MEDIA MISDIRECTION

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Junior Danie Eaves used to be the person scrolling through media, looking for the answer to all their woes. She had started developing tics and turned to the Internet for answers. TikTok told her that she had anxiety tics, which would go away in two to three weeks. She avoided going to the doctor because she thought they would disappear, but they didn’t. Eventually, she got a proper diagnosis of Toure es and received help. But social media almost led her down a different path.

“When people are looking symptoms up, it hurts me knowing they’re thinking they have something, when they probably have something else,” Eaves said. “It’s really confusing a lot of people and it hurts me knowing that people out there aren’t ge ing the right help.”

Social media tends toward oversimplifying mental illness. This results in short posts about mental illness on Instagram or Tiktok listing different symptoms.

“In recent years, discussions about mental health have proliferated on social media, particularly on TikTok,” According to The New York Times. “And for those researching various disorders, it has become increasingly easy to find bite-sized definitions and self-assessment quizzes online.”

These posts don’t allow for subtlety when it comes to talking about mental illness.

“We’re capable of having nuanced conversations about mental illness, which would allow people to see a variety of definitions of whatever it might be, social anxiety, depression or whatever,” English teacher Ben Pabst said. “But we don’t have nuanced conversations, we have bites, which affects our understanding of ourselves because we throw simplified terms around.”

When teens self diagnose themselves based on terms and symptoms on social media, it can lead to a misdiagnosis. Misdiagnosis can be harmful to many teens because of the further damaging effects it can have on their own mental health and their ability to deal with whatever is going on. Even when they go to a mental health professional, who may give them different advice, people still insist on the diagnosis they gave themselves.

“Once they’ve seen it, read it and it sort of clicks into place, it’s hard for them to let go of that narrative and really step back and evaluate in a gray zone. People like to narrow in, focus, clamp down on it and then say, ‘Oh, here’s what I’m dealing with.’ And so a lot of times people want to wrestle with me in some ways about something they’ve read.” Despite the harm that can come from certain posts about mental health on social media, other posts can spread positive awareness and broaden the larger conversation about mental health. “It cuts both ways, because it has spread awareness,” Christian said. “I wish it was a situation where mental health was talked about in limited quantities, where social media developed the awareness for someone to take the next step, [instead of making someone] shut everything down on their own self diagnosis, but I do think social media has helped make mental health Dismorphia: more understood. It’s been terrific because I see a lot more boys these days. A lot more men and Identifying boys, and all of that has come from an expanded awareness of mental illness.” the signs If someone is not doing okay and finds themselves pushed down the social media, self and symptoms. diagnosis rabbit-hole, experts agree there is one important step that can be taken. “Talk to someone in the field,” Christian said. “It can be their guidance counselor at school or their school social worker, that’s the easiest. But they could also go to the mental health center for their county. Paying for therapy is really hard to do. There are options out there.”

Teens begin to pigeonhole and limit themselves “

in what they think they are capable of in terms of both coping, functioning,

social situations and intellectual ability, Christian said. “