Mental Health Discourse: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Tiktok Video Narratives

Abstract

This study examined the construction, contestation, and circulation of clinical authority in TikTok mental health discourse through Critical Discourse Analysis, drawing on verbatim transcripts of fourteen purposively selected videos produced by both clinical and non-clinical creators. The social problem motivating the study was the systematic appropriation of clinical language by non-credentialed speakers theorised here as epistemic borrowing which produced authoritative mental health discourse for mass audiences in the absence of institutional grounding, with measurable consequences for public health, epistemic justice, and the global governance of medical knowledge. Grounded in Fairclough’s (1992, 2001) three-dimensional CDA model and Foucault’s (1972, 1980) theorisation of discourse as a site of power/knowledge production, the study interrogated how language performed clinical authority at the textual level and how algorithmic amplification functioned as a new regime of mental health truth at the sociocultural level. Four dominant discursive patterns were identified: the deployment of DSM-adjacent symptom lists as a normalised platform genre stripped of clinical qualification; the systematic use of assertive copular declarations, second-person diagnostic address, and constitutive intertextuality to perform clinical authority without credential; the instrumentalisation of personal testimony, neuroscientific framing, and psychological name-dropping as substitute epistemic warrants; and the emergence of metalinguistic counter-discourse by clinical creators that named and challenged the algorithmic ideology sustaining lay diagnostic authority. Crucially, the finding that an identified clinical professional adopted the same symptom-list genre as non-credentialed creators proved that the problem was structural rather than individual, with direct implications for governance design. The study introduced two original concepts: epistemic borrowing and digital diagnostic imperialism and concluded that TikTok mental health discourse constituted a linguistic crisis that applied linguistics was uniquely positioned to address. Recommendations were directed at scholars, clinicians, platform designers, and policymakers; educators and media literacy practitioners; and vulnerable young people whose epistemic protection is the study’s most urgent social purpose.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Keywords: Critical Discourse Analysis, TikTok, mental health discourse, epistemic borrowing, medicalisation, lay expertise, Fairclough, Foucault, algorithmic ideology, counter-discourse, self-diagnosis

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/112-03

Publication date: October 30^th 2026