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

• h2odragon 4y ago
  Reminds me of "WebMD caused a spike in cancer" stories; anyone remember those?
  • morley 4y ago
    And video games cause violence, and DnD leads to Satanism, and TV rots brains, and movies lead to illiteracy, and books lead to dangerous thought.
    • ominous 4y ago
      > video games cause violence They don't. Nothing harmful can come out of reading a book. > DnD leads to Satanism It can't, ever. No subculture can wander so close to satanism that would lead their elements to coopt it. > TV rots brains It doesn't. There's no way of consuming TV that has a negative impact on people. > movies lead to illiteracy They don't. Having the choice of a movie never prevented anyone from having to practice spending time learning to consume literature. > books lead to dangerous thought They don't. Nothing dangerous can be transmited in print. Well done, everything is harmless.
      • 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
        I suspect the gp had an implied "/s" and was referring to things like the infamous Chick tracts and so on.
        • AlexandrB 4y ago
          Pretty sure the parent was being sarcastic in response, given obviously false statements like: > Well done, everything is harmless.
          • 2000UltraDeluxe 4y ago
            D'oh!
      • dghughes 4y ago
        Isn't the inability to detect sarcasm known to be an early sign of dementia?
        • z9znz 4y ago
          My money is that the reply was itself sarcasm.
          • dghughes 4y ago
            As was mine.
      • booleandilemma 4y ago
        And HN usage leads to the inability to recognize sarcasm. Google it, it's true.
        • MichaelCollins 4y ago
          Sarcasm in response to sarcasm is evidently twice as easy to miss.
      • z9znz 4y ago
        [flagged]
        • z9znz 4y ago
          Downvoted with no replies... does that mean "it's true but I don't like to read it", or does it mean "it creates a cognitive dissonance that I can't deal with, and I don't know how to respond... so I downvote and hope it goes away"? This is HN. Step up and disagree with words, assuming your brain has not turned completely to 4th grade mush.
    • yathaid 4y ago
      What you are saying is a false root cause, i.e. "TikTok causes rare mental disorders". Which is not what OP is saying.
    • matt321 4y ago
      TV, Videogames, and moviesactually dorot brains since normally people would otherwise be picking up new skills to make themselves more able.
  • draw_down 4y ago
  • powerhour 4y ago
    Yeah, but this time China is involved, so we must take it seriously, I guess.
  • ralusek 4y ago
    Normalcy bias.
• Proven 4y ago
• astura 4y ago
  https://archive.ph/hQabE https://archive.ph/hQabE
• overthemoon 4y ago
  Tik Tok is the reason I've been told several times I have ADHD. Pretty sure I don't! This phenomenon is so infuriating. The only half-convincing defense I've heard of it is that it could, maybe, theoretically, disseminate information about illnesses to people who don't have the money to see a professional, but the other effects are so much worse it doesn't seem worth it.
  • jrm4 4y ago
    Tiktok and pop-culture generally make me very skeptical on "ADHD", the so-called "spectrum" and "neurodivergence" generally. I'm not saying these things don't exist, but much of it seems very difficult to falsify -- which needs to be the gold standard of determining these sort of things; e.g. "By what process can someone reasonably determine that they are NOT neurodivergent?"
    • kzrdude 4y ago
      Part of this is just giving labels to what happens when we are glued to screens and addictive apps and internet media, isn't it? It strikes me as something that is partly happening to me too, I can't really put down the addictive medias available. Of course things in professional or personal life may suffer when you have an addiction. Of course medication could help one control it, etc.
      • juve1996 4y ago
        Not really since ADHD has been around for much longer than addictive apps and the internet media.
      • duncan-donuts 4y ago
        To a certain extent maybe. I have adhd. Was diagnosed as an adult by several professionals. Not self diagnosed. There’s a difference between “this media is addicting and I can’t stop” and “I went into hyper focus for 6 hours and I forgot to pick up my kids”. In fairness I also have a hard time with consuming things online, but I also can completely forget the world around me. It’s not just a time management deficit. I have no concept of time-passed in that state.
• MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  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.
