If you are sad after a breakup, TikTok diagnoses you with depression. If you are anxious during the last few weeks of your school semester, TikTok will start flooding your feed with videos on how to handle panic attacks. TikTok has become more than just a place to doomscroll while lying in bed. It has morphed into TherapyTok, a breeding ground for unqualified content creators to promote their mental health tips.
TherapyTok, videos of creators describing different mental health disorders and terminologies, often with real-life scenarios that viewers could relate to, began gaining more and more traction during the pandemic. Hashtags like #mentalhealth, #anxiety, and #ADHD reached billions of views. With isolation and uncertainty, TikTok became a safe space for everyone. People could quickly find emotional validation as often as they wanted.
“Gaslighting,” “narcissist,” “trauma,” “triggered,” and “boundaries” are some of the most commonly and often incorrectly used terms on TherapyTok. “I can’t date right now, I’m still healing,” says your friend who had a moderate breakup two years ago. “I couldn’t go to their 30th birthday party, I had to protect my peace,” says someone who has no idea what protecting their peace means, and only heard the phrase after doomscrolling for six hours. You even find yourself unable to reply to a simple text message because you’re sitting overthinking your “triggers.”
It makes sense that people would search online for answers to their emotional turmoils, especially when they aren’t in therapy. But the problem is that mental health diagnoses are extremely personal and take time to understand, so the act of self-diagnosing via TikTok often leads to even further confusion.
According to PsychologyToday: “Studies show that over 83% of TikTok’s mental health advice is misleading (White, 2024).”
If TherapyTok is all about helping people work through their emotions and psyches, why has it made people less in touch with how they feel and more paranoid about how well they’ve healed?
In My #HealingEra
Having the desire to face your flaws and become a better version of yourself is admirable. But when healing is depicted as doing yoga and reading rather than a series of lifestyle changes, there is no understanding of how to actually grow. Instead, people ignorantly try to emulate their favorite TikTok creators and end up wondering why they still aren’t happy or healed.
What if you don’t have that $60 candle from Diptyque to light while you sit in your porcelain bathtub filled to the brim with bubbles and lavender-scented Epsom salt? What if you don’t have twenty minutes every morning to sit in the sun and journal about your intrusive thoughts? Or what if you don’t know what you even need to “heal”, but just feel the constant need to work on yourself like some ridiculously complicated project with no end goal? When there is no blueprint, there is no attainable success.
Again, the idea itself is positive, but its depiction on social media is not.
The narration makes sense, but the video’s message does not. This girl is drinking a smoothie, stretching in a hot tub, and relaxing in a sauna. What exactly does that have to do with healing? How does someone live for themselves, as the video says, when there’s no cold plunge to jump into at 6 am?
If you aren’t living for yourself and doing things alone, does that mean you aren’t in your healing era?
Seeing this type of content can often make people anxious about making big changes in their lives, whether they truly need to or not. A person might be totally content with themselves and their routines, but after spending too much time on TikTok, they begin to question whether they also need to heal…whatever that really means.
Not only do we have more vague displays of “exercise,” but we now have facial tapping, matcha, and a Rupi Kaur quote. The confusing part is that the viewer doesn’t understand what the creator is healing from, and therefore cannot relate to the steps taken to begin this healing.
The over-saturation of this trend has made it seem like everyone needs to step into their healing era, and that it should look like sitting alone by the water, doing Pilates, reading every night by a fireplace, painting with watercolors, and establishing firm boundaries.
Are You Also a Gaslighter?
Everyone is gaslighting each other, and the world is on fire.
The term, used to describe manipulating someone into questioning their own sanity, has become one of the most heavily used words in Gen-Z lingo. Due to its popularity, the word has lost its depth and is now being used as gun ammo against anyone who steps on the toes of another person. This ties back to the self-diagnosing behaviors that TherapyTok has created, where minor resemblances of behavioral patterns become a full-blown diagnosis.
“POV: You’re being gaslit”, “5 signs your partner is gaslighting you,” and “Gaslighting phrases people use to control you” are some of the most popular video headlines on TikTok when searching the term gaslighting. With the plethora of content surrounding this topic, it can be overwhelming for someone trying to understand their situation.
The creator in this video says they have to walk on eggshells around someone who’s too sensitive, which, for them, means the relationship isn’t worth having. But I thought it was previously established that calling someone too sensitive was gaslighting. I thought this had already been labeled as manipulation. “Everything I say, you take it the wrong way,” the creator says. Instead of recognizing that there is a huge communication gap, people have instead decided to label someone as a victim, a gaslighter, a narcissist, and slam the door shut.
Just because someone said something that checks off one of the boxes on your saved TikTok video of gaslighting, doesn’t mean they are an evil narcissist intentionally trying to warp your reality. People often miscommunicate and are misunderstood, and although there is a difference between a mistake and a pattern, the constant need to label someone’s actions as gaslighting or manipulative makes it very hard for relationships to be worked through.
It turns out everyone is a narcissist
Five warning signs that someone is a narcissist: They’re very reactive if they receive feedback, they don’t like being told what to do, they have a lack of empathy, they make all conversations about themselves, and they constantly have to put other people down to lift themselves up. This is what TikTok creator DoctorRamani says are the key characteristics of a narcissist.
But what else constitutes a narcissist?
Ok, so let me get this straight. I smirk instead of smile; I’m a narcissist. My eyes scan around a busy room; I’m a narcissist. I raise my eyebrows and open my mouth in shock when someone tells me they lost their job; I’m a narcissist. Got it.
But in all seriousness, if someone had seen this video and then went on a first date that night, their head would be swarming with “Oh my god, they’re scanning the room!” or “Why did they laugh so hard when I told them that joke.”
The popularity of this term has grown so much that there are creators who base their entire platform on being a narcissist or diagnosing narcissists.
This creator, thenamelessnarcissist, has spoken at Northeastern University about Narcissistic Personality Disorder, written a book about his experiences as a diagnosed narcissist, and has made countless videos reenacting interactions with a narcissist that a viewer can put themselves into.
While this information is helpful in some capacity, it often results in viewers spiraling about their personal relationships, even if they might be a narcissist themselves. Going back to the fact that people can self-diagnose incorrectly, there are many traits that overlap between mental health disorders, which makes consuming this content tricky. Some of the comments under his videos read: “I have autism and i relate to 99.99% of this” and “This is very familiar as an autistic person, its interesting how similar but different the two disorders are”.
If being a narcissist is narrowed down to these broad categories and signs, everyone would, in some format, be a culprit.
It’s time to put down the phone
When navigating difficult relationships, personal history, stress, and the average adult experience, my advice is to avoid TikTok. Everyone knows that when you’re sick, the worst thing to do is look up your symptoms on WebMD, since it almost always tells you that you have a rare strain of plague and will die in twelve days.
So if we have learned our lesson there, why do we still spend hours scrolling through TikTok to find a diagnosis for our social struggles? The best thing to do is speak to a mental health professional, not just a content creator with a blue check mark next to their handle.
