Teenage mental health and TikTok’s influence

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 16th of February, 2023. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. First up on The World and Everything in It: teens’ mental health and TikTok.

Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott announced a plan to ban TikTok on state-issued devices across Texas, citing issues of cybersecurity.

BROWN: While lawmakers point to TikTok’s relationship to the Chinese Communist Party, medical professionals have a different concern: a correlated rise in numbers of young people with tics—meaning those involuntary, repetitive physical movements and vocal noises that are commonly associated with Tourette Syndrome.

EICHER: WORLD Senior Writer Mary Jackson recently published a story about TikTok and social sickness for WORLD and we talked with her about it. But before we let you hear that, I’d like to play a bit of audio to give you a small sample of what we’re talking about, these vocal tics.

They’re vocal, but they’re also physical—tapping your chest, like this, or twitching an eye, or jerking your head to the side—in addition to the vocal tics.

Sometimes it’s just a noise, other times it’s random phrases, including foul language, which we’ll bleep out.

But let’s listen to about 30 seconds of TikTok influencer Baylen Dupree.

DUPREE: You guys have asked where Fluffy has been. She's been with, ahhhhhh, urgh, she's been with me. We’ve just been chillin’. She's got whipped cream, like dried whipped cream all over her face because I gave her a pup cup this morning. You want to say hi? Eww. Up talk, Girl Scout! Urgh. Wind it up! [bleep] men. Urgh. Ha!

BROWN: Well, as you can hear there, the symptoms of Tourette Syndrome can be pretty severe. But it’s increasingly showing up in unexpected places, thanks in part to TikTok. So we asked Mary how these things are related:

MARY JACKSON, REPORTER: Coming out of the pandemic, I started seeing reports of teen girls developing tics from spending a lot of time on TikTok and in particular watching videos of certain influencers who claimed to have Tourette Syndrome. And simultaneously, you know, an increasing number of kids at younger ages are on numerous social media platforms. And it's becoming normal for them to say that they have a mental illness, even without a formal diagnosis. So one girl I interviewed said, it's almost like trendy to have a mental illness. Meanwhile, we've arrived at this point where there's an unprecedented number of teens who do have formal diagnoses of mental illnesses. And the social psychologists I cite in my story, started to see those numbers climbing with the advent of the smartphone and social media. And so, it seems significant.

EICHER: You mentioned that the number of young people who self-diagnose mental health issues is rising partly in response to social influencers on TikTok. So I guess there’s a sense in which it’s good that certain mental health problems are becoming easier to recognize. But should we be concerned that teenagers are preferring self-diagnosis to professional evaluation?

JACKSON: You know, I think most medical professionals would say that the awareness around mental illnesses is, is in some ways a good thing. There's less stigma around certain disorders. But they would also say, it's vital that young people seek formal diagnoses and speak with their parents, trusted adults, medical professionals, about, you know, what they're experiencing, what the next steps are. The therapists and medical professionals that I spoke with are really concerned about the number of teens they're seeing self diagnosing, and sometimes finding those same kids are resistant to having a formal diagnosis and relying entirely on what they heard someone say on social media. So that is a concern.

EICHER: So where do parents and family environment come into the picture?

JACKSON: Yeah, some of the research I found pointed to the influence of kids growing up with married parents and how they tended to use social media less or have more rules around usage, you know, so things like not allowing your kid to take their phone in their bedroom at night or have it at the dinner table. In homes where there’s divorce—such as one of the families I profiled in the story—it’s hard for parents to be on the same page and provide that oversight. Coming out of the pandemic, I think a lot of parents just stopped limiting screen time, as they maybe previously had, or let their younger kids, you know, preteens get social media, because it was the only connection they had at the time to their friends.

EICHER: You know, I imagine a listener may be thinking of someone—a child, a grand-child, a friend—they suspect may have a smartphone addiction. Now Mary, what could a listener do to help?

JACKSON: Yeah, so obviously, if a child is exhibiting symptoms of a possible mental illness or disorder, trusted adults, parents, you know, grandparents may need to get others involved, such as a qualified medical professional. But I think young people really need the adults in their life, their parents, grandparents, you know, friends in the church, to talk about what they're experiencing and seeing around them and how it’s affecting them. They need their parents to set limits for their own good and prioritize in-person connection and activities. One pastor and father of five I spoke with was saying, you know, this is a huge opportunity for the church. Kids are yearning for real life connection. They’re searching for things on social media that can only be found in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and in a Bible believing community of believers. So helping kids process and helping them understand the potential dangers of social media, and understand how it might be affecting them–those are really important conversations to be having with young people.

EICHER: Mary Jackson is a Senior Writer for WORLD, and you can read her full piece at WNG.org. It’s a substantial piece, 3,000 words, she goes deep into it. We’ll include a link to Mary’s piece in today’s transcript.

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