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    There's no social capital to be gained by actually having the illness. Pretending you have it garners sympathy, elevates your voice, and ingratiates yourself into a community of like-minded people (most of whom also don't have the illness).
    • NoPicklez 4y ago
      It reminds me of the flat earthers movement documentary "Behind the curve". Where the main actor in the documentary joined the movement and wrose through the ranks to the leader. This person was a bit of a social recluse before but now he met his wife, gained friends around the world and brought in an income. He was asked if he was shown proof that would change his mind could he and he said he couldn't, because his entire identity was built around this belief. If he changed his mind he would lose everything. This is one of the dangerous things about echo chambers and micro communities produced by social media, it gives people a global identity even if their identity is based on nonsense.
• jgalt212 4y ago
  This reminds me of every other student while taking Abnormal Psychology in college.
  • girvo 4y ago
    Or how a tonne of kids (including my friends as I was a kid too) used to diagnose everyone and ourselves with “depression” back in the forums and MySpace days. Sure some of us ended up with real diagnoses, like myself (after some pretty severe impact from it), but a non zero amount of it seemed to be about being trendy and fitting in with the group and zeitgeist. This appears similar. Humans like pattern matching, and young people have enough knowledge about mental health topics to be “dangerous” in this case. This is a long winded way of me saying I agree, and this doesn’t seem like a particularly new phenomenon.
• nippoo 4y ago
  Related: medical students' disease! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_students%27_disease
  • kzrdude 4y ago
    One item in the article is: + Lua error in Module:Citation/CS1 at line 1392: bad argument #1 to 'pairs' (table expected, got nil). That's new to me. I didn't know wikipedia had adopted lua for its templates.
    • henriquemaia 4y ago
      I experienced the same bug today, with several bibliographical entries displaying the same error message. The article in question was the one on deus ex machina.
    • iamacyborg 4y ago
      Lua is used extensively on Mediawiki sites for templating. For example, all infoboxes use this module. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Infobox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Infobox
    • Earwig 4y ago
      Supposed to be fixed now. A bad edit to a widely used module, of course.
  • frereubu 4y ago
    I was looking for a comment like this before adding my own. I went through the first two years of a psychology degree alternately diagnosing myself with every mental illness under the sun, despite me knowing deep down that it wasn't really the case. The thing that stopped it dead was watching clinical videos of people who really did have serious mental illness. I wonder if the same would work for some of these people, presuming they're being suggestible. I remember in particular one video of a man with bipolar disorder in a manic phase, who was in his mid-20s when the video was filmed during the late 80s, and who was convinced that he'd been the Rolling Stones tour manager in the 1960s. There was nothing anyone could say to convince him otherwise, and he had all sorts of explanations for the mismatch in dates. We were laughing a bit because it was so clearly delusional, when the lecturer pause the video and said something like "yeah, it's kinda funny, but I remember getting a call from a friend who asked my clinical opinion about the fact he thought that the adverts for a bank on TV were telling everyone he was gay." We got pretty quiet after that. It chimes with the trivialisation of terms like OCD, which are use very filppantly, but anyone who's seen a clinical video of someone with full-blown OCD, which can be completely crippling, wouldn't use it so lightly.
• NoblePublius 4y ago
  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.
  • z9znz 4y ago
    There's a whole other side of this equation that I don't hear much about - the parents of the kids who are producing a lot of the content. I wouldn't want my kid spending hours each day scrolling through various social media, but likewise I wouldn't want them making pointless garbage videos just because... well because I guess that's what some people feel they should do? My son watched gaming streamers for several years in his early teens, and that drove me nuts. I understand watching people who are good at something do their thing, but most of the gamer stuff I saw was just obnoxious punks who really needed a life. I'm still baffled at how successful (followers, income) many of these garbage can kids are. If they tried to talk to people, or even just talk out loud, in public the way they talk on their videos, they would be getting broken noses weekly.
• nemo44x 4y ago
  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. With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences, etc. It’s no wonder so many kids think they have mental disorders or any of the other mind viruses going around.
