Tag: TikTok

Reading of the Week: Social Media – with Papers from Digital Health & BJP, and Dr. Vivek Murthy on Warning Labels

February 6, 2025 /

From the Editor

“I know all about antidepressants,” the young patient told me in the ED. “I’ve seen TikTok videos.” Social media isn’t just a source of great cat videos, many individuals – especially younger patients – turn to it for health information.

But how reliable is the mental-health information? In a new Digital Health paper, Roxanne Turuba (of the University of British Columbia) and her co-authors report on a summative content analysis of the 1 000 most popular mental health TikTok videos. They found that many featured personal stories and confessionals; less than 4% referenced scientific evidence; about a third offering advice was misleading. “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.” We examine the paper and its implications.

Social media: more than cat videos?

In the second selection, Harriet Battle (of the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust) and her co-authors consider attitudes toward mental health providers in social media. In a new British Journal of Psychiatry study, they analyzed more than 300 000 tweets spanning over a 16-year period, finding: “positive perceptions of mental health and mental health professionals increased over time. However, ‘psychiatrist’ had a consistently higher proportion of negative perceptions.”

And in the third selection, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy (the former US Surgeon General) writes about social media and adolescents in a New York Times essay. He notes the potential harms of social media for youth. He advocates changes, including warning labels. “We have the expertise, resources and tools to make social media safe for our kids. Now is the time to summon the will to act.”

DG

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Reading of the Week: TikTok is Popular & Cool But Good Mental Health Information? Also, Telemedicine and Practice (Psych Services)

March 3, 2022 /

From the Editor

Clever cats. Cool dancing videos. Tips on everything from calligraphy to home decorations.

A billion people are estimated to use TikTok on a monthly basis. The social media platform is incredibly popular here – and around the globe. And, as with other social media, people increasingly use it as a source of medical information.

To date, little research has been done on the credibility of that information. In a new Canadian Journal of Psychiatry paper, Dr. Anthony Yeung (of the University of British Columbia) and his co-authors focus on ADHD. They find uneven results: “In this analysis of popular TikTok videos about ADHD, there were over 2.8 million views per video and each video was shared on average 31,000 times. Approximately half of the videos analyzed (52%) were misleading…” We consider the paper and its clinical implications.

Continuing on the theme of technology and practice, in the second selection, we look at a new Psychiatric Services paper. Lori Uscher-Pines (of the RAND Corporation) and her co-authors do a qualitative analysis of why psychiatrists choose telemedicine for some patients and not others. The authors conclude: “psychiatrists did not perceive intermittent in-person visits as essential for high-quality care.”

DG

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