Young people are turning to social media to try and figure out why they are feeling not OK, but the answers they are getting could be more harmful than helpful. A paper published in January in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry describes how prolonged social media use, especially on video-sharing platforms like TikTok, is exposing young people to a growing number of content creators making videos about their self-described tics, Tourette syndrome and other disorders. “An increasing number of reports from the US, UK, Germany, Canada and Australia have noted an increase in functional tic-like behaviours prior to and during the Covid-19 pandemic, coinciding with an increase in social media content related to Tourette syndrome and tics. Similar phenomenon has also been recently chronicled with respect to dissociative identity disorder," the paper says. Psychiatrist and the executive director of Orygen youth mental health service, Prof Pat McGory, says it is important to note that just because some of the teens are wrong about their self-diagnoses, it does not mean they aren’t suffering. “There has been a huge uptick in depression and anxiety worldwide following the pandemic, and that’s particularly pronounced in young people,” he says. “This self-diagnosing isn’t just some kind of epidemic of attention-seeking or mass hysteria. There is a surge in young people suffering from genuine serious conditions like eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorders and self-harming.” #mentalhealth #selfdiagnosis #dissociativeidentitydisorder #tic #bdp #youthmentalhealth