Kate Speer, a mental health advocate and TikTok creator, with her service dog, Waffle, works with Harvard University social scientists to inject evidence-based content into TikTok feeds.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
By Ellen Barry, The New York Times, October 16, 2023
One day in February, an invitation from Harvard University arrived in the inbox of Rachel Havekost, a TikTok mental health influencer and part-time bartender in Seattle who likes to joke that her main qualification is 19 years of therapy.
The same email arrived for Trey Tucker, a.k.a. @ruggedcounseling, a therapist from Chattanooga, Tenn., who discusses attachment styles on his TikTok account, sometimes while loading bales of hay onto the bed of a pickup truck.
The invitations also made their way to Bryce Spencer-Jones, who talks his viewers through breakups while gazing tenderly into the camera, and to Kate Speer, who narrates her bouts of depression with wry humor, confiding that she has not brushed her teeth for days.
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