A pediatric clinician is sounding the alarm about the harms posed by TikTok to children.
Anthony Luczak, an advanced practice registered nurse in pediatric primary care and a developmental–behavioral specialist, said that based on his observations, the Chinese-owned social media app feeds young people’s addictions and fosters anxiety, depression, and harmful behaviors.
He said he’s aware that the United States views the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as “a foreign adversary intent on overtaking the U.S. as the global superpower.” After observing the relationship between children’s diverse mental health conditions and the content that was directly involved in harming many of his young patients, he has concluded that “TikTok behaves exactly like a psychological warfare tool intent on undermining the immediate and long-term psychological health of an enemy population.”
While there are valid security concerns regarding the CCP using the app to collect data, Luczak said, his concerns focus on the clinical impact of the social media app.
“Harmful content trends are nothing new to social media,” he told The Epoch Times. “But TikTok is different in that it seems to adapt its harmful content to each user. TikTok is actively trying to make each person using it into a worse version of themselves, and this is incredibly dangerous for children.
“TikTok seems to know which kids trend towards depression, anxiety, defiance, drug use, violence, criminal activities, or porn—and exploits those tendencies.”
Younger patients are more prone to harmful challenges than older, more mature patients, for example.
“I have noticed a lot of school expulsions and suspensions linked to TikTok,” Luczak said, explaining that the school expulsions are often associated with “dares” to destroy school property, hurt other students or teachers, or perform other threatening activities in school.
He recently met with a younger patient who attempted to drink gasoline after watching a TikTok video.
“Thank God he was stopped by his attentive parent,” Luczak said.
And it isn’t solely affecting children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder or conduct disorder tendencies, he said.
“TikTok worsens anxiety in patients who already have tendencies toward anxiety by increasing maladaptive content feeds targeting anxiety,“ Luczak said. ”The same is happening with kids suffering from depression.
“I have seen teens convinced by TikTok not to take their medications, with devastating results.”
He has personally observed its contribution to “psych admissions, arrests, school expulsions, and suspensions.”
“TikTok has worsened and, in some cases, developed mental health issues in children in my clinical practice,” he said.
‘TikTok Brain’
Luczak attributes TikTok’s success to its “hyper-addictive interface that is always monitoring the users’ interests.”“TikTok learns about you and seeks to keep you hooked,” he said. “The mechanism appears to seize the dopamine centers of our brains.
“In a healthy brain, dopamine is released immediately before positive experiences like social interactions, learning something, listening to stories, eating good foods, or pleasurable experiences.”
Luczak noted that “the hyper-release of dopamine associated with young children watching TikTok is creating a condition that some involved with child mental health call ‘TikTok brain.’”
He has witnessed this in patients as young as 5 years old.
“The use of TikTok appears to undermine or destroy the individual’s ability to focus attention for extended periods of time,” Luczak said.
Most of his patients that are older than the age of 12 agree that TikTok is “trying to make them a worse person.”
“Even if the teen is addicted and convinced that they are strong enough to resist the temptations, the teen doesn’t argue with my fundamental point that the app is actively trying to figure out how to present them with content that targets each user individually and make that person worse in some way,” he said.
There’s only one way to defeat the addictiveness of TikTok and that’s to completely stop using it, according to Luczak.
“You are likely to see extinction behaviors when you interrupt an electronic addiction in children—or adults,” he said.
Extinction behavior refers to the reduction and elimination of behavior that was previously learned by association.
As a clinician, Luczak “strongly encourages all parents to delete TikTok and any app that involves a similar format from their kids’ phones and tablets, as well as their own phones.” He noted that it’s also important to monitor a child’s device to make sure that it hasn’t been reinstalled.
“Clinically, I have seen that these extinction behaviors in kids usually will calm down after a few weeks, as their brain begins to reset to function without the apps,” he said.
In Luczak’s clinic, children who are unable to break an addiction to electronics in a gradual manner often have to detox from all electronics for up to six weeks.
His advice to patients and others is that “human beings are made to do real things, with real people, in the real world, [so] put down the electronics and focus on real activities that engage the world directly, and preferably do those activities with real people.”
Luczak considers it imperative to protect all ages from the dangers of TikTok.
“Communicate your concerns with your senators and congressmen,” he said. “Warn your friends, and teach your kids to say, ‘I don’t do TikTok.’”
TikTok didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.
