Elucidating Tourette's syndrome: perspectives from hypnosis, attention and self-regulation

Biological psychiatry favors drug treatment over non-pharmacological intervention and shapes the way clinicians both treat and understand Tourette's Syndrome (TS). However, drug treatments for TS involve side effects and are potentially toxic to the central nervous system. Moreover, current pharmacological treatments are largely ineffective and at best only provide a modest symptom reduction. In this paper, we describe how non-pharmacological treatments such as focused attention can modulate, reduce, or indeed entirely eliminate the symptoms of TS as well as elucidate the underlying neural mechanisms. Showing that the symptoms of TS are susceptible to self-regulatory interventions such as hypnosis, we propose that attentional training could be used to both treat the disorder and better understand it.