Title
Breaking the Silence in the Digital Village: A Digital Ethnography of Tamil Community Mental Health Discourse on TikTok
Background
South Asian diasporic communities face intersecting barriers to mental health care — structural, cultural, and communicative. @thadamofficial represents a vernacular form of community-based digital advocacy that operates outside formal health systems, reaching Tamil audiences through culturally resonant short-form video.
Objective
To apply a novel SOTA causal knowledge graph pipeline (PCMCI, graph diffusion, narrative role annotation) to 390 TikTok videos from @thadamofficial (December 2022 – September 2026), characterizing the temporal causal architecture of Tamil community mental health discourse.
Methods
Digital ethnography + computational analysis. TF-IDF + TextRank hybrid keyword extraction; 8-type directed knowledge graph (390 nodes, 2,847 edges); 21-channel temporal matrix (45 months); ADF stationarity pre-testing; Granger causality (90 pairs); 500-permutation null-model validation; PCMCI (Tigramite, ParCorr, τmax=2, FDR correction); graph diffusion (VideoDetective-style, 3 steps); Louvain community detection; Burt structural hole analysis; narrative role annotation.
Results
8 statistically significant causal links (q < 0.05, FDR). Headline finding: Self-Harm & Suicide causally suppresses Stigma two months later (MCI = −0.58, q = 0.0002, τ = 2) — the first computational confirmation of the "trust-then-challenge" arc in Tamil community mental health advocacy. Gender & Sexuality emerged as the structural hub (PageRank = 0.17, betweenness = 0.11). The niederschwelliges (low-threshold) pathway was computationally confirmed: Self-Harm → Help-Seeking (MCI = +0.33, τ = 1).
Conclusions
Tamil community digital mental health advocacy follows a structured causal architecture — not spontaneous, but strategically sequenced. The stigma-suppression effect of crisis content has direct implications for content strategy in community-based mental health communication. This work establishes a replicable SOTA pipeline for digital ethnographic causal analysis of community mental health discourse.
Keywords
Tamil diaspora · digital mental health · TikTok · causal inference · PCMCI · knowledge graph · digital ethnography · stigma · community advocacy