PATHOPHILIA

Pathophilia, a word that means the love or obsession with the mind, was the only fitting name for this podcast. Maybe “TikTok’s Biggest Problem” or “The Result of Idealization on TikTok” would have been equally appropriate, but fails to show the biggest and most damaging aspect of what TikTok is not only allowing but fostering: people obsessing over mental health. This is a strange statement that seemingly makes no sense. Why would anyone like, let alone obsess, over them? Well, thanks to a growing subsection of people, particularly on TikTok, it has led people to view mental health through rose-tinted glasses— or rose-tinted filters. 

    These clips, which are often only three minutes, try to summarize everything about mental health to put it in a better light after years of abuse and mistreatment. However, by doing this, many people only see the good of mental health, not the bad, not the ugly, and definitely not the true trauma. As a result, the dark history of the mental health world is being erased. We saw this trend earlier, back in the late 2000s and 2010s with Tumblr, but Tumblr was able to make improvements to the platform and was formatted in a way to be more conducive to mental health discussions. TikTok, on the other hand, is a platform designed to appeal to be addictive with short clips that provide no nuance. Adolescents are drawn to this design, particularly white young girls who were deeply affected during COVID-19’s isolation. This has been damaging both people of color who were being seen less as “the norm” and girls who were nolonger believed to be telling the truth because they were just “following trends.” Some adolescents went onto then fake diagnoses because they wanted either a place to belong or to fit in while others began self-diagnosing without doing full research and just relying on the bullet-point TikToks they’ve seen. TikTok has supported this growing problem which I strived to discuss in my podcast.