Mental Health Awareness Campaigns on TikTok: A Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis of Digital Health Education

Abstract

Mental health awareness has increasingly expanded beyond traditional healthcare institutions into digital environments, particularly on social media platforms such as TikTok. As one of the most popular short-video applications among adolescents and young adults, TikTok has become an influential medium for disseminating mental health information, promoting awareness, and encouraging public engagement. This study investigated how mental health awareness campaigns on TikTok construct educational meaning through linguistic, visual, and multimodal discourse practices. This study employed a qualitative research design using Critical Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CMDA), integrating Critical Discourse Analysis, Multimodal Discourse Analysis, and the Health Belief Model. The dataset consisted of 35 TikTok videos, including 30 user-generated awareness videos and 5 sponsored mental health advertisements, selected through purposive sampling. Data were analyzed by examining the verbal content, visual representations, multimodal elements, and persuasive health communication strategies. Four dominant discourse themes emerged from the analysis: mental health as a personal struggle, self-care as a solution, peer-to-peer emotional support, and professional help-seeking awareness. Creators combined personal storytelling, visual symbolism, emotional framing, and interactive features to construct mental health awareness messages. Across the corpus, captions, imagery, music, facial expressions, and other semiotic resources worked alongside verbal language to frame mental health messages as accessible, emotionally resonant, and educationally oriented. The study concludes that TikTok functions as an emerging platform for digital health education, where users act as information consumers and informal educators. This analysis positions TikTok as a significant site for examining how mental health knowledge, experiential authority, peer solidarity, and professional guidance are discursively represented in English-language digital communications.