Antidepressants are trendy. That’s a double-edged sword | Tayo Bero

It's great the taboo is fading. But as TikTok influencers tout them, it's a slippery slope to the memeification of disorders

Antidepressants are all the rage now, so much so that influencers are promoting them on TikTok, where mostly millennial and gen Z women have built micro-communities around hashtags like #lexaprotok, #zoloftgang and #livelaughlexapro.

According to data analyzed by the Wall Street Journal, content related to antidepressants has recently exploded. The hashtag #antidepressants has surpassed 1.3bn views, according to the data, and searches for #lexapro have more than tripled since 2022. The data also showed that user shares per video tagged #ssri nearly quadrupled from 2022 to 2025.

Tayo Bero is a Guardian US columnist