Navigating the TikTok Health Craze: A Survey Study on Consumers' Attitudes Towards Mental Health Influencers

This study explores how consumers perceive mental health influencers on TikTok. TikTok is a widely accessible social media platform utilized by many influencers to market lifestyle habits, including mental health advice/trends. Within this context, influencers strategically position themselves within distinct consumer markets, employing various tropes to shape user perceptions. Notably, the absence of stringent controls on TikTok raises concerns about the potential spread of misleading or harmful information, particularly concerning mental health, to young, impressionable audiences. Focused on the effects of mental health influencers, this research aims to unravel the reasons behind the popularity of mental health influencers (MHIs) on the social media platform. There is limited research into consumer attitudes and perceptions towards MHIs, and more specifically, attitudes consumers hold about influencer-produced content. The current study aims to fill this gap. Using a cross sectional survey study design, participants were selected through convenience and snowball sampling, and were asked to complete a general consumer attitudes questionnaire(n = 90, age M = 24.5, highly educated, frequent social media users). A frequency analysis of the consumer attitudes questionnaire revealed that a majority of consumers hold positive attitudes towards mental health influencers, and their contributions to the health sector, while simultaneously possessing high levels of skepticism about the validity and accuracy of influencer-related messages. Despite low credibility, consumers allow their individual health beliefs and behaviors to be shaped by online influencer health related content. This study contributed key insights into how mental health influencers should communicate about mental health conditions, as well as the degree to which this communication influences the consumers’ behavior. Future research should explore how these findings can inform mental health content guidelines on social media platforms in more depth. Keywords: mental health, online mental health help-seeking-behaviors, digital-help-seeking, online mental health, TikTok-Mental-Health, mental health influencers, social media