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The Crisis Viktor Frankl Predicted in the 1940s Has Arrived…on TikTok
People are faking serious mental illnesses on TikTok but it’s just a symptom of a condition we all suffer from — a lack of meaning.
There’s a disease spreading on TikTok. No, it’s not the Cinnamon Challenge, filming your workouts, or doing the WAP dance in grocery stores. It’s much more serious than that.
It’s the phenomenon of young people self-diagnosing with severe mental illnesses like Tourette’s Syndrome, Schizophrenia, and Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).
These conditions are exceedingly rare — Tourette’s affects about .3% of the population, Schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders affect between .25% and .64%, and DID affects about .5% and 1.5% of the population.
However, those numbers only account for diagnosed cases of these disorders, and conceivably many more people remain undiagnosed. Mental Health care is notoriously difficult to access in the U.S., often reserved for people with good-paying jobs with stellar health insurance, likely pricing out the very kinds of people who are more susceptible to these same disorders. But they seem to be everywhere on TikTok, leading some to suggest that there are a lot of fakers in the mix.
