Social / psychiatric contagion
Researchers mean different things by contagion. This page refuses to treat a clinic wave in one condition as a theory of all rising identification.
What we know
Emotional contagion exists as an interpersonal process. Historical mass sociogenic illness exists. Specialist clinics documented atypical tic-like presentations associated in time with social-media models. Eating-disorder and self-harm online spaces have dual-effect literatures.
How we know it
Experimental affect research; historical MSI reviews; FTLB clinical series and content analyses; systematic reviews for eating and self-harm.
What else could explain it
Pandemic stress, referral change, destigmatization, and selection into content.
What we don't know yet
Whether social media can produce functional symptoms, or only shape their form, and whether any such process generalizes.
Youth anxiety symptoms rose in many COVID-era samples. Social-media associations are small and mixed at population level.
Do not treat anxiety-content exposure as equivalent to tic modelling or eating-disorder thin-ideal exposure.
Among the best-studied outcomes for time-use research, and still causally unsettled. Reverse causation is a live hypothesis.
Depression time-use findings do not adjudicate DID or FTLB debates.
Content-quality evidence is stronger than viewer-effect evidence. Rising diagnosis has many candidate causes.
Misleading videos ≠ false self-diagnoses ≠ overdiagnosis in clinics. Each needs its own test.
Prevalence of identification has risen for many reasons, including criteria, awareness, and services. Social-media causation is not established.
Do not import FTLB logic into autism. Under-recognition is a documented historical fact.
One of the clearer content-specific risk literatures, alongside documented support/recovery spaces.
Stronger evidence here does not license the same claims about ADHD or DID.
Best current clinical case for socially patterned functional symptoms in the social-media era—still associational.
This is not a template that can be pasted onto every rising diagnosis.
Among the most important dual-effect cases. Ethical constraints limit experiments.
Self-harm contagion findings are not evidence about autism self-identification.
Etiology was contested long before TikTok. Online identification is a new empirical question, not a settlement of the old debate.
Neither traumagenic nor sociocognitive camps should be used as a shortcut around new data.
Functional tic-like behaviours and DID each have dedicated case studies because they are where public conversation is loudest and where collapsing categories does the most damage. SeeFTLB and DID.