TikTok videos leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2021)

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As an adult who struggles with ADHD that can be severely impairing, I’ve learned quite a few tricks from TikTok’s ADHD advocates. It’s definitely a coin with two sides.<p>Edit: I’ve also learned to accept things about me that I can’t change. For example, I have a better outcome if I plan to be distracted rather than trying to fight my way through distraction.

I&#x27;ve done a lot of thinking about this issue, and there&#x27;s two topics I notice. First, disability has become a status symbol in certain circles. Second, the huge rise in self-diagnosed disability.<p>On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24&#x2F;7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it&#x27;s just that the diagnosis might be different than the one they self-diagnose themselves with. I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what&#x27;s the cause?

Young people on the internet have been doing this since at least the 90s, though it&#x27;s definitely become more popular (mainly due to internet culture spreading to normal society). Just think back to the LiveJournal&#x2F;MySpace era - it was the same exact thing back then. All the kids that I knew who did this have grown up to be completely normal adults.

Tik Tok is the reason I&#x27;ve been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don&#x27;t! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I&#x27;ve heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don&#x27;t have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn&#x27;t seem worth it.

People are going to be blaming TikTok, social media, or whatever else for this, but it&#x27;s important to note that this is not a new phenomenon at all. Tuberculosis was fashionable during the Victorian era and shaped a lot of our modern beauty standards today[0]. Is social media really to blame, or is a desire to be different just a part of being human?<p>[0]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;science-nature&#x2F;how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.smithsonianmag.com&#x2F;science-nature&#x2F;how-tuberculos...</a>

Growing up, my teenage friend group would frequently dive into mental diagnosis and personality assessments. This feels like a very common teenage thing to do and TikTok didn&#x27;t invent it. At that age, you don&#x27;t know who you are or why you do things you do and there&#x27;s comfort in learning about this stuff. For that matter, it&#x27;s a joke among psych students that you begin to diagnose yourself and your friends as you take abnormal psych.<p>Or maybe it wasn&#x27;t a common thing for friend groups to do and mine was strange. We didn&#x27;t have the WSJ to tell us.

I recently discovered &quot;systems&quot; people via Reddit (r&#x2F;SystemsCringe) will searching for systems engineering. The core belief seems to be that the individual has &quot;multiple people&quot; living in the same body. They&#x27;ve devised a whole language for talking about it as well[0].<p>This reminds me of the &quot;otherkin&quot; fad that occurred primarily on Tumblr about a decade ago[1]. It was where teenagers believed themselves to not be humans but rather other creatures like dragons, bears, and so on. I remember reading about one girl who argued with her mother over whether or not she needed to eat diamonds because she was a dragon.<p>0. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SystemsCringe&#x2F;comments&#x2F;w95q5q&#x2F;alter_of_a_dead_person&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;old.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;SystemsCringe&#x2F;comments&#x2F;w95q5q&#x2F;alter...</a><p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Otherkin" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Otherkin</a><p>Edit: Corrected a typo. Added more explanation of how I discovered that sub. It seems some are misinterpreting it as a judgment.

Related: medical students&#x27; disease!<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Medical_students%27_disease" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Medical_students%27_disease</a>

I can&#x27;t stop seeing the heavy gender skew in online communities centred around these topics. Both the sexual orientation as well as mental disorder communities like this seem to be most popular among teenager or young adult women. As a man I don&#x27;t know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can&#x27;t even give an uneducated guess as to what could be the source of this attraction towards quirky sexual orientations and pronouns or mental disorders.<p>Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.

Reminds me of &quot;WebMD caused a spike in cancer&quot; stories; anyone remember those?

Teens do exhibit lots of mental disorder symptoms at various times--their brains are still developing rapidly, and on top of that they&#x27;re thrust into one unfamiliar environment after another. The &quot;normal, well-adjusted&quot; state ought to be pretty tumultuous at that age.

I wonder if kids would still self diagnose after having witnessed first hand what those illnesses are like and what they do to someone you love.

