While TikTok and social media can be good resources for spreading information and giving audiences access to professional advice they may not be able to get on their own, from dermatologists and plastic surgeons to hairstylists and nail techs, the line between good advice and misinformation has always been a thin one. Nowadays, TikTok has become a hotspot for discussions about mental health, specifically. While awareness and resources for mental health are crucial, a new study from The Guardian has found that more than half of the 100 top-performing mental health TikToks contain misinformation, raising concern amongst creators, viewers, parents and professionals alike.
The Guardian’s Latest Study Sheds Light on Misinformation Across Mental Health Tok
To investigate the accuracy of the ever-growing mental health related TikToks that boast all sorts of “mood-boosting” advice, The Guardian “took the top 100 videos posted under the #mentalhealthtips hashtag on TikTok and shared them with psychologists, psychiatrists and academic experts, who took a view on whether the posts contained misinformation,” the publication explains. The findings were less than ideal.
Upon review, The Guardian’s experts determined that a whopping 52 out of 100 videos “offering advice on dealing with trauma, neurodivergence, anxiety, depression and severe mental illness contained some misinformation, and that many others were vague or unhelpful.” In addition to videos containing misinformation and vague advice, another point of concern for experts like consultant neuropsychiatrist and researcher in psychological medicine at King’s College London, David Okai, was the misuse of therapeutic language across mental health TikToks. Okai reviewed the TikToks relating to depression and anxiety and found that the language often used terms like “wellbeing,” “anxiety” and “mental disorder” interchangeably, which he says “can lead to confusion about what mental illness actually entails.”
The experts involved in The Guardian’s study were not only concerned about the sheer number of misinformed mental health TikToks, but also that the one-size-fits-all approach regarding mental health could even be making matters worse. “TikTok is spreading misinformation by suggesting that there are secret universal tips and truths that may actually make a viewer feel even worse, like a failure, when these tips don’t simply cure,” says Amber Johnston, a British Psychological Society-accredited psychologist. While a TikTok spokesperson explained that the platform “proactively works with health experts at the World Health Organization and NHS to promote reliable information on our platform and remove 98 percent of harmful misinformation before it’s reported,” these new findings have opened the door for a wider conversation about mental health and social media today.
