In fall of 2021, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and the Children’s Hospital Association joined in declaring a national emergency in child and adolescent mental health. Making things worse, it’s become increasingly difficult for people to get a hold of a counselor during a crisis.
Many factors have been blamed, from COVID-19 lockdowns to social media constantly projecting unrealistic expectations of perfect bodies and carefree lives. But for several years, a TikTok influencer named Madison Little has built up a platform of nearly one million followers and more than six million likes by addressing mental health issues head on. Her secret sauce: honesty.
Little, a Toronto-born Gen Z influencer with surfer girl looks and a soothing voice that oozes empathy, still remembers watching her father murder her mother one morning when she was just four years old. Her father went to prison for the murder, and Madison suddenly found herself an orphan. After being bounced around the homes of relatives and friends, Little found a community on social media, though not everyone understood its importance to her.
“My grandmother dealt with me the way that you would deal with kids in the 60s, but the generational gap was a huge barrier between us,” Little remembers. “She didn’t understand why I was on the ‘Tickety Tock’ all the time or on the ‘Snappy Chat.’ She didn’t understand what value my phone held.”
Little eventually became legally emancipated as a teenager, but only after three suicide attempts and ongoing battles with compulsive lying and depression. She had always been comfortable with human suffering, so she decided to study psychiatry, but dropped out of university after realizing it would take at least seven years to get a degree.
Having burned her bridges at home, and with no obvious path forward, Little decided to move to Los Angeles. “I knew nobody, I didn’t know how to do anything, I had no degree, and I didn’t know how to be an inspiration to this world,” she recalls. “But I thought, if there’s anywhere I’m gonna learn how to be an inspiration, it’s gonna be in LA.”
By the time she arrived in the City of Angels, Little had already amassed 100,000 TikTok followers on her platform. There was still no plan, however, yet even though she admits to having “no idea what I was doing,” her TikTok audience only kept growing. Eventually, Little realized that she could channel her own trauma to help others survive their own battles with mental illness, and her category of “Hey Babe” videos was born.
“Realizing that I now have a reach of almost 1 million people is still crazy to me,” Little says, as her phone lights up with comments from followers. “I sit down and I make these mental health videos where I go ‘Hey babe, turn your phone! Did you drink water today? Did you eat your breakfast? Did you have some coffee? Did you get outside? Did you do something for yourself today?’”
Little is reaching far more people than she would have as a psychiatrist, though she can’t do deep dives into any single person’s psyche or prescribe medications. “I’m not a substitute for a professional,” she says, quick to remind her viewers. Typically, Little will simply look directly into the camera and urge her followers do everyday things that have somehow become nearly impossible, like eat or exercise, due to the weight of depression or anxiety. At the end of each video, she tells her followers that she’s proud of them.
“I’ve come to realize over the past two years of doing this that so many people, including myself, struggle with simple tasks such as getting out of bed in the morning, making the bed, walking to school, or whatever else,” Little says. “And I am very familiar with grief, with rage, with emptiness, and almost any emotion on the spectrum of pain or despair, so I can relate to everything they’re feeling.”
Despite offering therapeutic advice to nearly a million people every day, Little still sees a psychiatrist herself. She is also a voracious reader, finding inspiration in the works of women from famed Harry Potter author J.K.Rowling to new age spiritualist Marianne Williamson. One lesson that Little has taken from her own virtual mentors is that people generally do not take the time to give more thought to something than what they see, even though it is the unseen that drives human behavior.
This makes her conquering of a visual, image-obsessed media like TikTok all the more unlikely. If you asked her how she managed to make all of this happen, she would be the first to tell you that she’s not quite sure. Little still does not have a plan, beyond reaching out to as many of her followers as possible. When asked what she is thinking when she stares into her phone’s camera to make another “Hey Babe” video, however, Little doesn’t hesitate: “I want to show you that, regardless of what you go through, you can come out the other side stronger and wiser.”
