Over half of TikTok videos under #mentalhealthtips contain misleading or false advice.

Question

A recent report found that when reviewing the top trending 100 videos on TikTok tagged with “#mentalhealthtips,” more than half were found to contain misleading or inaccurate information about mental‐health practices. People.com This is particularly relevant for college students, many of whom turn to social media for quick, shareable wellness hacks or peer advice. The claim draws attention to the gap between content that looks helpful and content that may mislead, especially when it comes to serious mental-health issues.

It’s important to fact-check because misleading mental-health content can cause harm: self-diagnosis, skipping professional help, or spreading unvetted tips that may worsen conditions rather than help them. While the claim states “over half,” the nuance is that the review covered trending videos under one hashtag and may not represent all content on the platform, but the pattern is strong enough to warrant caution.

Answer 1

It does seem that there is some truth behind this. I was able to find an article by the University of Chicago that was also stating the same thing. "Around 44% of the videos contained non-factual information. Videos from “nonmedical influencers” ". i was also able to find an article by Plushcare that said "83.7% of mental health advice on TikTok is misleading. While 14.2% of videos include content that could be potentially damaging." and "While experts concluded that 54% of advice contained accurate information, 31% of videos contained inaccurate information.". It seems a lot of the mental health content on Tiktok is done by non-professionals and then gets quickly spread. So I would call this true for the most part with the numbers ranging from a little under half to a bit over depending on how the research was done. 

https://biologicalsciences.uchicago.edu/news/health-information-tiktok 

https://plushcare.com/blog/tiktok-mental-health 

Comments

Would there be a way to analyze all of the videos containing that hashtag instead of some of the top videos?

Answer 2

This claim is true. The claim is that a large percentage of mental health "tips" on TikTok are false and misleading. The source article from People Magazine speaks about how there is misleading information on TikTok, often leading vulnerable and impressionable youth to self-diagnose and believe false information about their mental health. I found an article by The Guardian (along with many reliable journals and news sites) supporting this claim. They say that TikTok videos provide many "solutions" or "explanations" to different mental health struggles, and over half of them are misleading or false. They state that 52 out of 100 videos regarding mental health contained misleading and even harmful information. All of this definitely supports this claim.

Hall, R., & Keenan, R. (2025, May 31). More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds

Comments

I agree with the claim in your answer that the push of misleading information is harmful to vulnerable and impressionable youth. One aspect that causes people to gravitate towards TikTok instead of other platforms is the more imperfect, real image of the app that many younger people find more accepting and appealing to post on than other social media. ia The unregulated aspect of TikTok, which people gravitate towards, preys on their view of the app and makes it easier for misleading information to happen, which I believe is why almost a 50% of health tips are false.

Answer 3

I agree with this true statement, reading new york times, it said how instead of turning to friends and talking about how they are feeling, they turn to TikTok, hearing what TikTok is saying, and then agreeing because what they are going through tiktok is saying it, and then giving you tips on what to do. " But if you're organized and you have structure and you like things a certain way and you're functioning, you don't have obsessive compulsive disorder - you're organized," Ms. barsch said said. "People who have O.C.D cannot function because of their compulsions. (New York Times).

Comments

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/29/well/mind/tiktok-mental-illness-diagnosis.html

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I think that this comment is very insightful and I like when you made that comment on people with OCD and how tiktok will sort of diagnose people in a way and make people believe that they have some disorder that they do not. In the same article you mentioned by Christina Caron, it mentions that many disorders have different symptoms for different age groups "But part of what makes diagnosis so complicated is that the same disorder can express itself in a child, adolescent and adult very differently — in other words, the same list of symptoms does not apply to every age group." This means when people are casting such wide nets trying to diagnose their symtoms on TikTok, there is a very high chance that they will come to the conclusion that they have a certain condition when they do not just because they matched their symptoms to a post on TikTok.

Answer 4

I liked this topic and the outcome you found. After looking through the other answers here the claim seems pretty unanimous but it made me curious what we can do to identify which information is accurate and what isn't. In my research I referred to The Mayo Clinic and the reminders they give to identify misleading content. Namely things like fear tactics, trying to sell you something, or excluding reliable sources of information are all common red flags to watch out for when engaging with social media posts that don't come straight from professionals or already reputable sources.

Answer 5

This claim is true, according to my research 52% of any top 100 videos under the mental health tips hashtag contains misinformation. This investigation consist of a team of psychologist, psychiatrist, and academic specialist. I was also able to read that many influencers misuse the clinical language by calling things they believe is "therapy". Not only this, but many even categorize these tips as a "quick-fix"  for their viewers. Two examples would be, "how to heal trauma" or "eating an orange will reduce your anxiety". To go further, my research has provided the fact that many influencers have oversimplified complex conditions. With misinformation like this, it causes people to self-diagnose themselves just because a video said so. Lastly, this is very harmful to many users because it can replace professional guidance that many people may need. Altogether, I believe this claim is true with the research that was done.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds
Hall, Rachel, and Rachel Keenan. "More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds." The Guardian, 31 May 2025, www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds. Accessed 8 Apr. 2026.

 

Comments

I like that you put the issue in context by providing the title of two medically-false videos. Thanks!

Answer 6

The information from the People Magazine article claims that half of TikTok's Health video contains misimformation. People Magazine is an American magazine that focuses on pop culture events and entertainment news. People Magazine isn't an academic or scientific source. The author of the article is Cara Lynn Shultz, who is a People Magazine writer, editor, and pop culture specialist, but doesn't have expertise in mental health or conduct any research. Shultz mostly reports on issues, rather than conducting research.

People magazine claims that TikTok videos regarding mental health can be inaccurate, which could be potentially harmful because of the inaccuracies in the information in the videos. The claim is true, but the article is slightly misleading. The evidence of the article is from The Guardian, which is a British news outlet. "The outlet explains it came to this conclusion by taking the top 100 videos under that hashtag and sharing them with academic experts and mental health professionals for review." The article only looked at 100 popular videos on TikTok, which is a very small sample compared to the large platform that TikTok is, where thousands of people post videos.

The links referenced in the article are from The Guardian, theguardien.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study finds, which is what the article is around. The National Library of Medicine agreed with the overall information from the article, but more research needs to be conducted to see the amount of misinformation about mental health on TikTok. When conducting research, a limitation was that sample sizes were small, which could cause inaccuracies. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9164092/#sec11. In another article  by Healthline, they agreed with the information that reported: "52% of the top-performing ADHD videos and 41% of autism-related videos on TikTok contained information that was inaccurate or not supported by current clinical evidence." The article was fact-checked by a mental health specialist, giving more credibility to the claim of the misinformation from mental health videos on TikTok. https://www.heathliee.com/health-news/adhd-autsim-videos-tiktok-inaccurate. Overall, the claim is true, but some of the evidence and research are limited due to small sample sizes, and it doesn't show the whole picture about the misinformation that half of TikToks spreads.