Mental health awareness is more widespread than ever. Some professionals think it may have gone overboard — especially on TikTok.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Mental health content on TikTok has attracted tens of billions of views, but some academics worry that it could be doing more harm than good.
- Most of it is not produced by mental health professionals. Some of it also explicitly encourages viewers to self-diagnose. The broader mental health awareness effort on TikTok might lead people to perceive common emotions and feelings as problematic signs of disorders like anxiety, depression, or ADHD.
- Considering mental health content on TikTok and other online platforms isn’t going anywhere, clinicians will have to find ways to deal with it.
By Ross Pomeroy
In one TikTok, a beautiful young woman sits in a bathroom, crying. Text accompanying the video reads, “The part of anxiety no one sees.” 7.5 million views, 1.2 million likes, 5,339 comments.
In another, a different woman is shown in various clips meditating, or looking sad and distressed. “Having anxiety is probably one of the most lonely, isolating things to have.” 8.1 million views, 1.2 million likes, 4,028 comments.
In a third, Jessa, who states she is a licensed therapist, sobs on her bed. “I just want to be normal,” she says to herself, almost angrily, through the tears. “The part of anxiety people don’t see.” 1.3 million views, 158,000 likes, 1,132 comments.
Videos spreading mental health awareness are both commonplace and popular on TikTok. As of January 2022, videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth collectively garnered 25.3 billion views. The social media platform has roughly one billion users who spend an average of an hour and a half daily on the app, more than any other social network.
Prevalence inflation
A growing cadre of psychiatrists and mental health professionals are concerned that spreading mental health awareness via TikTok is counterproductive and potentially even harmful. Adding urgency to their worries, two-thirds of U.S. teens have used TikTok and one-sixth say they use the app “almost constantly.” Moreover, 40% of adolescents are now initiating internet searches on TikTok instead of Google.
An area of mental health that gets frequent attention on TikTok is anxiety. Videos frequently portray it as a debilitating disorder. But the fact is that everyone, at one time or another, experiences it.
“There’s no line in the sand between the people who experience ‘normal’ anxiety and those who experience ‘clinical’ anxiety. It’s a gradually changing spectrum with a thousand shades of gray. But this point gets lost in the public conversation,” Dr. Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist at the University of Oxford, wrote in a 2023 op-ed for STAT.
“Campaigns and social media posts just churn out the message that there’s this problematic thing called anxiety, and so people start interpreting all the lower-level stuff as symptomatic of a disorder,” she added, calling this “prevalence inflation.”
Anxiety isn’t the only mental health issue that TikTokkers showcase. Autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, borderline personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are also frequent focuses. And, like with anxiety, many content creators encourage viewers to self-diagnose, which is highly problematic. According to surveys, Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, is especially likely to self-diagnose mental health disorders, with one survey suggesting three out of 10 members of the cohort have diagnosed their own mental health issue.
Foulkes is one of the most outspoken academics arguing that mental health awareness has gone too far. In a recent New York Times article, she pointed out that targeted interventions in schools have either been ineffective or actually worsened students’ mental health. Some students began over-interpreting their symptoms, perceiving them as signs of mental illness. Others spent more time ruminating on their thoughts and feelings at the expense of their overall happiness.
While there’s less research focusing on the effects of TikTok’s mental health awareness videos, it’s reasonable to assume they could be worse than in-person interventions. One reason is oversimplification. In a 2022 study, researchers analyzed 100 videos that were displayed with the hashtag #mentalhealth. Each averaged 13.4 million views. They found that almost half simply reported or expressed symptoms of mental distress (like the aforementioned crying women). Moreover, the vast majority were not posted by healthcare professionals. The study reinforces a fact of TikTok’s almost mythical algorithm: It shows what gets your attention, not necessarily what is nuanced, truthful, or helpful.
“Therapy ‘influencers‘ flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders,” Foulkes wrote. “When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.”
Self-diagnosis and social contagion
A study published earlier this year aligns with Foulkes’ claims. Researchers from the University of Delaware analyzed 100 TikTok videos with at least a million views focusing on depression, anxiety, or both. They found that videos featuring personal experiences had higher engagement than videos produced by health professionals. These personal experiences included descriptions or emotional displays of depression and anxiety symptoms…
more…
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/mental-health-awareness-backfiring/
F. Kaskais Web Guru
WebInvestigator.KK.org - by F. Kaskais 