Harvard seeks mental health influencers on TikTok – 10/18/2023 – Equilíbrio

In February, an invitation from Harvard University arrived in the inbox of Rachel Havekost, a TikTok mental health influencer and bartender from Seattle who likes to joke that her main qualification is having done 19 years of therapy.

The same email arrived to Trey Tucker, aka @ruggedcounseling, a therapist in Chattanooga, Tennessee, who discusses types of attachment on his TikTok account, sometimes while loading bales of hay into the bed of a pickup truck.

Invitations also arrived for Bryce Spencer-Jones, who guides his viewers about breakups while looking tenderly into the camera, and for Kate Speer, who narrates her episodes of depression with ironic humor, confiding that she hasn’t brushed her teeth in days.

Twenty-five recipients took a look at the emails, which invited them to collaborate with social scientists at the TH Chan School of Public Health at Harvard. They were not used to being treated with respect by the academy; several concluded that the letters were pranks or phishing attempts and deleted them.

They didn’t know—how could they know? — that a team of researchers had been watching them for weeks, whittling down an army of mental health influencers into a few dozen heavyweights chosen for their reach and quality.

The United States Minister of Health describes the mental health of young people in the country as “the decisive public health crisis of our time”. For this vulnerable and difficult-to-reach population, social networks serve as a primary source of information. And so, for a few months this spring, influencers became part of a field experiment, in which social scientists tried to inject evidence-based content into their networks.

“People are looking for information, and the things they’re watching are TikTok, Instagram and YouTube,” says Amanda Yarnell, senior director of the Chan School’s Center for Health Communication. “Who are the ‘media gatekeepers’ in these areas? It’s these creators. So we were looking at: How do we fit into this new reality?”

The answer to that question became clear in August, when a van with a dozen influencers pulled up next to the Harvard Medical School campus.

Each of the visitors looked like their audience: tattooed, wearing baseball caps, cowboy boots or large earrings that spelled out the word LOVE. Some were psychologists or psychiatrists whose TikToks were a side job. Others have built franchises by speaking openly about their own experiences with mental illness, describing eating disorders, selective mutism and suicide attempts.

In the velvety medical school dormitory, they looked like tourists or day visitors. But together, across multiple platforms, they commanded an audience of 10 million users.

Samantha Chung, 30, who posts under the name @simplifying.sam, has never been able to explain her work to her mother.

She is not a mental health clinic — until recently, she worked as a real estate agent. But two years ago, a video she made on TikTok about “manifestation,” or using your mind to bring about desired changes, attracted so much attention that she realized she could charge money for one-on-one coaching sessions and quit her day job.

At first, Chung booked one-hour consultations for US$90 (about R$453), but demand remained so high that she now offers counseling in three- and six-month “packages.” She sees no need to attend graduate school or obtain a license; Her approach, as she says, “helps clients feel empowered rather than diagnosed.” She has a podcast, a book project, and 813,000 followers on TikTok.

However, this achievement meant little to her parents, immigrants from Korea who expected her to become a doctor. “I really considered myself someone who makes videos in her apartment,” Chung said.

At Harvard, influencers were treated like dignitaries, receiving university-branded merchandise and buffet lunches while listening to lectures on air quality and health communications.

“I spent my 20s in a psychiatric ward trying to graduate from college,” said Speer, 36. “To walk into these rooms at Harvard and be welcomed with love — honestly, it’s nothing short of miraculous.”

Chung was so inspired that she told the gathered crowd that she would now post as an activist. “I’m leaving here knowing the truth, that I am a leader in public health,” she said. When Meng Meng Xu, one of the researchers on the Harvard team, heard this, she got goosebumps. It was exactly what she expected.

This isn’t the first time Harvard public health experts have tried to piggyback on popular culture. In 1988, as part of a campaign to prevent traffic accidents, researchers asked the writers of prime-time television shows such as “Cheers” and “LA Law” to include references to “designated drivers,” a concept that, at the time, it was completely new to Americans. This effort was successful: by 1991, the phrase was so common that it appeared in Webster’s dictionary.

Inspired by this effort, Yarnell designed an experiment to determine whether influencers could be persuaded to disseminate more evidence-based information. First, her team developed a group of 105 influencers who were prominent and responsible: no diet pill endorsements, no “five signs you have ADHD.”

Influencers would not be paid, but ideally they would be won over to the cause. Forty-two of them agreed to be part of the study and received digital toolkits organized into five “key themes”: difficulty accessing healthcare, intergenerational trauma, mind-body connections, the effect of racism on mental health and climate anxiety .

A smaller group of 25 influencers also received lavish personal attention. They were invited to hour-long virtual forums, joined in a group Slack channel, and ultimately hosted at Harvard. But the main themes were what the researchers were observing. They would keep an eye on influencers’ posts and measure how much of Harvard’s material had been published online.

A month after the meeting, Havekost once again felt exhausted. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about her duty as a public health leader — on the contrary, she said, “every time I post something now, I think about Harvard.”

But she didn’t see a simple way to integrate public health messages into her videos, which often feature her dancing uninhibited or looking at the viewer with an expression of unconditional love as the text plays. Her audience knows her communication style, she says; study citations wouldn’t seem any more authentic than a breast augmentation.

It was different for Speer. After returning from Harvard, she received an email from Bryn Austin, a professor of social and behavioral sciences and an expert on eating disorders, proposing that they collaborate on a campaign to ban the sale of weight-loss pills to minors in the state of New York.

Speer was overjoyed. She began working on creating a promotional video and a funding proposal. As summer turned to autumn, her life seemed to take a turn. “That’s what I want to do,” she says. “I want to do this for good instead of, you know, lip gloss.”

Last week, in a conference room overlooking the Hudson River, Yarnell and one of his co-authors, Matt Motta of Boston University, presented the results of the experiment.

It worked, they announced. The 42 influencers who received Harvard’s talking points were 3% more likely to post content about the key topics the researchers gave them. While this may seem like a small effect, Motta said, each influencer had such a large audience that the additional content was viewed 800,000 times.

These successes bear little resemblance to peer-reviewed studies. They look like @drkojosarfo, a psychiatric nurse with 2.4 million followers, dancing in a kitchen alongside a text about the mind-body connection, or user @latinxtherapy criticizing insurance companies while lip syncing to influencer Shawty Bae .

But who drives whom?

Jaime Mahler, an influencer who is a licensed counselor from New York, prides herself on simplifying complex clinical ideas into easy-to-understand videos. Mahler, who was promoting a new book about toxic relationships, sounds a little sad when talking about his gym partners. “Harvard has this abundant knowledge base,” she says, “if they could just find a way to connect with the people who are consuming.”

She learned a lot about scientists. In some cases, Mahler said, they spend ten years on a research project, publish a paper “and maybe it gets publicized, but sometimes it never reaches the general public in a way that really changes the conversation.”

“My heart kind of breaks for these people,” she says.

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