The Influencer Stories of Mental Health and Young People project is a collaboration between researchers at the University of Birmingham, Aston University and the University of Nottingham, funded by the ESRC.
The project explores how stories told by social media influencers (‘influencers’) can help young people or put them at risk as they gain awareness of, and respond to, challenges in mental health.
Young people’s needs are at the heart of the project. We are working with our partners at The McPin Foundation and a Young People’s Advisory Group of 12 young people, aged 16-25 who have lived experience of mental health issues. Our Young People’s Advisory Group recommended the types of influencers and the social media sites we should focus on.
Based on their recommendations we developed a dataset of 23,700 videos from 66 influencers, using the TikTok researcher API. These influencers are drawn from three categories: Experts (health professionals with recognised credentials), Wellness figures (who focus on holistic or non-medical approaches to mental health and wellbeing) and Lived Experience experts.
We are exploring this data using corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis to identify how the stories these different influencers use convey information, offer help and reduce stigma associated with mental health.
For more information about the research, please contact Dr Ruth Page (r.e.page@bham.ac.uk).