  • szundi 4y ago
    With good reason. After puberty starts, your only way to influence the culture your child absorbs is which culture you allow access to. This is proved by science, of course this is not easy to communicate to a child of that age that is a culture demonstration of yours how to handle.
  • brink 4y ago
    • throw__away7391 4y ago
      15? I thought it was 5...
  • JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > With the internet and especially media like TikTok parents are exposing their kids to untold bad influences Some parents. Elite schools in Manhattan and Palo Alto send home fliers that parents (or at least those I know) read. Screen time of all types is monitored. And the children have a somewhat hilarious self-protecting pride in their control over digital intake. (Most of them. Thinking of two brothers, one who eats his veggies because he, and I quote, doesn’t like his poop going soft, and self moderates cartoon watching and phone fucking around. The other who steals my phone to watch loud videos.)
    • dimitrios1 4y ago
• Zigurd 4y ago
  Recasting this as "Social media is bad for mental health" would be more truthful. But it would not villainize just one new social media platform at a time when legacy platforms struggle with growth.
  • AlexandrB 4y ago
    There has definitely been a rash of anti-TikTok stories lately. I wonder if it's Facebook's PR department working overtime. My preferred outcome would be if the companies involved performed mutual annihilation by making social media as a whole look as bad as possible.
• trh0awayman 4y ago
  Young people on the internet have been doing this since at least the 90s, though it's definitely become more popular (mainly due to internet culture spreading to normal society). Just think back to the LiveJournal/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.
  • NamTaf 4y ago
    The difference is that hyperpowerful social media algorithms have weaponised it. Kids in the 90s had to actively seek out whatever propaganda or whatnot that they wanted to read about. If you were a pissed-off goth kid wanting to read how to bomb something, you had to genuinely work to find shit like that. These days, you linger on an auto-playing video too long (that is quite possibly intentionally engineered to bait you in) and suddenly the algorithm gets a lock on you and absolutely rams more of that shit down your throat. It's not even just propaganda either. The exact same cycle is what's at play here with preying on children's weaknesses. Mental health, body image, etc. etc. can all be weaponised the same way. And kids are espeically susceptable to it given the age they tend to start getting on social media is precisely also the age where they feel most socially awkward and trying to find their identity in the world.
    • PheonixPharts 4y ago
      > If you were a pissed-off goth kid wanting to read how to bomb something, you had to genuinely work to find shit like that. Every pissed off goth kid I knew in the 90s had a copy of the Anarchist cook book on a 1.44mb floppy disk. We probably burned more than our fair share of holes in our backyards, but it wasn't access to information that was limiting us doing harm to our peers. If anything I think it was having a group of like-minded people to burn holes in your backyard with that ultimately allowed us all to feel less alienated. We may have felt individually ostracized, but found camaraderie in trying to put out the homemade napalm fire in the back yard before someone's parents got back or the neighbors called the fire department. I get more worried about teens today because I no longer see packs of kids getting in trouble together. The only kids I know that ended up in real trouble where the ones that eventually got alienated from that pack as well.
• jklinger410 4y ago
  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't achieve them. 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.
  • giraffe_lady 4y ago
    If you're going that way you can reasonably say that capitalism is the context that makes some of these things disorders in the first place. For example it's still not clear to me whether I consider my adhd a disorder in a vacuum. It definitely is here, I can't consistently execute the tasks that that will allow me to safely live. But there have definitely been times and places where "weirdo who is good with kids, calm in an emergency, and knows a lot of infrequently-used-but-valuable skills" is a role people are allowed to occupy. I'm definitely disordered within a context where each individual must labor effectively or die. There have been other arrangements though. This is probably true for some, but not all or even maybe most, mental illnesses and neurological disorders as well.
    • z9znz 4y ago
      There are some life situations where having ADHD is probably a lifesaver. Those situations are likely far less common these days than 100+ years ago, so that aspect of humanity is now less relevant. But the evolutionary behavior will take a long time to eliminate itself... There were parts of the book, The Highly Sensitive Person, by Elaine Aron, which were eye-opening to me in how they illustrated facets of myself (and how they showed the human value of some of those facets). There's definitely a place in the world for fixers, watchers, and people with unusual behaviors. I suspect there may be uniquely valuable things to be learned or received from autistic people; but we haven't figured out how to bridge the communication gap. So while most people would assume that autistic means broken or useless, it's possible that the rest of us are just not ready or not capable of comprehending what's actually available.
