Psychologist Concerned About TikTok Becoming Dangerous Breeding Ground For Mental Disorders

There are a lot of advantages when it comes to social media. However, there are also a lot of disadvantages. Psychologists have recently brought attention to mental health influencers on TikTok.

Apparently, there is a new group of social media stars surging on the social media platform: Mental health influencers, which consists mainly of teen girls and young women who post videos of themselves experiencing symptoms, like Tourette’s tics, rapid switches from one personality to another due to borderline personality disorder, and many others.

And what’s problematic is that these influencers, who are often without any medical credentials, post videos that help viewers “self-diagnose” their own mental conditions.

And what could be considered even worse is that these types of videos are getting billions of views. On TikTok alone, the hashtag #BPD, which stands for borderline personality disorder, has 3.7 billion views, #bipolar 2 billion, and #DID (dissociative identity disorder) another 1.5 billion, the New York Post reported.

Recently, psychologists have become aware of a trend among adolescent girls who claim they suffer from Tourette’s Syndrome and rare mental health conditions that aren’t typically seen in the teen demographic. The common denominator between many of these symptomatic girls is the consumption of mental health content on TikTok.

For example, Caroline Olvera of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago researched “numerous” girls with tics who blurt out the word “beans” in English accents — and found some who didn’t even speak English. It was discovered that a British Tourette influencer with over 14 million followers manifested the exact same “beans” tic.

Experts cite the nearly two years of lockdowns and school closures as the reason lonely teens are spending more time online and the reason many inevitably come across mental health content on TikTok. And when they do, the social media algorithm starts working to offer suggestible young girls even more videos on the topic.

Although mental health awareness is a topic that should be discussed, well-meaning influencers are unintentionally harming young, impressionable users, with many of them turning to incorrectly self-diagnosing themselves with disorders or suddenly manifesting symptoms because they are now aware of them.

The TikTok mental health explosion has been described as “clearly a modern version of social contagion, which has always been more prevalent among teen girls than other demographic groups,” by Dr. Jean Twenge, who is a professor.

Rates of depression have since doubled among teen girls between the years 2009 through 2019, and self-harm hospital admissions have soared 100% for girls between the ages of 10 to 14 amid the rise of social media between 2010 and 2014.

The rise of poor mental health coupled with the use of smartphones has resulted in its own frightening epidemic.

Social media users use to share their best days mainly. But it has become trendy to celebrate your worst moments because what garners attention today across social media marketing is tears, and content creators are incentivized to be vulnerable all for getting views.

And what is worse is there is no solution for the crisis going on.

One help to the cause is parents, specifically those of adolescent girls. Parents need to be the first line of defense against social media’s harmful effects.

Dr. Twenge urges parents to keep girls off social media, at least until they are 16, if possible. She also advises to “leave your phone outside your bedroom while you are sleeping, make sure your kids do the same, [and] put down all electronic devices an hour before bedtime.”