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

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201–210 of 664 posts

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

#201

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 q…

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.

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

#202
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the o…

> This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. I find it astonishing that this is the limit of "bad". There are people alive today who were at lynchings in the US as children and cheered them on. Setting cats on fire by comparison was a harmless past time.

Very true, I picked this example as a thing that kids could theoretically be doing right now. You don't have to go very far back at all to get into the really heinous stuff. There's a big complicating factor in what parents would have actually prevented as a bad influence too, children cheering on at lynchings were accompanied by everyone else in the town cheering at lynchings. If there was a disconnect between parents tolerance of lynchings and child exposure to lynchings it didn't last very long.

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

#203

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 abo…

Allowing teens to spread mental illness on social media was less profitable in the 00s. There was a low cost to shutting down pro-ana tumblr accounts.

Now, those sites are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Can't afford to do the right thing.

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

#204

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.

> 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

Another thing TikTok does is provide a venue for sharing stories - "you're not alone" - and sharing coping mechanisms. Good things.

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

#205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Basically, are they "well-adjusted"? This is so easy to game. People read the diagnostic criteria online and echo it back to their doctor for a prescription. Their proof of needing adjustment can be little more than pointing to their grades and attributing their less than stellar academic performance to the list of ADHD symptoms they memorized online. EZ way to get yourself a stimulant subscription. This was partic…

Someone being able to fake an illness does not signify that the illness does not exist. You can fake chronic back pain, migraines, suicidal tendencies, and so on. That doesn't make any of them any less real.

I'm responding to the claim that it's easy for doctors to falsify a false claim of ADHD from somebody who's drug seeking and has been coached online to say the right things to the doctor. This doesn't seem to be the case.

ADHD may be real, but doctors seem to have a hard time distinguishing people who actually have it from people who just want the drugs and know what to tell the doctor because they watched a bunch of instructional videos about this sort of deception on tiktok.

The 'test' for ADHD boils down to "evaluat[ing] traits, strengths, and difficulties, and to what extent they impact functioning as a person in society. Basically, are they "well-adjusted"?" It's not as though the evaluation is some chemical analysis in a lab, anybody so inclined can be coached to pass this evaluation by telling their doctor the right things.

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

#206

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 t…

>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).

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

#207
post #7

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.

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?"

Source: I've been diagnosed with severe ADHD on 4 occasions(mostly retests for due diligence reasons after switching psychiatrist)

Generally by having a full workup with a psychiatrist. They will do various interviews. Possibly might have to interview parents and teachers in pediatric cases or in adult cases where ADHD was not diagnosed in childhood(childhood onset is a diagnostic requirement for adult ADHD).

In more difficult cases a neuropsychologist might be consulted and can perform various neurological tests to more thoroughly rule out other disorder. There's some promising work on blood biomarkers and brain imaging but nothing in clinical use yet afaik.

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

#208
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the o…

> Now, with TikTok, the only limit is what TikTok will ban. Which isn't much. The population segment of kids who aren't supervised in any way used to have an inherent limit. Not any more. This may be new-ish but I’m not sure it’s that new. I grew up with the early web in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it’s always been pretty unfiltered. It wasn’t centralized in the way TikTok is, but plenty of us grew up on the web wi…

difference is tiktok and short video algos exploit ppls worse natures. like i know a few ppl whose feeds became e-thots doing dances in bikinis bc they wouldnt go seek it out but tiktok showed them that and their watch metrics or whatever were better. or ppl whose feed became far right shit bc it showed them some of that.

there's a lot of stuff we know isn't good and won't consciously choose to go watch. but short video shows us some of that and we subconsciously engage with it more instead of consciously choosing so we watch more and more.

this is hard for adults to deal with but way worse for kids with shitty impulse control.

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

#209
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an interesting phenomenon where the lower bound of "bad influences" has gotten much lower in a lot of places that used to be safe. Previously, bad influences were limited to what your local neighborhood kids were telling your kid. This could be bad, they could be torturing cats or something, but that wasn't likely. And that floor could be raised by society as a whole improving. Now, with TikTok, the o…

Banning "undesirable topics" isn't the solution, but only a band-aid. We need to teach children critical thinking skills and allow them to make their own decisions. The former might be easier, but the latter is the most beneficial in the long run.

the problem is that social media is like Heroin and not even the parents are immune.

There is a difference in reading an article in a newspaper with critical thinking and lumping through a social media page where the whole purpose is not the content but to keep you glued to the screen.

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

#210
post #15

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 unt…

Anecdotally my teen brother, the youngest (born over a decade after the rest of us), is remarkably even-tempered and not prone to fall for bad influences. He does spend a lot of time on IG, mostly looking at cars and making informative posts on automobiles. He watches a lot of documentary-like material on YouTube about engineering, physics, and sociology. He isn't likely to get these wild ideas his peers seem to fall for. My parents though, will fall for all manners of internet misinformation- the phenomena of believing nonsense online isn't exclusive to children and young adults.

With my brother I've found that if you treat younger adults and children with seriousness and listen to them as though their POV is valid, you build a trust there where they have a sense of where to discuss their doubts and insecurities so they don't fall prey to hypes and misinformation.

I mention this because I had a huge amount of influence on him growing up, almost the opposite of my experience with my parents dismissing and ridiculing my concerns. Although when I was a teen social media was mostly all chat rooms, forums, myspace, and then facebook (YouTube barely existed until the end of my adolescence) where I found people who listened- and there was the potential for them to have an influence which may have led to something very similar to this article.

Although social media now is vastly more powerful and common, it is not the sole variable. For many of these children it is filling a gap where a solid foundation of reality and context should be- with family members and social support structures who can be trusted to provide a reality check. I can see why many young ones listen to online personalities (many adults do, too) and although the medium through which they're getting these concepts (tiktok) plays a large part, it is not the root nor is avoiding tiktok the solution.

I would add, my parents moved us far from the town with the intent to take us away from bad influences of kids who hung out downtown- what this actually did is prevent me from being able to walk to the library, while my sister still found a way to get in trouble because lo and behold, her friends had cars or knew older kids with cars. The isolation they thought might be a solution proved ineffective, but I think if their parenting had been more nutruring and less abuse/neglect she might have avoided a lot of the trouble she got into.

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