TikTok partnered with the World Health Organisation (WHO) to promote mental health education through a year-long collaboration. The initiative will focus on providing reliable mental wellbeing content and combating misinformation with the help of WHO's Fides Network, a community of healthcare professionals who are also TikTok creators.
This network includes creators from the UK, US, France, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Mexico, and Brazil, who will produce evidence-based content on mental health and related issues. As part of the collaboration, TikTok has donated approximately £2 million to support WHO’s global efforts to destigmatise mental health and create an informed online community.
Dr. Kirren Schnack, a healthcare professional with over 20 years of experience and a Practitioner Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oxford, is among the creators participating in the initiative. Dr. Schnack, who shares mental health content on TikTok with her 588,000 followers, covers topics such as anxiety and loneliness.
Expressing her excitement about the project, Dr. Schnack told, “I’m so excited and pleased to be part of this project. I think for TikTok and WHO to be able to bring such a large number of healthcare professional creators together to make mental health content is so empowering.”
She added, “It really excites me, because I feel like it demonstrates such a huge potential for TikTok, as a social media app, to be a real force for positive change in public health, mental health across the world. In lots of corners of the world, people don’t have access to help or can’t get help and sometimes it is apps like TikTok where they get that information from, so it’s really exciting to be part of something like this.”
The partnership will feature various campaigns on mental health topics such as loneliness, depression, and suicide. Dr. Schnack also highlighted the dual role of social media in mental health, noting, “I do think that (social media) does benefit people. I think sometimes it is a mental health problem in itself if you are not able to regulate your use or you’re misusing. I think if the use of the app becomes a problem, or people are using it too much and it’s affecting that mental health, I see that as a mental health problem in itself that we could address by using the platform as well.”
Dr. Schnack is also recognised as an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society (AFBPsS), a title that acknowledges her significant contributions to Clinical Psychology.
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