Battling Mental Health Misinformation: Meeting People Where They Are

A young woman is unusually slow as she walks down the street. When her companion accuses her of being lazy, she explains that she banged her foot and is in a lot of pain.

“Just keep walking,” he says. “It’s all in your head.”

This scenario — part of an Instagram reel illustrating life when you treat physical health the way we often treat mental health — was created by Deven Patel, MD.

“I’m interested in mental health and storytelling,” says Patel, a resident in psychiatry and human behavior at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. His 30-second video about the stigma of mental health has more than 228,000 likes.

Adrian Preda, MD, points to content creators such as Patel as part of the solution for what he views as a public health crisis. “We are seeing an explosion of misinformation in the mental health domain,” says Preda, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at UC Irvine. “Many of the people leading conversations around mental health are influencers with no background in psychiatry.”

Preda hopes to change that by encouraging medical and academic institutions to recognize and value the impact of social media content.

Misinformation as a Public Health Problem

As editor-in-chief of Psychiatric News, Preda first broached the topic in his May 2026 editorial, “Psychiatry in the Public Square,” calling for increased visibility, public engagement, proactive education and collaboration.

“[W]ithin psychiatry itself, many will argue that media engagement is peripheral to the real work of clinical care and research — a distraction rather than a responsibility,” he wrote. “I think that view is mistaken.”

To back his argument, Preda cites Australia’s Beyond Blue campaign, a media-engagement initiative that helped reduce stigma around depression and anxiety and encouraged people to seek treatment.

Yet Preda stresses that mental health misinformation is not a public relations problem.

“When stigma is amplified, or mass media communications about suicide lead to suicide epidemics,” he says, “it is much more helpful to conceptualize this as a public health problem than to say we just need to ‘represent things’ better.”

He adds that mental health is a field particularly susceptible to misinformation.

“If you go to your doctor and say, ‘I saw this TikTok video and I think I have diabetes,’ they can check your blood sugar and say, ‘no, you don't,’” he explains. “Without similar biomarkers, psychiatry becomes more vulnerable to misinformation compared to other medical specialties.”

Social media algorithms can further magnify the problem. “The algorithms know what people are interested in, and they keep feeding them more of the same content,” says Preda. “This creates a cascading effect.”

Incentivizing Public Engagement

In a follow-up article in The American Journal of Psychiatry, “Mental Health Misinformation as a Public Health Problem: The Case for Psychiatric Public Scholarship,” Preda offers a potential solution.

“To fix this, we need experts from the academic community to join the social media conversation, which requires reorganizing academic practice,” he says. “Right now, we are incentivized to publish in peer-reviewed journals.” Research publications lead to professional recognition and tenure.

“I would like to see a path for what I call ‘public scholarship,’” says Preda. “Currently, there is no credit for this type of public-facing work.”

In particular, Preda wants to encourage more public-facing content addressing suicide as well as misconceptions about violence due to mental illness.

“Thinking about this from a public health perspective, I think suicide is the number one issue we need to tackle,” he says. “Second is the misconception that people who have severe mental illness are very violent. There is no data to support this.”

Preda plans to work with the Department of Psychiatry & Human Behavior at UC Irvine to explore what a public scholarship track could look like.

“The first thing would be for groups such as the Committee for Academic Promotion to consider this type of work during an academic review,” he says. “I hope to persuade my colleagues that this has value, so we could then establish criteria for evaluating media content.”

Patel welcomes the suggestion.

“It can take a lot of time,” says Patel, who is fortunate to have a background in filmmaking. But he still says that pulling together a short video to explain a mental health condition can be overwhelming.

“You come up with the idea, write the script, record it, edit it, upload it to the platform, add the subtitles or music or caption, and then post it. And that’s just one video,” he says. “You don’t necessarily make any money from it; it’s just something we do because we’re passionate about it.”

And while Patel understands the tremendous value of publishing a research paper, he stresses that public scholarship can help expand its reach. “Even if a research paper is read by 1,000 people, a 60-second video with similar — though much less detailed — information might be seen by 100,000 people,” says Patel. He says the same logic applies from the clinical perspective.

“In addition to making an impact one patient at a time, with a bigger platform, you can improve healthcare literacy by lowering the barrier for access,” he says. “If doctors were given a designated space to create this content, as opposed to just those already passionate about creating media, it could be really valuable.”

— Shani Murray