I don&#x27;t see it mentioned very often, but the whole &quot;record yourself doing this funny dance&quot; aspect of TikTok is, I think, a huge portion of why this is happening and is what makes it more powerful than other forms of social media. Getting people used to imitating what they see on the app could also be programming their minds to consciously&#x2F;subconsciously imitate other things they see on there as well.

My question is: Does this actually matter?<p>Does this have a lasting impact or do the kids simply move on with no negative changes to their lives?<p>I remember thinking a lot of dumb stuff as a teenager. Just because I thought it doesn&#x27;t mean it was bad that I did.

I see a lot of affirming opinions to this post, but I&#x27;m worried that it&#x27;s just a very direct read without assuming greater societal context.<p>Could it be the case that there is now less social stigma to address and speak about mental health publicly?<p>Speaking from anecdotal experience (which is, yes, the worst), I struggled in school on mathematic topics, and just about never did my homework. My high school pushed me for a study, which was performed. My parents and I were invited to a meeting to review the results, but they did not allow me to come along, and I was not allowed to view the results of the study, but my school did grant me extended time on tests but was not allowed by my parents to elucidate why. (I did not <i>need</i> the extended time.)<p>These days, I went to a psychiatrist and had more studies, done, it turns out I have a rather textbook case of ADHD which was not disclosed to me and was left untreated. I also casually think that a small slice of my family, possibly including myself, is on the autism spectrum (on the DSM-5 style definition).<p>So, while I partially agree with some of the perspectives here, I also firmly believe a non-zero amount of the change is that we&#x27;re getting better at understanding and speaking about mental health—where definitions and processes from a psychiatric perspective are evolving, and that socially it&#x27;s no longer something that must be bottled up and kept hidden (as much).

Headline could&#x27;ve been &quot;TikTok videos leave teens with mental disorders&quot; and I&#x27;d still believe it.

Is anyone else just not worried about this at all? I started using IRC at the age of 7 and I turned out okay. My brother who ran with the local hoodlums is still a mess to this day. As as far as my children, I would be more concerned with them going to a nationalist political rally than I would be about them being online. Back in my parents time there were roving religious cults that indoctrinated youth, these days at least my kids can look these up online and realize what they&#x27;re getting into.<p>There is a big, seeming North American sentiment that children are incapable of functioning without an adult and need to be protected at all times, rather than fostering their capability for independence. This is not to say you don&#x27;t watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.

For all of human history across every culture, parents would do what they could to keep their kids away from “bad influences”. You move to certain areas, go to certain places, are members of certain organizations etc. which serve to socialize your kids with kids from families that have shared values. You don’t talk to strangers.<p>With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc.<p>It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.

Recasting this as &quot;Social media is bad for mental health&quot; would be more truthful. But it would not villainize just one new social media platform at a time when legacy platforms struggle with growth.

There is a strong aspect of mimetic contagion to this phenomenon. For a primer, see this book: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1250262488&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?crid=12IUYDKLC6FJ1&amp;keywords=wanting+burgis&amp;qid=1659376732&amp;sprefix=wanting+burgi%2Caps%2C163&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday...</a>

When I see some adults in TikTok videos, I also think they have rare mental disorders.

Psychology is not a hard science, it&#x27;s not a computer where you can prove what will happen. Therefore when applied by clinics the only way to diagnose is based off of the patients own words. If you say the right things to mark off DSM5 symptoms, then you get that diagnosis.<p>I don&#x27;t blame social media for this, while it is true that it has heavily increased knowledge of various real illnesses, and therefore increased the case of false positives - clinics should be able to differentiate between this. That&#x27;s the point. The professional should be able to properly diagnose, because the patient themselves doesn&#x27;t know what the problem is or how to treat it.<p>But there in comes the &quot;do no harm&quot; idea. Where we have to do <i>something</i> because if we get it wrong and didn&#x27;t prescribe pills then the patient may kill themselves or harm others. And conveniently we can point and say &quot;we did it by the book, no liability.&quot;. It should be recoined &quot;do harm to everyone equally&quot; for correctness.

