Dr Amanda Cole was 15 and sitting in a religious studies class when she experienced a peculiar spasm at the back of throat. She assumed it would pass, but it was a vocal tic and her first known manifestation of her Tourette's syndrome, a condition that causes people to make sudden, repetitive sounds or movements. "How am I going to have a family? How am I going to have a job?" Cole, 32, remembers asking herself as she lay awake at night after her diagnosis in her 20s at her home on the Debden Estate near the London-Essex border. "I thought it was going to destroy my life." Now a married mother-of-one, Cole is an assistant professor in sociolinguistics at Cambridge University, but throughout her academic life she has kept her Tourette's hidden - until now. Following an incident at this year's Bafta Film Awards ceremony in which a guest shouted out offensive words because of his tics, Cole said she wanted to be open about her condition and allowed the BBC to join her as she began telling colleagues and students. "I felt so scared of Tourette's," says Cole, who is one of about 300,000 people in the UK living with the condition. "There was no-one I knew that had Tourette's, and I didn'
Aug 11, 2026 → Aug 22, 2026
The actor on mucking out pigs as a teenager, an apology to his first wife and what makes him cry all the time Born in London, Nigel Havers, 74, was Bafta-nominated for his 1981 role in Chariots of Fire. His other films include A Passage to…
Read original at The Guardian →2 updates from 2 sources over 11 days.
The actor on mucking out pigs as a teenager, an apology to his first wife and what makes him cry all the time Born in London, Nigel Havers, 74, was Bafta-nominated for his 1981 role in Chariots of Fire. His other films…
Read original at The Guardian →Dr Amanda Cole was 15 and sitting in a religious studies class when she experienced a peculiar spasm at the back of throat. She assumed it would pass, but it was a vocal tic and her first known manifestation of her…
Read original at BBC →What this story stands on. Tier 0 is a primary record or the subject's own words; higher tiers must be attributed, never stated as bare fact.
The actor on mucking out pigs as a teenager, an apology to his first wife and what makes him cry all the time Born in London, Nigel Havers, 74, was Bafta-nominated for his 1981 role in Chariots of Fire. His other films include A Passage to…
View source →Dr Amanda Cole was 15 and sitting in a religious studies class when she experienced a peculiar spasm at the back of throat. She assumed it would pass, but it was a vocal tic and her first known manifestation of her Tourette's syndrome, a…
View source →Tier key: T0 = Primary source · T1 = Wire · T2 = Outlet report · T3 = Commentary
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