 characters at a time. We immediately recognized it as Twittervitis.”
The disease, first diagnosed in 2009 during the Iranian government crackdown, is a mild neurological psychosis that affects the brains of Twitter users. Although far more common in Tweeters than followers, it has been known to also attack those who don’t even have Twitter accounts but just obsessively refresh their Firefox tabs for hours during times of breaking news.
Since the UDD protests in March, no fewer than 23 cases of Twittervitis have been reported in Bangkok hospitals, most of them mild. According to Pornsak, treatment is easy if caught early.
“We usually prescribe 48 hours of sleep, medically assisted if necessary, and wrap the hand in a stiff cast to loosen the joints,” he said. “We also ask friends and family to confiscate the mobile phone and laptop for three days and make the patient ingest traditional, unilateral media after every meal. Usually after a romantic comedy on DVD and a copy of Harpers, the patient recovers fully.
Hillenbrand’s case, however, appears to require more extreme measures. Although staff declined to comment on the record about specific treatments, it is rumored that he is undergoing a 24-hour “re-education session” that includes watching children’s television programming to teach him how to use complete words normally.
Although Twittervitis has never been diagnosed as a chronic case, some believe Hillenbrand may represent a new strain of the disease that could be fatal to a journalism career.
“Severe Twittervitis sufferers can’t give interviews, or speak on TV, or even write a 50-word summary,” said Morton Cartersmith, a media analyst specializing in trade medical issues at Nielsen. “Worse, they lose their personal relationships as well, preferring to communicate with spouses and even their own children through Tweets or Tweet-like bursts.”
“And,” he added, “their need to have the last word in every conversation, usually with some contrived, pop-cultural reference punchline, just makes them insufferable.”
