He looks for his reflection on his cell phone, but what he finds there is very different from what he sees, every morning, in the mirror. And that makes him angry. Beatriz López, a 47-year-old Valencian, is bothered by how people talk about depression on social media. How she frivolizes a topic that has touched her directly for 30 years. “So neither I nor my family knew what was happening to me,” she explains in a telephone conversation. Depression was a taboo and people stayed away from those who dared to break it. In this time, she concedes, mental illness has gained focus: “It’s talked about more, but not necessarily better,” she says. “Now it is being romanticized.”
Normalizing conversation about mental health issues is a positive thing, but there’s a huge difference between destigmatizing therapy—a personalized, expert-led conversation—and turning it into social media content. Use it to get attention, likes and money. “Depression is an illness that has to be treated by a specialist,” López summarizes. “We do not need influencers“We need psychiatrists.”
But that’s going to have to wait. López went to the social security doctor a few weeks ago to make an appointment with the psychologist. They have given it to them for April. Spain has six public psychologists per 100,000 inhabitants, three times less than the European average, and 11 psychiatrists per 100,000 people, almost five times less than in Switzerland (52) and half than in France (23), Germany (27) o Netherlands (24). In this context, mental health content creators are filling a health gap.
TikTok videos with the tag #mentalhealth have been viewed almost 44 billion times. This could be good news, but the important thing is not how much, but how it is spoken. In recent months, many accounts have moved from raising awareness to offering guidance and entertainment. There is influencers mental health, untrained people who have found an expanding market niche. “Talking about mental health is fashionable,” acknowledges Luis Muiño, psychotherapist and disseminator in the podcast. understand your mind. “And I think it’s important to know it, to conceptualize it. We have gone from having mental health as a taboo, to the opposite: it is talked about, sometimes, too much. Because when something is fashionable, there are those who can draw on their experience to seek attention, vindicate themselves and say, ‘hey, I’ve had it too.’ In some way it is understood that it is something that gives status, that it is cool.”
Issey Moloney is a influencer 18-year-old British woman with more than seven million followers on TikTok. There, she combines videos about her beauty routines or her travels with jokes that relate depression to eating pasta or lists like “Signs you might have bipolar disorder.” In a 24-second video, she comes out crying while she looks at the camera and lists sensations such as “feeling empty” or “having very short and intense relationships.” Among her comments, several of her users accuse her of “pathologizing being a teenager.” Borja Hiriart is a Chilean content creator with two and a half million followers on TikTok. Among his most viewed videos there is one in which you can read the message “your little joke cost me my emotional stability” while he fakes a crying fit. In others he gives advice on how to help your girlfriend if she has anxiety or lists “signs that your mental health is on the verge of collapse.” Both Hiriart and Moloney perform an emotional state, with performances, dramatic music and short phrases of just 10 words. They adapt the psychological diagnosis to the TikTok format.
“Speed can be useful if you are talking about a simple topic,” explains Muiño, “there are pills of information that can be given on TikTok. But the problem is that the content creator has to continue uploading videos, feeding his account, and it is easy for him to be tempted to analyze complex things in 30 seconds, such as the gestural profile of a person with depression. TikTok rewards these videos, which accumulate millions of views. Social media is not designed to prioritize the most accurate content, but rather the content that provokes the strongest reaction. And depression sells.
In this way, topics that deeply affect people with a diagnosed illness are preyed upon by content creators who know how to hit the key of virality. “Social networks often lack filters for the accuracy and quality of information, so it can be oversimplified,” says María Palau, an expert psychologist in anxiety management, who warns: “This can lead to self-diagnoses.” or erroneous self-treatment.”
Self-regulation
Without a legal framework, it is the content creators themselves who have to self-regulate. That’s what Óscar Alonso ended up doing. This 40-year-old Basque illustrator began sharing his weight loss process online. Hence his professional name: 72 kilos. But little by little he turned towards content more related to mental health. “I speak from my experience,” he explains in a telephone conversation, “I under no circumstances want to be anyone’s therapist. “I am not a doctor, I do not have any training in psychology, I am telling my case.”
Alonso knows that his illustrations connect with people who have gone through the same thing. He knows that it is a hot topic and that this helps his creations go viral. But at the same time, he cannot abstract himself from the global conversation, especially when it affects him directly. He tries to draw an ethical line to address the topics that interest him without frivolizing in search of virality. “That’s the risk,” he concedes. “We have to talk about this, but it cannot become a business. We must be alert so that, in a capitalist society in which almost everything is sold, this does not become just another product.” Alonso, who has just completed an assignment for the Ministry of the Presidency, assures that we must not lose sight of the fact that this fashion “helps more people than it is harming.”
Both Palau and Muiño agree with this idea. Talking about mental health “allows people to feel less alone in their experiences and know that treatments exist,” Palau emphasizes. “The dissemination of information can promote awareness and education.” Furthermore, one only frivolizes what reaches the mainstream. Feminism has also been used to sell t-shirts or records, and that has not prevented—perhaps even encouraged—it from reaching more people and its changes from being more transversal.
And the depression became pop
Mental health has entered the conversation and this is not only reflected on social networks. According to Listen Notes, a podcast search engine, more than 5,500 episodes have the word trauma in their title. Amazon offers more than 60,000 results when searching for books on mental health. In interviews, actors, singers and celebrities of all stripes talk about how therapy has helped them become better people.
Philosopher and music producer Alex Kresovich has analyzed references to mental health in contemporary music. In a 2021 study he noted that his presence in rap songs over the last 20 years has increased in a surprising and constant manner. In another, he recorded a similar phenomenon in pop. According to Kresovich, Kanye West’s album 808s & Heartbreak, from 2008, was a turning point. “It has become very normalized,” he stated recently in an interview with New York Times. “Mental health is talked about so much publicly that some neuroses, such as depression, are almost romanticized.”
The public is no stranger to this fashion, which has ended up permeating society. They are no longer just the influencers Those who talk about it are the users. We are all. Social networks are a loudspeaker that magnifies and distorts the conversation. Nowadays it’s so easy to make private feelings public and find people who validate them through interactions, hearts, or thumbs up. And it can be addictive. Only in this way can viral phenomena such as Elmo, the famous doll, be understood. Sesame Street. His Twitter profile launched an innocent message last week: “Elmo has arrived, how are you?” He encountered thousands of dramatic responses that spoke of depression, anxiety and suicide attempts.
In this regard, the American psychologist Scott Lyons warns in his book Addicted to Drama that the attention economy is producing a spiral of stress and heightened feelings. “We know from research that being more dramatic [en redes sociales] get more attention and more likes. It is a reinforcement,” he explains in an audio exchange. In this way, and without being fully aware, he explains, we end up being part of the problem. “60% of young people who use TikTok end up self-diagnosing a mental health problem,” she points out. Many of those who do, end up joining the conversation online, sharing experiences with other people suffering from the same illnesses. Creating groups. “It’s what we call dramatic union. If we come together because of a shared symptomatology and we feed each other, it is difficult for us to later want to give up the label and the relationships we get from it,” he reflects.
It is what differentiates real and individual therapy from the reductionist, viral and generic version that proliferates on the internet. Talking about personal problems and anxieties can have a healing effect. But when the conversation takes place on social networks, it is amplified by algorithms and distorted by the attention economy. And it can have the opposite effect. While we talk more than ever about depression and anxiety, suicide rates and mental health issues continue to rise. Most of this public conversation takes place on the internet, which encourages vulnerable people to surround themselves with conversations on the topic, entering algorithmic wormholes. And this doesn’t seem to be having any positive effects.