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Paper short abstract

This contribution examines how young people on TikTok narrate their lived experience of mental health, exploring how platform affordances shape visibility, peer support, and representation, and how users mobilise discursive, visual, and relational strategies to resist standardisation.

Paper long abstract

This contribution examines everyday practices of self-narration of mental health on TikTok by young people with lived experience of mental health, focusing on the role of digital platforms in the production of experiential knowledge, forms of care, and processes of subjectivation. Drawing on critical sociology of mental health and Mad knowledges, as well as queer and transfeminist studies, the contribution approaches mental health as a deliberately ambiguous category: not merely a set of clinical diagnoses, but also a pervasive social language, a normative technology, and a site of negotiation between subjective experience, market dynamics, and biomedicine. The analysis explores how mental health narratives circulating on social media generate peer support, visibility, and representation of lived experience, while also showing how platform affordances shape what becomes visible on TikTok. In particular, the privileging of recovery-oriented and relatable content fosters processes of standardisation, individualisation, and the algorithmic rearticulation of languages and practices rooted in Mad movements and disability rights struggles. The contribution also examines discursive, visual, and relational strategies through which users respond to these dynamics. Based on digital ethnography combining participant observation, content analysis, and semi-structured interviews, this contribution highlights the tension between the counter-hegemonic epistemic potential of self-narratives of mental health and dynamics of neoliberal normalisation embedded in platform logics.