I donβt think I fully realized just how many kids are being straight up emotionally neglected by their parents until I had tiktok (deleted it a while ago but still) like there is absolutely no way that a 12 year old who is getting the appropriate amount of attention at home is going to be on tiktok unsupervised for 10 hours a day talking about how they have 70 different very rare mental illnesses and 600 different genders. like I saw kids who claimed to have such severe dissociative identity disorder that they have over a thousand different anime characters living in their head
also I hope everyone eventually realizes how fucking gross and creepy it is that grown adults online are making these kids even more unwell by convincing them that their parents are transphobic and ableist for not affirming all of their different made up genders and their 10000 different self-diagnosed disorders. every adult who does this needs to be put on a watch list and im not kidding
this is a great point actually - it is 100% normal for kids that age to have phases where they just simply lie for fun. I had a friend in 7th grade who completely unironically tried to convince us that she was a vampire and had a werewolf boyfriend from texas who died by running into a tree, now we both just laugh about it but if she wouldβve posted all of that online and had a bunch of grown adults telling her βactually you are a vampire and anyone telling you youβre not is a nazi and wants to genocide youβ then that couldβve possibly derailed her entire life
And even without the outside validation this new version of lying is both much less interesting than claiming to be a vampire/werewolf/alien/witch/fairy, and a lot more concerning. Being a vampire is impossible and cool, having a mental illness is possible and it sucks. And online it can become contagious.
Teens have literally developed tics from tiktok (yes, really). Disproportionately girls and trans identified teens...
"The adolescents wereΒ overwhelminglyΒ girls, or were transgender or nonbinary β though no one knows why."
No one knows why teen girls would be particularly vulnerable to this, not like being a teen girl in a patriarchal, hypersexualized and pedophilic society is horrifically stressful! No one knows why teens who are susceptible to one form of social contagion would also be susceptible to another!
DID claims in particular seem like a loneliness thing, like a lot of kids don't have many irl friends so they've made up friends who live in their heads.
Plenty of these kids probably do have mental illnesses, just not all of the ones they're claiming, and if they don't to start with, being immersed in that culture will give them one.












