Bad Online Anxiety Advice? (Ep 297)

Bad Online Anxiety/Mental Health Advice … It’s A Thing

When PlushCare examined 500 mental health videos on TikTok, they found that a full 84% of those videos contained misleading information.  14.2% of those videos contained information that was so misleading as to be classified as dangerous.  It doesn’t matter though. Those videos had a combined view count of over 24 million and a combined like count of over 3.5 million.

As it turns out, not all mental content online is good content. Who saw that coming?

Popular Does Not Mean Helpful

The popularity of a YouTube video, TikTok video, or Instagram reel has little to no relationship to how helpful it is in the context of recovery and creating change in a bad mental health situation.  Social platform algorithms boost content that gets attention, which is not necessarily the same as content that can be applied in a useful way in your recovery journey.  Emma shared that on her channel, which has a very large audience, the videos she feels are most helpful in explaining , educating, and promoting improvement are her least viewed videos.

Oversimplifying And Limiting Options

Sometimes online mental health content goes too far in misusing diagnostic labels and clinical language.  Diagnosis is a tricky thing that can become misleading or even dangerous when used in a casual fashion. The rise of the term “narcissist” in online mental health content is an excellent example. Without knowing more about the term, what it means, and how it is applied in a clinical setting, a quick scroll though mental health Instagram would lead an alien to conclude that 50% of all human beings are insufferable harmful narcissists. This would be an incorrect conclusion.

This can also lead to limiting of viable real life options for addressing mental health issues or interpersonal conflict. Mental health, wellness, and personal development content gets attention when it aggressively uses words like boundaries or goes directly to handing out extreme advice regarding ending relationships and cutting people out of our lives.  No ethically practicing mental health helper would tell a client to leave a partner or end a lifelong friendship, yet that instruction is easily found every day while scrolling on popular social platforms.

Limiting And Being Intentional With Social Media

Two ways to guard against unhelpful or dangerous mental health information on the Internet are to limit consumption and be intentional with your social media use.

Scrolling for hours every day all but guarantees that you will be served algorithmically generated content suggestions, which often will not match your mental health goals or directions that are in your personal best interest. Pick the content creators you find most useful and applicable in your situation and drop the rest. Limit your consumption to the content those creators produce. Its fine to search for new content from time to time, just be careful about letting the algorithm automatically pick that for you to keep you scrolling.

Ask yourself what you hope to get out of the content you find online?  Are you just hoping to see content that reminds you that you are broken and validates your retreat? Maybe you’re looking for content that makes you feel better for a few minutes?  Are you interested in content that might inspire and inform new actions and behaviors that can lead to real change?  Everyone is free to choose any of those options at any time, but it can be helpful to decide what you’re looking for first, before endlessly scrolling on any given day. There’s nothing worse that scrolling for 3 hours every day consuming an endless stream of random “popular” mental health content only to wind up feeling worse about oneself and frustrated because all that “recovery content” is leading nowhere.

Links Of Interest

• Emma McAdam – Therapy In A Nutshell
• My Panic Attacks Explained Workshop
• My Agoraphobia Explained Workshop
• My Panic and Agoraphobia Recovery Guidebook
• Follow me on Instagram
• My YouTube Channel
• Disordered – With Josh Fletcher

Disclaimer: The Anxious Truth is not therapy or a replacement for therapy. Listening to The Anxious Truth does not create a therapeutic relationship between you and the host or guests of the podcast. Information here is provided for psychoeducational purposes. As always, when you have questions about your own well-being, please consult your mental health and/or medical care providers. If you are having a mental health crisis, always reach out immediately for in-person help.