What the studies on TikTok mental health advice actually found

A panel of psychologists, psychiatrists and academics went through the 100 most-viewed TikTok videos under the mental health tips tag. They judged 52 of them to contain unhelpful or potentially dangerous claims about managing trauma, anxiety and depression.

The Guardian reported it on 31 May 2025, and the headline that travelled was that over half of mental health advice on TikTok is wrong. If you have spent a year watching these videos, that can land two ways. You feel caught out, or you feel the whole thing is being waved away.

I want to read it more slowly than the headline did, because the studies say more about you at your phone than about TikTok. You have tried a breathing pattern, a supplement and a nervous system reset, and cannot tell whether any of it helped or the videos are just describing you. I spend the first stretch of the work on that question.

What the figure covers

Start with the 52. It is the most-viewed hundred and it stops there. How common misleading content is across all mental health videos on the platform is a separate question, and the study leaves it open. The reporting also leaves out how the panel defined misinformation and how it reached its judgements.

The problems the panel named are easy to recognise. Everyday emotions presented as serious mental illness. Trauma oversimplified, as if everyone experiences it the same way. Quick fixes with no evidence behind them, such as an orange eaten in the shower to reduce anxiety, or a herb said to heal trauma within an hour. Therapy language used loosely.

TikTok says it works with the WHO and the NHS and removes most harmful misinformation before it is reported. That is the company's own claim, and I have no way to check it from where I sit.

So the figure is thinner than the headline. It is a fair warning about what travels furthest, and a rough guide to the rest.

Some of the videos help some people. A breathing pattern can steady a bad moment, and a good share of what gets posted speaks of professional help with respect. A year spent looking for something that works is a sensible thing to have done.

The 52 in 100 shows you what travels furthest on the platform. How much of everything else is misleading is a separate question.

Why the relatable voice wins

The more useful finding comes from a different study. Researchers at the University of Birmingham, led by Professor Ruth Page, interviewed young people aged 16 to 25 in schools and colleges across England and held group discussions with them. The work was funded by the ESRC and published in Digital Health, and the press release came out on 24 August 2026.

They found that young people struggled to tell relatable from reliable. Many judged credibility by follower counts, comments or how a video looked, rather than by whether the speaker was professionally registered. Serious videos were often followed straight away by unrelated entertainment, which left little room to reflect. Many did not know about the built-in safety features.

These were young people. It is a qualitative study, and the press release gives no participant numbers, so I would not stretch it far. But it describes something I see in adults every week.

The same team looked at 27,000 TikTok videos and found that wellness influencers often recommended supplements for mental health problems, and that user-generated content was not always helpful to people seeking support. A recommendation from a voice that sounds like yours is still only a recommendation. It is no evidence about you.

Put the two studies side by side and they point the same way. People pick advice by relatability. A voice that sounds like yours, describing a feeling you have had, earns trust before a single claim has been checked.

A voice that sounds like yours carries more weight than a correct one, and the video gives you no way to tell which you are hearing.

What neither study settles is how common bad advice is across the whole platform, or whether following it does harm in adults. I would not claim either.

That is the gap the headline skips. The risk sits in the question nobody asks afterwards: did the tip do anything for this one person?

What I check first

When you come to see me, I take the tips seriously, in order. I ask what you tried first, how long you kept it up, what you noticed in the days after, and what happened on the days you missed it. I lay it out as a timeline.

Three things come up again and again. Most people started two or three things inside the same fortnight, so no single one can take the credit. A good many date the better weeks to the day they began a routine, when the weeks were already turning.

And the video that felt like it was describing them usually was. It named a feeling they had never heard said aloud. That recognition feels so much like relief that it is easily mistaken for treatment.

Often the thing that helped is the one people dismiss. Ten slow breaths in the car park before a shift gets waved off as too simple, while the supplement gets the credit.

Then I ask what fits this one person. Where the anxiety sits in your body, when it flares, when it first showed up in your life, and what it is doing for you. That last question surprises people.

Anxiety that has run for years is usually doing a job, like keeping you ready for the next thing to go wrong on a shift, and a routine written for everyone cannot know what the job is.

That is where the work begins. Behaviour pattern reprogramming starts by finding the pattern and where it started. Clinical hypnotherapy then changes it beneath conscious thinking, where the reflex lives, and the change is built into ordinary days: the shift, the drive home, the evening.

Where the root is a specific memory still firing in the present, I use EMDR, a method where you recall the memory while following my hand from side to side, so that it sits differently afterwards.

None of this asks you to throw away what you tried. By the end of that first stretch you have a plain account of what each thing did, and some of it stays, because it earns its place. The rest I set aside, and most people find that a relief.