She looks for her reflection on her phone, but what she sees there is very different from what she sees in the mirror every morning. It makes her angry. Beatriz Lopez, 47, is troubled by the way people talk about depression on social media. How they trivialize a topic that has directly impacted her for three decades. “Neither I nor my family knew what was happening to me at the time,” she explains. Depression was taboo. People turned away from those who tried to break it. She admits that mental illness has become more prominent these days. “It’s not necessarily a good story, but it’s becoming more popular,” she says. “Now it’s romanticized.”
Normalizing conversations about mental health issues is a positive thing, but destigmatizing treatment (private conversations with professionals) and using it to garner attention, likes, and money is a positive thing. There is a big difference in making it content. “Depression is a disease that requires professional treatment,” Lopez says. “We don’t need influencers, we need psychiatrists.”
TikTok videos tagged with #mentalhealth have been viewed approximately 44 billion times. This may be good news, but it’s not the quantity that matters, but how it gets talked about. In recent months, many accounts have shifted from raising awareness to providing guidance and entertainment. There are people with mental health impacts and untrained people who have found a niche in a growing market. “It’s trendy to talk about mental health,” psychotherapist and popularizer Luis Muinho explains on the podcast. entiende to mente (In English: Understand your heart). “And I think it’s important to know and conceptualize that. Mental health has gone from being taboo to being talked about, sometimes to excess, because when something is trending… Because there are people who use their experiences to get attention and advocate for themselves and say, “Hey, that happened to me, too.” In a way, it’s seen as something that gives status and is cool. ”
Issey Moloney is an 18-year-old British influencer with over 7 million followers on TikTok. There, she combines videos about her beauty routine and her travels with jokes linking her depression to eating pasta and lists like “Possible Signs of Bipolar Disorder.” Masu. Her 24-second video shows her crying as she stares into the camera, and she cites symptoms including a “feeling of emptiness” and “an intense and short-lived relationship.” In her comments, several users accused her of being a teenager, calling it pathological.
Borja Hiriart is a Chilean content creator with 2.5 million followers on TikTok. Among his most-watched videos is one in which he pretends to break down in tears and reads, “Your little joke has ruined my mental stability.” Other articles give advice on how to help her if she has anxiety, and list “signs that her mental health is on the verge of collapse”. Both Hiriard and Moloney play off emotional states with their performances, dramatic music, and short his ten-word phrases. Psychological diagnosis tailored to TikTok format.
“If you’re talking about a simple topic, quickness helps,” Muiño explains. “The amount of information that TikTok can provide is huge. The problem is that content creators have to keep uploading videos and feeding them into their accounts, and they can create something as complex as a gestural profile of someone with depression in just 30 seconds. TikTok rewards these videos, which rack up millions of cumulative views. Social media is designed to prioritize content that evokes the strongest reaction, rather than the most accurate content. And depression sells.
Depression is cool
Mental health is a hot topic, and it’s not just limited to social media. According to podcast search engine Listen Notes, more than 5,500 episodes include the word “trauma” in their titles. A search for books about mental health on Amazon returns over 60,000 results. In interviews, actors, singers, and celebrities from various fields talk about how therapy helped them become better people.
Philosopher and music producer Alex Kresovic analyzes references to mental health in contemporary music. In a 2021 study, he noted that their presence in rap songs has increased in a surprisingly consistent manner over the past two decades. In another article, a similar phenomenon was observed in pop music.Kanye West’s 2008 album, according to Kresovic 808 and broken heart was a turning point. “It’s really become the norm,” he said in an interview recently. new york times. “There is this idea that mental health is so often discussed in public that some neuroses, such as depression, are almost romanticized.”
The general public is also familiar with this fashion that has permeated society. It’s not just influencers talking about it anymore. It’s the user. It’s all of us. Social networks are like megaphones that amplify and distort conversations. In this day and age, it’s all too easy to make your private feelings public and find people who will acknowledge them through interactions, hearts, thumbs-ups, etc., and this can be addictive. This is the only way to explain the viral phenomenon. Sesame streetElmo recently posted the following innocent message on his X account: How is everyone? ” The post received thousands of dramatic responses talking about depression, anxiety and suicide attempts.
American psychologist Scott Lyons warns in his book, addicted to drama That the attention economy is fueling a spiral of stress and heightened emotions. He explains that research shows that being more dramatic on social media gets more attention and more likes. It’s reinforcement. In this way, we become part of the problem without being fully aware of it. 60% of young people who use TikTok self-diagnose a mental health problem. Many who do so end up participating in online conversations and sharing their experiences with others struggling with the same problem. Creating groups. “This is what we call dramatic bonding. If we come together through a common symptom and feed each other, we will later be willing to let go of the labels and the relationships we have gained from them. “It’s difficult,” he recalls.
That’s the difference between genuine personal therapy and the reductionist, viral, generic versions that run rampant on the internet. Talking about personal issues and anxieties may have a therapeutic effect, but when conversations take place on social media, they can be amplified by algorithms, distorted by the attention economy, and backfire. . Suicide rates and mental health issues continue to rise as depression and anxiety are talked about more than ever. Because most of this public conversation takes place online, vulnerable people are surrounded by conversations about the topic, encouraging them to fall into algorithmic wormholes. This doesn’t seem to have any positive impact.
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