Sweet Anita: Tourette's queen of Twitch

By Drew Miller HyndmanBBC OuchAnita, 30, is a full-time carer for her mum. For the hundreds of thousands of gamers who visit her on Twitch, she’s also known as the sassy and challenging Sweet Anita, a video gamer and streamer. But for a while she was waiting to be thrown off the platform for breaking all the rules.With practiced self-awareness, Anita broadcasts a daily mix of gaming, chatting with other streamers and fun challenges like building card towers.She has Tourette’s syndrome – a neurological condition which amongst other things causes people to make involuntary sounds or movements.Though it’s a condition which is better known in recent years, people are still full of questions because of its nature.When she first started broadcasting on the well-known platform Twitch, Anita feared she would be thrown off because her verbal tics are of the kind known as coprolalia, where you might swear or say inappropriate things. Anita has cussed everyone from Queen Elizabeth II through to Jesus and beyond as well as making many explicit references to sex acts, body parts and what your parents would think of as the worst swear words.”It feels like you’re being physically forced to say these things,” she…
Read More