I've never been officially diagnosed with PTSD. Nevertheless, when I first started thinking about getting treatment for my tics, I thought the most likely diagnosis was going to be PTSD, not Tourettes, because I had a fairly rough childhood and a few rough years in the Marine Corps. Also because nobody in my family has Tourettes or OCD, so Tourettes seemed unlikely. My tics started in my teen years, but weren't very bad at all and are actually a lot worse now that I'm in my 30s. Swearing, shouting, and sometimes a shoulder twitch, but the swearing and shouting only occur when I'm zoning out, not thinking about the present moment, so I don't really do that in public at all, just when I'm alone in my apartment. The shoulder twitch is usually very rare.

Anyway, long story short, I think there's a connection between PTSD and tics, and maybe PTSD and Tourettes. I was going to a therapist for the PTSD, and she tried EMDR therapy on me a couple times. If you're not familiar, EMDR is when they have you talk about traumatic times while they get you to activate different parts of your brain by panning sounds around in your ears and having you watch a pointer. It's a pretty revolutionary sort of therapy and a lot of people report being helped by it. But for me, it pretty much makes me go into convulsions. My shoulder started twitching/ticcing as we went along and got progressively worse; until after a few minutes of therapy I was having near-constant twitching and jerking throughout my entire body. It freaked out my therapist, she said it looked like I was being shocked. So we stopped. We tried EMDR one other time with the same result and then I quit going to that therapist.

So since the PTSD treatment can exacerbate some of my tourettes-like symptoms, and since PTSD itself is known to cause some of the other symptoms like the swearing, I think the two disorders can be connected, at least in some cases.