According to a new study, over half of the most popular content about ADHD on TikTok is misleading.

After analysing the top 100 #ADHD videos on the platform, clinical psychologists found a high rate of generalisations and inaccurate claims, with many TikTok creators sharing personal experiences without clarifying that they don’t necessarily apply to everyone with ADHD and might be experienced by people without the condition. This may lead to viewers incorrectly diagnosing themselves or misidentifying symptoms, the study, which was published by journal PLOS One, concluded. 

As someone who has an ADHD diagnosis and knows a decent amount about the condition, it does not come as a surprise to me that a lot of what people say about it on the internet ranges somewhere between “vibes-based” and completely made-up. But blaming creators alone misses the bigger picture: ADHD misinformation is often a top-down phenomenon which is promoted by supposedly reputable sources. Much of what these creators are saying is downstream from real – if low-quality – research funded by pharmaceutical companies, which have a history of sponsoring educational materials and patient advocacy groups. 

To give one example: ‘rejection sensitivity dysphoria’ (which, as the name implies, refers to being particularly distressed at being rejected) is now commonly thought of as both an ADHD symptom and an innate neurological trait, despite the evidence for this being extraordinarily flimsy. While not disputing that the symptoms exist, writer Marta Rose has argued that the label pathologises reactions which are more likely the result of traumatic experiences. “What you are healing from is not some made-up disorder in your brain called “Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.” No, what you are healing from is rejection itself,” she writes. All across social media people are accepting the idea that RSD is an immutable part of their brain chemistry, which can only be treated through drugs, when this might be far from the most helpful way of understanding themselves and the problems they’re experiencing. 

One of my favourite dubious claims about ADHD is that people who have it are especially sensitive to injustice – obviously quite a flattering thing to believe about ourself There is some research which backs this up, but the findings aren't straightforward: according to one study, children with ADHD are more insensitive to injustice when they are the victim, but less insensitive to injustice when they are the perpetrator, which isn't quite so flattering! You never hear content creators talking about the second aspect - probably because they’ve never bothered to look into it - which complicates the notion that we are blessed (or perhaps cursed?) with rare empathy: it wouldn’t go down well if you said, based on a random study of German children, that people with ADHD are less able than others to acknowledge themselves as the perpetrators of injustice, even though this would be just as fact-based as the attendant claim. In either direction, we don’t have to believe that these studies say anything at all about who we are or how we live. I find it sad when people attribute the qualities they like about themselves to having ADHD, as though that grounds them in scientific truth and makes them irrefutable: wouldn’t it be better to just think of yourself as creative, empathetic, quirky, or whatever, without tracing that back to a neurological condition?

While I don’t blame TikTok creators for taking these ideas and running with them, it’s also true that social media creates particular incentives. Lots of ADHD creators are effectively making comedy skits: however good their intentions, the imperative to be funny, engaging and relatable surely takes precedence over the imperative to impart carefully sourced medical advice. ADHD isn’t actually that interesting: if you have to keep making videos about it (and if you earn money from doing so), it seems inevitable you’re going to end up reaching for wackier symptoms or casting irrelevant personal quirks as ADHD traits, even if this means drifting away from clinical guidelines or any kind of consensus opinion about what the condition actually is.

To what extent does this kind of misinformation matter, though? The authors of the study seem concerned that it is fuelling a crisis of overdiagnosis (it’s true that rates of diagnosis have increased in recent years), but I’m not sure you can blame TikTok for that – if someone believes they have ADHD based on online misinformation, it's for a doctor to decide whether or not they actually meet the criteria. And as Professor Philip Asherson, an expert quoted in The Standard, points out, most people consuming this content already have a formal diagnosis. While it can be annoying, “people with ADHD are loveable, zany goofballs” isn’t a particularly dangerous form of misinformation, and not every comedy skit has to be peer-reviewed. 

Still, people should have the right to trustworthy and unbiased information about their own health, particularly if what’s at stake is the decision to take stimulants every day for (maybe) the rest of your life. Whether it’s due to dodgy research or a growing trend towards pharmaceutical brands hiring “micro-influencers”, that kind of information is becoming harder to access on the internet, at the same time that support from Britain’s crumbling healthcare system is vanishing. As someone with supernaturally high levels of empathy and Heightened Injustice Sensitivity, this makes me rightfully upset.