  • ralusek 4y ago
• jnovek 4y ago
  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. 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.
  • ralusek 4y ago
    Devil's advocate: I'm sure the people learning about their non-existent dissociative identity disorders also feel as though they're learning useful information and tricks. That being said, I'm in no way implying that the internet can't contain useful information.
    • jnovek 4y ago
      Sure, that’s the other side of that coin I was talking about. :-) Personally, I suspect that people who incorrectly self-diagnose are desperate and grasping at straws. They misdiagnose themselves because proper diagnostics are really hard to get in for. However, I would be willing to bet that people who misdiagnose themselves with DID still have some other underlying mental health condition that they are misunderstanding.
      • naravara 4y ago
        I think popular cultural conceptions of what a "diagnosis" is are kind of weird. It seems more like people categorizing themselves with immutable labels rather than accepting that it's just a way to refer to/characterize your subjective experience. I remember talking with one guy who was genuinely sad when his psychiatrist told him she might need to revisit his autism diagnosis and she thinks there might actually be some other class of diagnoses that fit his condition better. You would think she told him he had cancer or something. It helped him a lot to know that there was a box he could fit into and not having a box was distressing for him. It had him feeling unmoored and unstable. Now after reevaluating she did end up settling back on autism and his relief was palpable.
• elSidCampeador 4y ago
  Three Men In A Boat redux - 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck. 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: “Well, what’s the matter with you?” I said: “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.” And I told him how I came to discover it all. 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. 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. He said he didn’t keep it. I said: “You are a chemist?” He said: “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.” I read the prescription. It ran: “1 lb. beefsteak, with 1 pt. bitter beer every 6 hours. 1 ten-mile walk every morning. 1 bed at 11 sharp every night. And don’t stuff up your head with things you don’t understand.”
• pbj1968 4y ago
  Perhaps not so rare then?
  • vehemenz 4y ago
    That would only make sense if these young adults were in a position to self-diagnose. These contagious social phenomena seem to arise most in young adults, especially women, who are heavy users of social media.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• mbg721 4y ago
  Teens do exhibit lots of mental disorder symptoms at various times--their brains are still developing rapidly, and on top of that they're thrust into one unfamiliar environment after another. The "normal, well-adjusted" state ought to be pretty tumultuous at that age.
  • __s 4y ago
    Good point. I use to experience slight hallucinations (mostly auditory), but that tapered off as I grew out of adolescence
    • mbg721 4y ago
      I wonder sometimes how many adults experience slight auditory hallucinations, especially at night, and don't bother recording them. I live in a pretty busy area with lots of trains and emergency vehicles outside, and when I'm close to sleep but get jolted back awake, I sometimes remember things that don't make any sense.
      • nomdep 4y ago
        Don’t worry, the auditory hallucinations that sometimes occur between waking and sleeping are normal and documented (see “hypnagogic hallucinations”). I would start to worry only if I had them during the day while awake.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• devmor 4y ago
  My question is: Does this actually matter? Does this have a lasting impact or do the kids simply move on with no negative changes to their lives? I remember thinking a lot of dumb stuff as a teenager. Just because I thought it doesn't mean it was bad that I did.
  • z9znz 4y ago
    I suspect it is worse now than when some of us were kids. Some of us had less exposure to stuff that could mess us up because there was less stuff available. After all, in my early youth we had only three TV stations. I also see a parallel with HN and developers with impostor syndrome. Before HN, and even before Slashdot, I was a good developer. I wrote some impressive C, C++, and Java code that went into some serious projects. But now, thanks to HN, I know that I'm a below-average developer. Perhaps I'm not, but it sure feels that way because of what I see presented and discussed here. If I had grown up with HN, I might not have done some of the things I did; rather I might have given up and chosen a career which I didn't feel inadequate at. This is how I imagine kids today feel with all the stuff they have access to. I mean heck, you can even go to youtube and see 10 year olds making amazing creations out of just about any material you can think of. How does that feel when you're still trying to cut straight lines on paper?