&gt; &quot;Despite how great the newfound mental-health awareness is among teens, there seems to be a trend of using mental-health diagnoses as a social currency,” he said.<p>Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you&#x27;re a teen, though? Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?

I work with younger people in a tech-centric mentoring program. Most of them shun TikTok just as they shun other mainstream social media sites like Facebook.<p>However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit.<p>The amount of incorrect, oversimplified, and downright weird psychiatry and psychology information they pick up from Reddit is astounding. The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. However, there’s something about Reddit’s hive mind that has convinced these people that the bar for ADHD is very low, such that they see <i>everything</i> as ADHD. It’s so bad that entire cohorts will come through and convince each other that they all have self-diagnosed ADHD, despite most of them functioning just fine in their personal, academic, and work lives.<p>They say things like “My brain doesn’t produce dopamine” (ADHD has dopaminergic involvement but it is not a disorder of decreased dopamine production, thats Parkinson’s) and other such statements that would be easily disproven with even cursory research on the topic. This is one of the most confusing aspects to me, as these are the same people who will spend hours researching the intricate details about front-end frameworks or other topics. There’s something about Reddit psychiatry that short-circuits past their normal logic and leads to blind acceptance.<p>I suspect the root problem is that they’re not actually going to Reddit for psychiatry advice or self-diagnosing with the goal of learning how to work with a mental health condition. It seems to be more about identity and adopting an explanation that makes them different and unique. ADHD has become especially attractive as a self-diagnosis because it’s trendy right now and it gives people a sense that their accomplishments are that much greater due to starting from a disadvantaged point.<p>Meanwhile, I have worked privately with several mentees who admit struggles with doctor-diagnosed ADHD and they behave completely differently. They usually don’t want to public announce their condition and go to lengths to avoid letting it be obvious to their peers or employers. The trivialization of genuine ADHD is massively frustrating to these people.

I think social media like TikTok can be a force for good in helping people gain awareness of previously not commonly discussed phenomena like mental illness or sexual orientation, both in &quot;oh wow I might have this&quot; for those who are afflicted but not aware and just the general populace as a whole. This is probably thanks to the exposure of popular influences who discuss these things as their main platform or make content those who do have it can relate to. This can also lead to incorrect diagnosises though, whether through malic by trying to imitate what made someone popular or simple confusion (I think thinking in terms of binary classification helps here). I think this worries many people, but so long as it doesn&#x27;t lead to physical harm or actual mental illness, it&#x27;s something kids will learn to grown out of with time.

If so, I can only imagine what Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook does to teenagers and their fragile minds.<p>The best way I can describe my use of TikTok is, it makes me happy. There are fun people doing fun things, and it makes me happy to watch. Even if I&#x27;m older than most of them.<p>Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed.<p>I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it&#x27;s a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others.<p>As usual, the real &quot;problem&quot; with TikTok is that it&#x27;s not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That&#x27;s why it gets attacked in western media.

This reminds me of every other student while taking Abnormal Psychology in college.

This just seems like a video version of WebMD<p>I use to joke with my sister who would go online and read things then come up with self-diagnoses.<p>I think people have to be more aware that not everything you read of see online is real.

Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called &quot;narcissism&quot;. Not so long from now, companies like Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok would be banned for the impossible to measure but huge damage made to the society. Facebook is also evil, but for many other types of damages. And it&#x27;s not like these companies don&#x27;t know what they actually are causing - they perfect know to conditions they put youngster into, make he acute, and profit from it! This is not moral and soon should be illegal!

