Abstract

The aim of this study is to explore how social media platforms, particularly TikTok, can be utilised as innovative technology-mediated spaces to create and spread specialised knowledge related to mental health and well-being. More specifically, this research seeks to address the intersection between medical discourse and digital participatory spaces (KhosraviNik 2017) byinvestigating the potential of social media in shaping and disseminating information about mental health. The study is based on the assumption that the technological affordances of the social media TikTok allow mental health experts, acting as specialised content producers, to perform multimodal discourses with distinctive linguistic and visual features connected to and stemming from the specific digital and participatory context of social media platforms. Hence, through a corpus of TikTok videos selected by using the hashtag #mentalhealth, the present research explores how healthcare communication is performed by experts, with a specific focus on the analysis of multimodal discourses of health professionals (Tessuto 2015a), namely psychologists and psychotherapists, who promote awareness on mental health while challenging conventional representations of mental illness, raising awareness and reducing stigma.