    • AlexandrB 4y ago
      I think the worst effects of social media are exactly the same as the worst effects of traditional media like TV: unrealistic body images, the veneration of consumption, and "aspirational" content that makes people feel like they're not good enough. Basically the stuff that fuels capitalism.
      • z9znz 4y ago
        I think Capitalism is too simple or broad a term. It really encompasses a lot of ideas into a single word, and some of those ideas are natural and admirable while others are generally counterproductive. You could say that someone who performs a dance well and gains positive attention from an audience is expressing capitalism. The idea that putting work plus talent to get appreciation (in monetary or other forms) is not necessarily bad. I think what we currently experience as capitalism is a skewed, min/max version which loses sight of the main value and focuses too much on simple financial return.
• freebreakfast 4y ago
  I recently discovered "systems" people via Reddit (r/SystemsCringe) will searching for systems engineering. The core belief seems to be that the individual has "multiple people" living in the same body. They've devised a whole language for talking about it as well[0]. This reminds me of the "otherkin" 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. 0. https://old.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/w95q5q/alter_of_a_dead_person/ https://old.reddit.com/r/SystemsCringe/comments/w95q5q/alter... 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otherkin Edit: Corrected a typo. Added more explanation of how I discovered that sub. It seems some are misinterpreting it as a judgment.
  • washbrain 4y ago
    TikTok wasn't around a decade ago. I also suspect that systems cringe might not be the best source for understanding plural folks... It might be worth trying to understand before casting aspersions.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
      • washbrain 4y ago
  • jnovek 4y ago
    For the Otherkin stuff, did you mean Tumblr? I’ve often seen TikTok described as the new Tumblr.
    • freebreakfast 4y ago
      I did. Corrected.
• 5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
  Using tiktok is a mental disorder in itself. 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.
• marcodiego 4y ago
  When I see some adults in TikTok videos, I also think they have rare mental disorders.
• pid_0 4y ago
• timothycosta 4y ago
  I was strongly recommended to advertise on TikTok but I refuse to because I know I will get addicted. I'd rather my business fail than get addicted to it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  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. However, there is another huge offender in the psychiatry misinformation space: Reddit. 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 everything 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. 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. 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. 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.
  • MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    >The most common self-diagnosis is ADHD. Do some of them actually have ADHD? Sure, statistically speaking some of them will actually have ADHD. Self-diagnosis aside, I had this exact thought after a conversation with a teacher. The number of kids on medication for ADHD in their school was just too much. Sure, the school could just be lucky but I doubt it. More likely pressure from educators and parents for a "quick fix" for what should be correctable (sans drugs) behavioural issues.
• rvz 4y ago
  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. TikTok knows this and they thrive in knowingly damaging the mental health of their users of this addiction.
• lizardactivist 4y ago
  If so, I can only imagine what Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook does to teenagers and their fragile minds. 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'm older than most of them. Whenever I go on the platforms I mention in my first paragraph I instead get insulted, provoced, accused, questioned, and depressed. I'm sure there's some bad stuff happening on TikTok, but on the whole it's a happy, friendly place. That simply cannot be said about the others. As usual, the real "problem" with TikTok is that it's not owned and controlled by a western tech giant. That's why it gets attacked in western media.
• matt321 4y ago
  My sister never had any facial ticks until it was popular on ticktok to have a facial tick.
  • madamelic 4y ago
    Tics are socially contagious, more so if you have a close social connection to the person. It's actually really fascinating. A loved one of mine has tics and I occasionally pick up their vocal tics unknowingly. There's an actual term for it but I can't find it for the life of me. I don't believe it is echolalia but it is a precise word for people 'catching' tics from loved ones.
• matt321 4y ago
  Second year syndrom
• ok123456 4y ago
  s/TikTok/Social Media/g It's all so tiring.
