TikTok style videos and mental health: effects on stigma, self-pathologizing, and help-seeking

Abstract Through various social media platforms, individuals learn, discuss, and describe their thoughts and opinions regarding mental health, which may influence how society interacts with mental health topics and services. TikTok is one of the more recent social media platforms to house a wide array of video content regarding mental health attitudes, symptoms, humor, and advice, which are all regularly absorbed and shared by individuals globally. The present study explored the influence of TikTok videos posted by non-mental health professionals on attitudes toward mental health stigma, self-pathologizing, and professional mental health treatment-seeking in a college sample with ages ranging from 18 to 60 ( M = 21.20, SD = 6.26). In a pre-post randomized-control design, participants completed dependent variable measures before and after viewing daily, brief mental health-related TikTok videos (experimental group) or non-mental health-related TikTok videos (control group) over two weeks. The results indicated that those who viewed mental health TikToks did not experience the increase in mental health stigma observed in the control group ( p < .01), suggesting that mental health TikTok content may suppress increases in mental health stigma over time through exposure to mental health topics. However, the experimental group did not experience the decrease in self-stigma observed in the control group ( p = .04). Further, TikTok content did not significantly impact perceptions of public stigma, treatment-seeking, or self-pathologizing. These results suggest that mental health social media content may be protective against some stigmatized beliefs, but it may not significantly impact perceptions of self and public stigma, treatment-seeking attitudes, or self-pathologizing.