Social Media Mental Health Influencers
Perverse incentives applied to mental health
As I’ve written about before, it’s a strange time to have a mental health challenge. On the one hand, there are better resources and less stigma than ever before. On the other hand, there is greater temptation to turn your challenge into a thing which you identify with for social clout, an identity marker in a noisy world. And the rise of mental health influencers and the phenomenon of self-diagnosis from those influencers is a perfect example of this tension. There are people who have made a name for themselves on social media as “content creators,” pushing information about mental health conditions in Reels, TikToks, Instagram pictures and so on. Sometimes this information is accurate and helpful. It raises awareness of conditions. For example, in the case of OCD, many advocates have done good work correcting the myth that the condition is just about cleanliness or orderliness. By exposing the wider public to the variety of ways OCD can present, these people have helped others suffering from OCD get the help they need, which is wonderful! I’ve tried to do this myself. So awareness raising is good. Education, especially when done by experts, is good. But there are also some “content creators” who misinform or who sensationalize, who dramatize, who romanticize, who are really more interested in creating a brand than helping people. And this has to do with the perverse incentives of social media. You are encouraged to create viral content that promotes yourself, rather than morally good content that helps your neighbor.
What concerns me is for all the helpful advocates raising awareness of mental health challenges, there are many more influencers and content creators who are building brands, encouraging people to self-diagnose, and promoting a fragile view of the human mind—a view that the human mind is broken, under attack, traumatized, frail, and helpless. In my experience, what good therapists (and good theology) teaches is that we have agency. That we can act to pursue our mental health through good therapy treatments. This doesn’t guarantee “healing” in this life or a “cure,” but it does mean we can learn some way of living with suffering. And life in this fallen world means living with suffering of one kind or another. It’s only a matter of living well or not.
In On Getting Out of Bed I wrote about the danger of falling in love with your suffering. This can happen a number of ways, I think. You can get so comfortable with feeling bad that you identify with it, as in an abusive relationship. It feels normal and safe. Condemnation, shame, worry, anxiety, or depression feel appropriate. Moments of peace, ironically, make you feel anxious! This is quite normal (in my experience), and over time, as you stretch yourself to accept the goodness and rightness of feeling joy, your feelings of discomfort dissipate. A more troubling form of falling in love with your suffering is when you romanticize it. When you find something about your mental health challenge to be exotic, original, remarkable, identifying—something that makes you standout, something that gives you meaning and purpose, even if it’s tragic meaning and tragic purpose. Humans are remarkable. We can find meaning for ourselves both in stories of triumph and tragedy. This is part of expressive individualism. We hunt for an identity and then project it out into the world.
When someone finds tragic identity in their mental health challenge, they can romanticize it, dramatize it. Every twist and turn becomes grand and filled with significance. And social media is the perfect platform to display this romantic view of mental suffering to the world as a way to express yourself and validate your experience. But not only do you express your tragic mental health experience, you invite others to consider if they might find themselves in that story also. Perhaps they might find meaning through similar mental health suffering? Perhaps their anxiety isn’t just normal, mundane teenage anxiety but some condition which gives them an identity and a tragic story? Perhaps my depression isn’t just from being on my phone too much but from deep childhood trauma that I haven’t explored? And if that’s true, there’s a tragic dimension to my story that gives me meaning.
I hope you can see how all of this might be appealing, especially to young people who are trying to figure out who they are and who are addicted to devices. The temptation for mental health challenges to take on a viral quality through social media seems real to me.
And yet, having worked with many young people, deep childhood trauma, anxiety conditions, depression—these are realities for so many of them. I do not believe the rise in mental health diagnoses that we see in the data is caused by people making up conditions to feel significant. In other words, I want to say that two things are true at the same time. It is both the case that social media and expressive individualism encourages people, especially young people, to adopt a false narrative of mental health suffering in order to feel alive and significant; and a great many people are suffering from mental health challenges and benefit from increased awareness and decreased stigma surrounding therapy.
So what are we to do? How are we to advise people?
First, our action should be local, working with people we have direct influence upon. Consider who you know and how you can love them well. Check in on people around you, especially young people. See how you can serve and love them. Ask them meaningful questions about their life and how they are handling anxiety and stress. If you don’t want young people turning to dubious social media influencers, then be an influence in their lives yourself.
Second, if someone you know is wrestling with mental health challenges and has self-diagnosed, encourage them to see a therapist and get tested. Don’t challenge their diagnosis. That’s not your place. Instead, ask them to rely on professionals to help them.
Third, if you are someone who is struggling, be judicious about who you follow on social media. Not all social media mental health advocates are qualified to be giving advice. Are they therapists? Are they recommended by therapists? In the OCD space, I’ve found many self-proclaimed “experts” who are really just people with OCD who claim to have cured themselves and who are selling programs to desperate people. Be discerning.
Ultimately, we should not be getting our medical advice off of social media, whether it’s mental health or physical health. I know many of us are addicted to watching short-form videos and learning from them, but the prudent thing to do is to find reliable sources and trust them.
The power of the algorithm to push for viral content and the power of expressive individualism to project an interesting identity work together to create a perverse incentive for mental health social media influencers. The temptation to romanticize suffering and turn it into a viral sensation for others to participate in is real and malicious. But real suffering is not sensational. It’s petty, sad, and painful. The best way to treat it is to talk to a human person who knows how to help you treat it, a professional. That professional may not give you great advice. It’s normal to need to see multiple therapists before you find the right one who fits your personality and can help you, but what I really want to stress is that you have agency and you are your best advocate after Christ. Keep pressing on toward healing.