Mental health recovery on TikTok
Type of research (qualitative empirical and/or quantitative empirical):
Description:
Mental health recovery is increasingly understood through both clinical and personal lenses. Clinical recovery typically focuses on symptom reduction and functional improvement, whereas personal recovery emphasizes connectedness, hope, identity, meaning, and empowerment, as outlined in the CHIME framework. However, much of the existing knowledge about these recovery models is derived from clinical research, which may lack ecological validity and fail to capture how recovery is experienced outside of clinical settings.
Social media platforms like TikTok have become influential spaces where individuals share their lived experiences with mental health, including recovery. Despite the growing presence of such content, little is known about how clinical and personal recovery models are reflected in these narratives. This thesis aims to explore and compare representations of clinical and personal recovery in TikTok videos across different mental health conditions. By doing so, it seeks to provide insights into how individuals construct and communicate recovery outside formal care settings, potentially offering a more ecologically valid perspective on recovery experiences.
In this thesis, you will conduct a content analysis of TikTok videos related to mental health recovery. Drawing on the CHIME framework for personal recovery and established indicators of clinical recovery, you will develop a coding scheme to systematically analyze how recovery is represented in the videos. Potential research questions may include: (1) How are recovery dimensions represented across different mental health conditions? (2) To what extent is the CHIME framework reflected in TikTok recovery narratives? (3) Are there quantitative patterns (e.g., engagement metrics) associated with videos that contain clinical and/or personal recovery elements?