"TikTok ≠ Therapy": Queer Mental Health Practitioners of Color in Spaces of Digital Care

Seemingly overnight, mental health practitioners took to TikTok and began educating their audiences on mental health diagnoses and practices to alleviate their stress from the comfort of their home. Simultaneously, the country was reckoning with social issues like racist police violence, anti-trans legislation, and increased xenophobic rhetoric which exacerbated the unwellness of those most marginalized. Queer mental health practitioners of color (QMHPOC), who bring lived experience on the margins with the education and training as a therapist or social worker, similarly have migrated to TikTok to create spaces of digital care for these audiences. However, the journey to TikTok seemed to outpace the oversight of regulatory professional bodies and literature meant to ethically guide practitioners on social media. Furthermore, the guidelines which were created have yet to conceptualize social media as it currently stands; outdated understandings of social media as a facsimile of in-person spaces and an overemphasis on practitioners staying private have fails to capture the true benefits and challenges which emerge in digital spaces when mental health practitioners use these spaces publicly as a vehicle for care. Guided by a constructivist grounded theory methodology, this study explores the practices of QMHPOC who use TikTok as a space of digital care. Paper 1 categorizes the types of care practices which participants engage in and extends the conceptualization of TikTok as a space of digital care. Paper 2 attends to the social work field’s concern with practitioners using social media, namely, the publicness of social media and the possibility of boundary crossings and developing inappropriate dual relationships with clients. Paper 3 continues the exploration of ethics from the grounded perspectives of QMHPOC. This paper uses the concepts of tacit knowledge and practice wisdom to understand how QMHPOC make ethical decisions on TikTok despite the lack of explicit knowledge and training in using social media.