Baylen Dupree-Dooley says missing even one day of her Tourette syndrome medication can leave her body and emotions out of sync for more than a week. In a sneak peek of an upcoming Baylen Out Loud episode, she said the lapse makes her feel physically off, mentally drained and far from herself.
The comments are drawing attention now because they come just days before the episode is set to air on TLC on Tuesday, July 21. Dupree-Dooley has built a large audience talking openly about Tourette syndrome, and this is one of her clearest firsthand descriptions yet of what happens when treatment is interrupted.
She said she has missed maybe a day of medication in the past, and the effect is immediate. “In the past, I have missed maybe a day of medications. So having all of these emotions, it’s just my body being all out of whack,” she said, adding, “That’s how I used to be unmedicated.”
That description matters because Dupree-Dooley also said the medication helps her sleep, but sleep alone does not fix everything. “I got some sleep from my sleep pills so I’m definitely feeling physically better. Mentally, I’m still not feeling the best,” she said. Asked when she would feel normal again, she answered, “I would say I won’t start feeling like myself again until like a week and a half, maybe a week.”
The episode shows her in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with her then-fiancé, Colin Dooley, who said he had never known her unmedicated. “I didn’t know unmedicated Baylen. I’ve only known medicated Baylen,” he said, adding that he knew it was something he could “perfectly handle and not freak out about.” She replied that he had been patient and understanding, and said she could not have asked for anyone better to marry in a month.
The larger story is not just that Dupree-Dooley skipped medication once. It is that she describes a narrow margin between feeling stable and feeling overwhelmed, with one missed day setting off more than a week of emotional and physical fallout. For viewers of Baylen Out Loud, the episode offers a more direct look at how Tourette syndrome treatment affects daily life, and for Dupree-Dooley it adds another layer to the awareness work she has done since being diagnosed in 2020. What comes next is simple: the episode airs Tuesday, and it will put her account of that disruption in front of a much wider audience.
Earlier this year, Dupree-Dooley also revisited the road to diagnosis, saying a neurologist initially told her she had Tourette’s before rescinding it because her symptoms were so severe. She said she was later formally diagnosed at the Mayo Clinic around five months afterward. That history makes her latest comments feel less like a passing anecdote and more like part of a longer, and still ongoing, account of living with Tourette syndrome in public.
