TikTok and Mental Health
Don’t get me wrong. I love TikTok. I spend likely too much time scrolling, laughing at videos of parrots, dogs, and listening to the moving stories of strangers. But my relationship with mental health TikTok, or therapy TikTok as it’s sometimes called, is more complex.
TikTok has a vast array of content. While some may think it’s just teenagers dancing, it’s more than that. There are people of all ages talking about everything you can imagine, and mental health is no exception.
There are significant advantages to the massive amount of information about mental health on this particular social media platform. We are actively de-stigmatizing it by discussing things like hospitalization, substance use, or Borderline Personality Disorder.
Of course, there are downsides. The biggest disadvantage is the lack of depth and context in the discussions. TikTok videos are often short - until recently they were time-limited to three minutes. Three minutes is not enough time to have a nuanced conversation about ADHD in women. Three minutes is not enough time to adequately describe what a trauma response is. Three minutes is not enough time to provide psychoeducation on polyvagal theory. We risk over-simplifying these intensely complex topics. When we over-simplify, we lose the information about the role of culture and race, to use just one example.
Furthermore, we risk pathologizing normal responses. I’ve seen a wide variety of TikToks claiming to describe the “fawn” response, which is another response alongside flight, fight, or freeze, according to Gina Ryder. While the fawn response is an important topic in the context of PTSD symptoms, we risk people thinking that a normal human response is a sign of a significant mental health concern.
When we discuss mental health and diagnoses in particular, it’s important that we understand the system in which diagnoses exist. Diagnoses are helpful categorization systems, but they are manmade, change over time, and are culturally bound. When we throw them around loosely without that context, we can cause harm. Awais Aftab said it beautifully: “The DSM was never designed nor intended to provide a framework for self-understanding of psychopathology. It is also, in my opinion, quite unsuited for this task.” When TikToks go viral for helping people diagnose themselves, we miss this point, and may miss the greater lessons in human nature.
But of course, this is not a black or white issue. The conversation about mental health is important, and reflects a reckoning with the unwellness in our culture. It opens eyes, and destigmatizes. Keep all of this in mind as you scroll - and don’t forget to find some funny cat videos too.