Monterrey — teenagers and young adults look to TikTok for guidance on dealing with issues like depression or anxiety rather than consulting a mental health professional.
“Mental health debates have proliferated online, especially on TikTok, where the format allows for intimate and easily digestible videos that appear in an endless algorithmic stream,” says an article published in The New York Times.
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And for those searching for disorders, it has become increasingly easy to find brief definitions and emotional self-assessment questionnaires on the web that kids use the most.
“A major concern is that adolescents may be making the wrong self-diagnoses and treatment plans in the absence of a professional perspective,” the text says. “They might also come across inaccurate information or accounts that encourage harmful behavior, such as self-harm.”
Mental health professionals say they are seeing an uptick in teens and young adults self-diagnosing mental illnesses, including rare disorders, following “learning” regarding them online.
“In some cases, this information can guide them to getting the help they need, but it can also result in people mislabeling themselves, avoiding professional evaluation, and taking inappropriate treatments.”
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The paidopsychiatrist Magdalena Rodríguez Salinas affirms that the least number of children check what they see on the Internet, ask the school psychologist or their parents.
“The majority that touches me is that they say: ‘I saw on TikTok that I might have anorexia’, and instead of asking for help they went to find how to continue losing weight,” Rodríguez explains. “Or they tell me: ‘I feel like everything is going wrong for me, I think I was bewitched, and I started looking for videos on TikTok to reverse spells’, or ‘I met someone who says they don’t deal with psychiatric drugs, that it’s better a sunbath or quartz’”.
Thus they enter the spiral of the algorithm and misinformation, warns the specialist.
“They start watching videos of cutting or of suicidality, and they begin to see more videos with depressed children or cutting themselves, or how to hide that you hurt yourself, or how to pretend that you are fine or that they don’t see that you just cried. They are terrible tips,” she added.
The situation worsens if the parents, upon realizing it, turn the issue around and allow time to pass before deciding to go to the child psychiatrist, already at a serious level.
If a child, adolescent or young person listened to expresses that they saw something on TikTok that made them think regarding what they are experiencing, the important thing will be to listen to it. Without judging what he expresses.
“We should take it as a sign of interest in mental health,” Rodríguez said. “Let’s listen more to our children. If they are telling us something, it is for a reason. We must not go to the conclusion that “it is a fashion”, “you are exaggerating or “you want to look like the tiktoker”. That’s dangerous because we might miss a call for help.”
Finally, TikTok and the rest of the social networks are the platforms that they know.
“Our children are in another era and those are their sources. Rather, we have to help them identify the true information,” added the specialist.
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Lastly, the child psychiatrist Magdalena Rodríguez Salinas recommends:
- Listen to what the child or adolescent has to say, without interrupting, without qualifying it as “exaggerated”.
- Watch, together, the video with which he identified himself and explore with him why he feels that way, since when and how he notices it.
- Go to a mental health specialist to resolve the doubt.
