TikToks on mental disorders trivialize the topic, defends the psychologist

Mental disorders are not like a recipe for cake. Mental health content has become popular on social networks like TikTok, but beyond awareness, quick videos list symptoms. We’ve been talking about depression, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, anxiety for a few seconds… and that’s it, the diagnosis is made.

With the gargantuan reach of this content, experts have already warned that the way it is addressed can drain the mental health debate.

Mental health on social media

Debates about mental health on social networks have great public appeal: a hashtag on TikTok, #anxiety (anxiety in Portuguese), already had more than 11 million views at the beginning of 2022. That of #ADHD, more than 9 millions.

However, for the psychologist Clarissa Mendonça Corradi Webster, professor of the Psychobiology course at the Faculty of Philosophy, Science and Letters of Ribeirão Preto (FFCLRP) at the USP, this does not always come to raise awareness.

Problems

For the teacher, content gets views quickly and generates engagement, but there is no oversight on the truthfulness or accountability of what is being said.

This is a bad combination, complex mental health content produced easily, quickly and sensationally in the pursuit of engagement.

Clarissa Mendonça Corradi Webster

For her, one of the problems is the question of diagnosis, a type of content that has become popular. Contrary to what is shown in the videos, monitoring by doctors and healthcare professionals is essential to identify the patient’s condition, which goes beyond a simple “cake recipe” or a check list.

The teacher emphasizes that professionals are careful to get to know the patient and understand what can influence the diagnosis.

fake content

Trivialization of mental health

Clarissa Mendonça warns that videos trivialize diagnosis and, moreover, suffering.

Increasingly, common experiences are referred to as diagnoses in everyday life. For example, we end up no longer saying that we are sad, but depressed, or if we are happy, we say that we are manic. If we perceive a change in mood, we call it bipolar.

Clarissa Mendonça Corradi Webster

It also points out that content trivializes frameworks and, consequently, awareness about them.

It gets worse when the vast majority of manufacturers aren’t even in the healthcare arena and understand what they’re talking about, leaving it up to the user to decide what’s or isn’t worth their time.

age range

It gets worse: another research published on the PudMed, in 2021, revealed that 25% of TikTok users were between the ages of 10 and 19. That is to say, a quarter of the audience of these videos are building an identity and can be influenced by captivating videos.

With information from USP Journal AND PubMed

TikToks post on mental disorders trivializes the topic, argues the psychologist who first appeared on Olhar Digital.

Source: Olhar Digital