Members of both parties in the House are entertaining the idea of using a rarely-utilized “discharge petition” to force a vote on raising the debt ceiling as Democratic leaders refuse to negotiate.

The procedural maneuver by which a measure gets forced out of a committee for a House floor vote is being discussed by Democrats and moderate Republicans as the United States hit its borrowing limit at $31.4 trillion, prompting the Treasury Department to take “extraordinary measures” to prevent a default in the short term.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) told Semafor the discharge petition is “one of many options” under consideration as he works with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ) on hammering out some sort of a deal. In speaking with CNN, Fitzpatrick stressed that forcing a vote on a clean debt ceiling increase without conditions is an “absolute last option.”

The assistant Democratic leader in the House, Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), said members of his party should work with Republicans if they do decide to start a discharge petition. “I believe that what we ought to do as Democrats is join with whatever Republicans that may exist that want to do something about this, so if a Republican puts up a discharge petition, I’ll certainly sign it,” Clyburn told CBS News.

A discharge petition requires that a bill be submitted to a committee for 30 legislative days, have 218 signatures, spend seven legislative days on the calendar, and then finally the speaker has two days to set up a time for a vote upon notice. If the measure is approved, then it moves to the Senate for consideration.

The mechanism has been used sparingly over the years. Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler (D-NY) initiated a discharge petition to advance the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which was being held up in the Rules Committee. That endeavor failed because the discharge petition did not get enough signatures, however the legislation was ultimately taken up for consideration and passed. More recently, dozens of House Republicans joined with Democrats in supporting a discharge petition to force the lower chamber in 2015 to consider rescuing the Export-Import Bank.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) agreed to seek spending cuts as part of his effort to woo conservative holdouts who held up his quest for the gavel. This week, McCarthy rejected the idea of a debt ceiling increase without conditions, instead pushing to find “a path to get us to a balanced budget and let’s start paying this debt off.”

While McCarthy says he wants to engage in talks, Democratic leaders are resisting negotiations. White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Tuesday, “We are not going to be negotiating over the debt ceiling,” and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said, “there should be no political brinkmanship with the debt limit.”

Researchers have examined the troubling trend of teens self-diagnosing mental illness through social media. 

A new paper published earlier this month in Comprehensive Psychiatry proposed that “social contagion” through prolonged social media use can explain why some teens, mostly adolescent females, self-diagnose their purported rare mental illnesses and personality disorders online. 

“We believe there is an urgent need for focused empirical research investigation into this concerning phenomenon that is related to the broader research and discourse examining social media influences on mental health,” said the study’s lead author, John D. Haltigan, and co-author, Gayathiri Rajkumar, in a recent article for Reality’s Last Stand.

The paper focused on the uptick in teens presenting with tics with no known biological cause and the resurgence of the extremely rare multiple personality disorder, now called Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), in which a person claims to harbor multiple distinct personalities. Also mentioned are the prevalence of autism, depression, eating disorders, and gender identity-related conditions on social media. 

“That rates of teen and adolescent depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation have risen precipitously since the advent of social media and smartphones is likely no coincidence,” the authors said.

The paper proposes that social media platforms like TikTok, whose core user base are teen girls, and the popularity of online communities that glamorize mental illness, may act as a “spread vector” for adolescents to adopt various disorders as part of their online personas.

“While posting about personal struggles with mental illness online may be emotionally genuine to some, it is more accurately understood as a behavioral display to fit in and appear unique to others online,” the authors said.

Since the pandemic in 2020, while many were shuttered indoors relying heavily on social media, neurologists began seeing droves of teen girls reporting the sudden onset of physical and verbal tics. Experts believe that teen girls around the world have started reenacting tics after watching popular influencers with Tourette’s syndrome on TikTok. 

Neurologists call them functional tics, or functional tic-like behavior, as they appear to start out of nowhere, and “functional” in medicine refers to “no known physical cause.” Functional tics differ from Tourettes, a nervous system disorder with a known physical cause, characterized by repetitive, unwanted movements and sounds that usually begins in childhood. Tics can be imitated by watching others with tics, similar to the phenomenon doctors describe of witnessing siblings of children with seizures develop “functional seizures.” 

On TikTok, the hashtag #tourettes has 7.6 billion views, #DID has 2.4 billion views, #borderlinepersonalitydisorder has 1.5 billion views, and both #transgender and #autism have 16.9 billion views. 

“Unfortunately, many content creators posting these videos are not medical professionals, but are instead self-identified patients or mental health advocates who often speak on mental disorders with little to no expertise on the matter,” the authors said. 

In the Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) portal, popular content creators capture themselves “switching alters,” summoning their distinct personalities in a short video format. Historically fewer than 200 cases of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) were documented over many centuries until the popular 1976 TV movie “Sybil” featured a woman who suffered from the affliction. By the late 1980s, one estimate found that more than 40,000 patients, mostly women, had come out of therapy believing they had DID. 

Recently, mental health professionals have seen another boom in self-diagnosed DID, which they believe is socially influenced, not organic. The authors argue that these novel mental illnesses have become identity signifiers and are used to build a social media following. 

“They may incorporate mental illness symptom presentations they are exposed to in online communities to socially assimilate and build social capital within these communities,” the authors said.

The paper sources the onset of “mental health content” to a social media platform that was popular in the 2000s called Tumblr. It “provided users who typically were seen as outcasts” with “a sense of community and belonging,” the authors said.

In 2012, Tumblr implemented a policy against blogs that promoted eating disorders, self-mutilation, and suicide due to their popularity among teens and young adults. The authors note the attempt to “de-stigmatize” and “normalize” mental illness may have had the unintended effect of glamorizing it.

“The continued evolution of this trend underscores an urgent need for increased understanding of the influence of social media on mental health, including its phenotypic clinical presentations and the possibility that increasingly algorithmic social media platforms may serve as a vehicle of transmission for social contagion of self-diagnosed mental illness conditions,” the paper concluded.