Harnessing Youth Engagement With Mental Health TikTok and Its Potential as a Public Health Tool

At different institutions, we were seeing the same trend-TikTok arising more in discussion during appointments. It is hard to accurately quantify the mental health-related content on Tik-Tok because it is ever-increasing. Nevertheless, national news outlets have reported on the worrisome trend of self-diagnosis of mental health disorders via TikTok. In 2018, Shafi et al. described the importance of understanding the role of social media in adolescents' lives.1 Four years later, that role continues to evolve and to become ever more prominent. As of September 2021, 25% of TikTok users were 10 to 19 years old and 22.4% were 20 to 29 years old. That is an estimated 172,250,000 users.2 As of February 2022, #anxiety registers 11.7 billion, #ADHD 9.4 billion, #BPD 3.9 billion, #depressed 3.6 billion, #bipolar 2.1 billion, and #DID 1.5 billion views.