By Tatum Hunter, Photo: Hao Nguyen/The Washington Post, The Washington Post, August 29, 2022
Issey Moloney signed up for therapy through Britain’s National Health Service when she was just 12 years old. She was on a waiting list for four years.
In the meantime, social media helped her feel less alone, says the now 17-year-old who lives in London. She connected with people online as the pandemic isolated her from real-life friends. Eventually, she started making her own content. Now, she has 5.9 million TikTok followers — about 85 percent of them young women between the ages of 14 and 18 — and a collection of videos about friends, relationships and mental health.
Some of her clips are general, such as a short ode to the relationship between mentally ill people and pasta, while others address real diagnoses, such as “signs you might have BPD,” or borderline personality disorder. Sometimes, people ask her to address particular conditions.She tries to research for at least a week, checking websites and message boards and interviewing by direct message people who have the particular diagnosis. She adds disclaimers: “Everyone deals with [panic attacks] differently and not all of them feel the same.”
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