SynthesisFrontiers in digital health2026
Telepsychology and digital mental health communication: an exploratory mixed-methods study of tikTok content.
Synthesis in Frontiers in digital health, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Background: Telepsychology consolidated as a mainstream mental health care modality following the COVID-19 pandemic, supported by evidence of clinical efficacy comparable to in-person therapy and a recognized potential to democratize access to care. Against this evolving clinical landscape, social media platforms have simultaneously emerged as major environments for the public circulation of psychological knowledge. Objective: To explore the relationship between scientific evidence on telepsychology and its discursive representation in highly viewed Spanish-language TikTok content, and to identify implications for digital mental health literacy and professional communication practices. Methods: An exploratory mixed-methods design with qualitative emphasis integrated a scoping review (PRISMA-ScR) across Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed (2020-2025; Results: The scientific literature consistently supported the clinical viability and democratizing potential of telepsychology. Within the TikTok corpus, 64% of content featured simplified definitions or subjectivist experiential narratives with minimal reference to ethical or regulatory frameworks. Corpus-descriptive indicators revealed a substantial gap between scientific representation and digital circulation (TGI = 0.80), limited presence of clinical foundations in digital discourse (DTLI = 0.36), and a predominance of simplified over technically grounded content (SCI = 1.78). Conclusions: Within the analyzed corpus, telepsychology undergoes a process of digital discursive reinterpretation in which communicative accessibility and immediate subjective experience displace clinical precision as central evaluative criteria. These findings underscore the need to strengthen digital mental health literacy and professionals' evidence-based communication skills online. Given the exploratory design, findings are specific to a non-probabilistic Spanish-language TikTok corpus and are not generalizable prevalence estimates. Future research should extend this agenda through larger multilingual samples, additional platforms, computational social science approaches, and longitudinal designs examining how digital representations of telepsychology shape users' expectations and engagement with digital mental health care.
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