Academic Papers
Influencer Stories has helped lead the academic conversation on the effects social media mental health content on young people. While our data is not openly available, all of our papers and methodological guidelines are fully open access, and you can find them all listed on this page.
Paper 1: Multimodal Analysis of Stories Told by Mental Health Influencers on TikTok
Our first academic article, published in Health Expectations, explores the storytelling practices of three types of mental health influencers. It concludes that the gap between information and support provided on TikTok may lead to partial and imbalanced development of mental health literacy by adolescent users, and that content provided by certain influencer types mimics authoritative and authentic communication while promoting non-medical solutions to mental health that are unsupported by evidence.
📄 Multimodal Analysis of Stories Told by Mental Health Influencers on TikTok
The multimodal analytical framework used for analysis in Paper 1 is freely available on the Open Research Framework:
🔧 Multimodal Analysis Framework (OSF)
Paper 2: Mental Health Advice on TikTok
Our second academic article, published in Journal of Pragmatics, is the first large‑scale study of mental health advice by health professionals and wellness influencers on TikTok. We provide a systematic approach to identifying and analysing mental health advice giving on social media. Using this approach, we show that health professionals rely on diagnostic information and therapeutic advice, while wellness influencers recommend embodied practices and products to treat mental health issues.