In The Weekend section, my colleague Margaux took a deep dive into the reality that bipolar creators on TikTok face. During manic episodes, those creators sometimes struggle with common symptoms of bipolar disorder, like an excess of energy and lack of judgment. That puts them in a vulnerable position as they post and talk to the public online.
The challenge is that those same symptoms can sometimes help a creator produce a lot more content, which helps them drive views and followers. In other words, the algorithm rewards these harmful episodes. In an interview last month, Dom Esposito, a YouTube video creator who has more than 443,000 subscribers on the video app, told me he was diagnosed as bipolar many years into his 11-year-long career as a YouTuber.