• MichaelCollins 4y ago
  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's body can be socially transmissible, ripping through teen social cliches particularly, and could be spread through the internet by "pro-ana" websites and chat groups. I don'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?
  • rlv-dan 4y ago
    It's taboo to criticise such movements because by extension you criticise those that actually have the illness. And some movements have grown quite powerful politically. If you allude that it's problematic to let children change sex, you are painted as anti lgbtixxxx. Activism has won against science.
    • JediLuke 4y ago
      • MichaelCollins 4y ago
        Men cry in the office too, but they're better at hiding it because the social expectations are different. A few times during crunches I've heard men sobbing in the restroom instead of at their desk. Men get told to 'man up', so they bottle it up or hide it.
        • collegeburner 4y ago
          counterpoint: no. i been in some pretty stressful environments and never reacted like that. same for most guys i know. maybe it's different where you are but i never seen it even in private like that or with close friends.
• faeriechangling 4y ago
  I've done a lot of thinking about this issue, and there's two topics I notice. First, disability has become a status symbol in certain circles. Second, the huge rise in self-diagnosed disability. On the latter point, these kids are acting out these disabilities with such sincerity and 24/7 consistency that they effectively are disabled for all practical purposes, it'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's the cause?
  • macspoofing 4y ago
    >I think the TikTok videos are a symptom, what's the cause? Why don't you think TikTok videos specifically (and social media generally) are not a cause? At this point, we know the addictive and viral effects of social media, especially as it pertains to teenagers and kids (and especially teenage girls).
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • faeriechangling 4y ago
      Being a symptom and a cause are not mutually exclusive, but blaming the videos alone results in a chicken and egg scenario.
  • Mezzie 4y ago
    I think the cause may be wanting a way to opt out of the pressure cooker that modern life is. I'm disabled (I have MS), and the one benefit to it is that I have a 'get out of social expectations free' button I can push if things get too difficult. If I'm not feeling well, it's acceptable for me to cancel plans, call off work, make sub-optimal decisions (putting my health above my earning capacity, etc.). In short, disabled people are allowed to be fallible, have needs, and make mistakes. I think that the kids feel under too much pressure and want a release valve for it. An invisible disability gives them a 'this is too hard, I need out' button. Disabled people are also given some empathy, and that is at a major premium right now.
• bilsbie 4y ago
  I wonder if you could find this same article about google in 2000-2010 timeframe?
  • jimmar 4y ago
    Google search and TikTok differ on important dimensions. Google search makes you input the search criteria. TikTok learns what draws your attention and feeds you more of that information without you explicitly asking for it. On TikTok, all you have to do is flick up to see the next video, which for some, is going to feed them more information about mental illness if the algorithm says it will keep them engaged. Google search forces people to be more intentional about the terms they search for and the search results they view.
• andsoitis 4y ago
  > "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. Is it healthy to be so acutely aware of mental health when you're a teen, though? Why is disability valid social currency? Is it because we also see adults tap into victimhood as currency?
• originalvichy 4y ago
  I can'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't know how teenage hormones affect girls different than boys at that age, so I can'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. Us boys certainly had our fair share of weird and destructive online communities, but not like this I am sure.
  • jnovek 4y ago
    This is because women are under-diagnosed for most mental health disorders except for Bipolar and BPD, for which they are over-diagnosed. They build communities because their doctors aren’t helping them.
    • collegeburner 4y ago
      do you have somewhere where i can read more about this? i havent seen it before and am interested.
      • fsociety 4y ago
        Shared a good article about this below. You can see the bias crop up in the comments here unfortunately. I would say there are as many uninformed opinions on here as there are with people on TikTok self-diagnosing themselves with a mental illness. It is quite sad. I personally know that being diagnosed with depression when you have ADHD instead is debilitating. It feels like nothing will fix you. But then with an ADHD diagnosis it was much easier to be present in the world. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180523-how-gender-bias-affects-your-healthcare https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180523-how-gender-bias-...
        • jnovek 4y ago
          “…diagnostic errors cause 40,000-80,000 deaths in the US alone…” If it’s as high as 80,000 per year, that would be about the same as U.S. automobile and gun-related deaths combined.
