Mental Health Is One of Social Media’s Biggest Content Categories. So Why Are Behavioral Health Employers Invisible?
The hashtag #mentalhealth on TikTok had accumulated 25.3 billion views as of January 2022 . That figure is now considerably higher. Across Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, mental health content generates billions of impressions monthly, drives some of the highest organic engagement rates of any topic category, and has produced a generation of therapist-creators with followings that dwarf most healthcare brand accounts. Here is the part that should give social media strategists pause: the professionals producing and consuming this content are the same ones behavioral health organizations are struggling to recruit. And those organizations, by and large, have no meaningful presence on the platforms where this audience lives. This is not a staffing problem. It is a marketing problem. And it is costing the sector at a scale most HR departments have not begun to calculate. This article surveys the situation, looks at the problem, and outlines what is to be gained when so...