Do you have depression? A summative content analysis of mental health-related content on TikTok.

Background: TikTok is a global social media platform with over 1 billion active users. Presently, there are few data on how TikTok users navigate the platform for mental health purposes and the content they view.

Objective: This study aims to understand the patterns of mental health-related content on TikTok and assesses the accuracy and quality of the advice and information provided.

Methods: We performed a summative content analysis on the top 1000 TikTok videos with the hashtag #mentalhealth between October 12 and 16, 2021. Six content themes were developed to code the data: (1) a personal story, perspective, or confessional, (2) advice and information, (3) emoting, (4) references to death, (5) references to science or research, and (6) a product or service for sale. Advice and information were further assessed by clinical experts.

Results: A total of 970 mental health-related videos were pulled for our analysis ( = 30 removed due to non-English content). The most prevalent content themes included a personal story, perspective, or confessional ( = 574), advice and information ( = 319), emoting ( = 198), references to death ( = 128). Advice and information were considered misleading in 33.0% of videos ( = 106), with misleading content performing better. Few videos included references to scientific evidence or research ( = 37).

Conclusion: 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. Interventions to reduce the amount of misinformation on the platform and increase people's ability to discern between anecdotal and evidence-based information are also warranted.