• dqpb 4y ago
  • purpleflame1257 4y ago
    If that "delusion" were really so maladaptive it would have been outcompeted by now.
    • jstanley 4y ago
      Has it not been?
    • photochemsyn 4y ago
      The concept of (religious fanatics + nuclear weapons) has greatly undermined the old 'utilitarian' argument about the social benefits of religion. For those who haven't heard it, that argument is something like 'yes, religious texts are just fairy tales, but religious belief leads to social cohesion and confers survival advantages on a society, so we should promote it, even though we don't believe in it ourselves.' Another somewhat more cynical take on the utilitarian argument is that religious believers are conditioned to accept rule by a small elite (aka the feudal aristocracy) and can be more easily manipulated by propaganda.
      • bbarn 4y ago
        I buy that argument. I am a 44 year old atheist and even in my life I've seen the difference in society from when being a Christian in the US was just something most people did, to now where we're all much more secular. Religion's negatives get a lot more press than it's positives.
        • hiptobecubic 4y ago
          Promoting cults is all well and good until your neighbor is in the wrong cult and then suddenly it's a disaster. My experience has been that "is religious" is not at all a good predictor of whether someone is going to be a "good citizen." Instead it's "lives in a community with low socioeconomic diversity," where that last one is not "pakistani vs british" but way more specific, like "center-right environmentalist in the middle third of income."
• alexb_ 4y ago
  People are going to be blaming TikTok, social media, or whatever else for this, but it'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? [0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculosis-shaped-victorian-fashion-180959029/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/how-tuberculos...
  • bufferoverflow 4y ago
    You can blame social media for bringing it to a psychotic scale.
    • thrown_22 4y ago
      You can also blame the fact kids aren't working 16 hour days any more. Just because you can't doesn't mean you're right.
  • ID1452319 4y ago
    Exactly. Here is a story from 2010 where a storyline about a character's bi polar on a popular UK soap saw a doubling in the number of young people seeking help. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-10004491 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-10004491
• f38zf5vdt 4y ago
  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're getting into. 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't watch over them, but they have the capacity to learn from the world just as you do.
• boredumb 4y ago
  Tumblr boards leave teens thinking they have rare mental disorders (2011)
• deleted 4y ago
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• Fargoan 4y ago
  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.
• programmarchy 4y ago
  According to Wikipedia [1] there's actually a term for this -- "cybermunch". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on_self#Munchausen_by_Internet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factitious_disorder_imposed_on...
• tmaly 4y ago
  This just seems like a video version of WebMD I use to joke with my sister who would go online and read things then come up with self-diagnoses. I think people have to be more aware that not everything you read of see online is real.
• nikolay 4y ago
  Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called "narcissism". 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's not like these companies don'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!
  • MichaelCollins 4y ago
    > Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called "narcissism" I think you have to break apart those 'using' TikTok by anonymously consuming content, and those who are 'using' TikTok by producing content with the aspiration of hitting it big. Narcissism seems connected to the second, but not so much the first.
    • nikolay 4y ago
      Reverse narcissism isn't less severe!
  • qabqabaca 4y ago
    > Most people using TitTok already have a mental disorder called "narcissism". Pretty broad statement to make about an app with 1B+ monthly active users. Are 7% of the world's population narcissistic?
    • nikolay 4y ago
      Cocaine has a lot of users, too. Should we legalize it?
• deleted 4y ago
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• sorwin 4y ago
  How are the videos and information surrounding all these mental disorders on TikTok not in the same category as COVID-19 misinformation?
  • johndfsgdgdfg 4y ago
    Simple. One is right wing and the other one is left-wing. The same reason 'fat is healthy' is not misinformation even though ~80% of people in US died with COVID were obese.
• barneygale 4y ago
  Never read HN comments unless it's about something technical. The privilege is fucking unreal.
• deleted 4y ago
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• _blz2 4y ago
  Headline could've been "TikTok videos leave teens with mental disorders" and I'd still believe it.