Three Men In A Boat redux -<p><i>It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.<p>I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus’s Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too,—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright’s disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could conclude I had not got was housemaid’s knee.<p>I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn’t I got housemaid’s knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without housemaid’s knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.<p>I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to “walk the hospitals,” if they had me. I was a hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.<p>Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.<p>I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.<p>I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I’m ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to him now. “What a doctor wants,” I said, “is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each.” So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:<p>“Well, what’s the matter with you?”<p>I said:<p>“I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is not the matter with me. I have not got housemaid’s knee. Why I have not got housemaid’s knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not got it. Everything else, however, I have got.”<p>And I told him how I came to discover it all.<p>Then he opened me and looked down me, and clutched hold of my wrist, and then he hit me over the chest when I wasn’t expecting it—a cowardly thing to do, I call it—and immediately afterwards butted me with the side of his head. After that, he sat down and wrote out a prescription, and folded it up and gave it me, and I put it in my pocket and went out.<p>I did not open it. I took it to the nearest chemist’s, and handed it in. The man read it, and then handed it back.<p>He said he didn’t keep it.<p>I said:<p>“You are a chemist?”<p>He said:<p>“I am a chemist. If I was a co-operative stores and family hotel combined, I might be able to oblige you. Being only a chemist hampers me.”<p>I read the prescription. It ran:<p>“1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer<p>every 6 hours.<p>1 ten-mile walk every morning.<p>1 bed at 11 sharp every night.<p>And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”</i>

There is an aspect of mimetic contagion to this phenomenon. For a primer on what this means, see: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday&#x2F;dp&#x2F;1250262488&#x2F;ref=sr_1_1?crid=12IUYDKLC6FJ1&amp;keywords=wanting+burgis&amp;qid=1659376732&amp;sprefix=wanting+burgi%2Caps%2C163&amp;sr=8-1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday...</a>

Note for the hacker news comments: you&#x27;ll see a lot of people not putting sarcasm markers next to what they say and then a whole bunch of replies thinking that person was serious and there&#x27;s a whole lot of misunderstanding going on in a lot of these comments and that&#x27;s a problem. Tone indicators are important.

According to Wikipedia [1] there&#x27;s actually a term for this -- &quot;cybermunch&quot;.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_self#Munchausen_by_Internet" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...</a>

The psychological resources is always limited even in the best development country. There are fair amount of people out there that are actually undiagnosed. I think there may be some people overreacting, but the real number is definitely higher than the statistics we have.

It’s this kind of content that reminds me that if social media censors were actually interested in keeping safe people with mental problems, they wouldn’t police content so much as they would prevent such people from using their poisonous systems.

My sister never had any facial ticks until it was popular on ticktok to have a facial tick.

Tumblr boards leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2011)

I was strongly recommended to advertise on TikTok but I refuse to because I know I will get addicted.<p>I&#x27;d rather my business fail than get addicted to it.

Never read HN comments unless it&#x27;s about something technical. The privilege is fucking unreal.

I wonder if you could find this same article about google in 2000-2010 timeframe?

Yes. Taking digital crack cocaine for breakfast, lunch and dinner uninterrupted and everyday does get you these mental disorders which are not good for the brain.<p>TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.

s&#x2F;TikTok&#x2F;Social Media&#x2F;g<p>It&#x27;s all so tiring.

Perhaps not so rare then?

Second year syndrom

How are the videos and information surrounding all these mental disorders on TikTok not in the same category as COVID-19 misinformation?

It feels as though our society has collectively forgotten that mental illness can be socially transmissible. I remember in 00s there seemed to be mainstream acknowledgement and concern that anorexia and distorted perception of one&#x27;s body can be socially transmissible, ripping through teen social cliches particularly, and could be spread through the internet by &quot;pro-ana&quot; websites and chat groups. I don&#x27;t hear much about it these days though. Instead, internet media promoting mental illness seems more common than ever and with few exceptions (threads like this) I rarely see anybody express concern about it. What happened?

The only reason I ever downloaded TikTok was to watch cringe videos of people cosplaying having multiple personality disorder. I deleted it the same day.

Tangentially related. I think capitalism increases self-reported rates of mental illness because individuals who are not achieving the highest goals they set for themselves are looking for an easy excuse as to why they can&#x27;t achieve them.<p>I think levels of anxiety are also on the rise, which causes many symptoms which are similar to more severe mental illnesses. Which also reinforces my first point.

Using tiktok is a mental disorder in itself.<p>I seem to recall tiktok zoomers also eating tide pods and dying after doing the blackout challenge so maybe they do have a mental disorder.