With the rise of TikTok among young adults and children also comes a large boom in content on and around mental health. Online awareness of the importance of mental wellbeing can have serious benefits. It gives (young) people a low threshold way to find information and resources that support them while many countries around the world lack the proper care (structure) to inform and advise. Social media also allows people to find community online but but a platform like TikTok also creates the risk of unqualified content creators providing wrong and harmful information. Diagnosing mental disorders generally does not lend itself to ‘7 signs you have X’ formats that are open to interpretation and play into a feeling of relatability, rather than accuracy.

To test the degree to which harmful information is spread online, a new study looked into the #adhdtest hashtag on TikTok and the accuracy of information. To determine whether information was useful or misleading, the researchers compared the test to the official ASRS-v1.1 questions list that provides six questions that are most indicative of having ADHD. If the TikTok video contained at least 4 out of 6 questions from the official screener, it was deemed useful.

The results were not great: “out of the 50 included #adhdtest videos, 92% (n = 46) were misleading. Furthermore, useful videos had minimal engagement, with only 4% of the total likes, 1% of the total comments, and 7% of the total favorites.”

There is no reason to believe this degree of potentially harmful information is only limited to ADHD testing. Other popular categories are OCD, autism, depression and many more. And especially for children this kind of misinformation is concerning. Due to their age, where they are in the process of finding their identity, the invitation arises to self-diagnose normal and harmless quirks into an official mental disorder. 

A recent article by Dazed also dove into the rise of a neurodivergency subculture on TikTok, or SickTok, how the disorder-focused subculture is also referred to: “A recent study in the journal of Comprehensive Psychiatry found that teenagers’ exposure to it during an important phase of personality development raises the likelihood that they’ll develop symptoms of the disorders they see online. Evidence that social media is “a vehicle of transmission for social contagion of self-diagnosed mental illness conditions” is mounting.”

And instead of neurodivergent content focusing on research-backed advice and support, an emerging market leads to commodification of disorders instead. “To keep purses open, neurodivergence has undergone a rebrand. (…) Symptoms are now ‘superpowers’ wrapped in a set of cutesy aesthetics aligning them with modern hippies and creative types.” The result is that being neurodivergent becomes a cool and unique type of identity within a subculture that young people aspire to belong to. And this development ignores the very real and often distressing experience of people that genuinely are affected by certain disorders. 

Want to read more about the risk of over-emphasizing mental health? Read our in-depth blog post that we wrote a year ago here.