• navjack27 4y ago
  Note for the hacker news comments: you'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's a whole lot of misunderstanding going on in a lot of these comments and that's a problem. Tone indicators are important.
  • kayodelycaon 4y ago
    Tact is important too. This isn’t a good article to be making sarcastic comments on. :)
  • elliekelly 4y ago
    Which is a bit ironic, given the thread, since some studies have found people with ADHD tend to have more difficulty parsing sarcasm from sincerity.
• devwastaken 4y ago
  Psychology is not a hard science, it'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. I don'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's the point. The professional should be able to properly diagnose, because the patient themselves doesn't know what the problem is or how to treat it. But there in comes the "do no harm" idea. Where we have to do something because if we get it wrong and didn't prescribe pills then the patient may kill themselves or harm others. And conveniently we can point and say "we did it by the book, no liability.". It should be recoined "do harm to everyone equally" for correctness.
• cad0420 4y ago
  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.
• chaoticmass 4y ago
  I don't see it mentioned very often, but the whole "record yourself doing this funny dance" 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/subconsciously imitate other things they see on there as well.
  • thih9 4y ago
    Isn’t the “record yourself” aspect relatively irrelevant? The majority of users don’t record themselves dancing (or even don’t create content on a regular basis).
    • chaoticmass 4y ago
      I'm not so sure. Even if they don't record themselves, they see "everybody else" is doing it. You get the same thing happening in other forms and other social phenomenon but I'd wager the effect is stronger on TikTok.
      • thih9 4y ago
        That’s different to what you said earlier, now it’s not about imitating but observing others that imitate. As you say, same thing happens in other forms. A viral tiktok dance format seems similar to a viral image board macro or a viral twitter text format. How is tiktok different and why the effect would be stronger on tiktok?
  • feoren 4y ago
    I downvoted you because this is completely unsubstantiated nonsensical speculation that boils down to "Kids these days!!". You sound like you would have protested against AD&D in the 80s and Harry Potter in the 90s for turning kids into Satanists, or violent video games in the early 00s for turning kids into school shooters. Same bullshit, different decade.
    • 4y ago
• devving8 4y ago
  There is an aspect of mimetic contagion to this phenomenon. For a primer on what this means, see: https://www.amazon.com/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday/dp/1250262488/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12IUYDKLC6FJ1&keywords=wanting+burgis&qid=1659376732&sprefix=wanting+burgi%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday...
• devving8 4y ago
  There is a strong aspect of mimetic contagion to this phenomenon. For a primer, see this book: https://www.amazon.com/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday/dp/1250262488/ref=sr_1_1?crid=12IUYDKLC6FJ1&keywords=wanting+burgis&qid=1659376732&sprefix=wanting+burgi%2Caps%2C163&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Wanting-Power-Mimetic-Desire-Everyday...
• madrox 4y ago
  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't invent it. At that age, you don't know who you are or why you do things you do and there's comfort in learning about this stuff. For that matter, it's a joke among psych students that you begin to diagnose yourself and your friends as you take abnormal psych. Or maybe it wasn't a common thing for friend groups to do and mine was strange. We didn't have the WSJ to tell us.
  • cptcobalt 4y ago
    I participated in this with friend groups, prior to the era of TikTok. I think it's actually an interesting exercise, since doing things like MTBI tests in a group—even if the results/outcomes are tenuous at best—it helps you start to understand and breakdown how different people tick.
  • hiptobecubic 4y ago
    "Personality tests" have been a thing for a long time. The difference here seems to be that we're talking about diseases and not just differences between people.
• cptcobalt 4y ago
  I see a lot of affirming opinions to this post, but I'm worried that it's just a very direct read without assuming greater societal context. Could it be the case that there is now less social stigma to address and speak about mental health publicly? 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 need the extended time.) 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). 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're getting better at understanding and speaking about mental health—where definitions and processes from a psychiatric perspective are evolving, and that socially it's no longer something that must be bottled up and kept hidden (as much).
• ausbah 4y ago
  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 "oh wow I might have this" 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't lead to physical harm or actual mental illness, it's something kids will learn to grown out of with time.
• deleted 4y ago
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