Do you have depression? A summative content analysis of mental health-related content on TikTok

TikTok is a global social media platform with over 1 billion active users. Presently, there are few data on how TikTok users navigate the platform for mental health purposes and the content they view.

This study aims to understand the patterns of mental health-related content on TikTok and assesses the accuracy and quality of the advice and information provided.

We performed a summative content analysis on the top 1000 TikTok videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth between October 12 and 16, 2021. Six content themes were developed to code the data: (1) a personal story, perspective, or confessional, (2) advice and information, (3) emoting, (4) references to death, (5) references to science or research, and (6) a product or service for sale. Advice and information were further assessed by clinical experts.

A total of 970 mental health-related videos were pulled for our analysis (n = 30 removed due to non-English content). The most prevalent content themes included a personal story, perspective, or confessional (n = 574), advice and information (n = 319), emoting (n = 198), references to death (n = 128). Advice and information were considered misleading in 33.0% of videos (n = 106), with misleading content performing better. Few videos included references to scientific evidence or research (n = 37).

Healthcare practitioners and researchers may consider increasing their presence on the platform to promote the dissemination of evidence-based information to a wider and more youth-targeted population. Interventions to reduce the amount of misinformation on the platform and increase people's ability to discern between anecdotal and evidence-based information are also warranted.