March 20, 2025 - 4:10pm
In 2017, Simon Wessely, the former president of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, said: “Every time we have a mental health awareness week my spirits sink. We don’t need people to be more aware: we can’t deal with the ones who are already aware.”
The same is true for ADHD awareness, and the situation has only deteriorated since then. In 2023, Dr Tony Lloyd, the chief executive of the ADHD Foundation, said there had been a 400% increase in the number of adults seeking a diagnosis since 2020, while in the US one in seven boys under 17 have now been diagnosed with the condition. In the UK, the average waiting time for an ADHD referral is three years.
Social media has a lot to answer for here. A new study has analysed the 100 most popular ADHD videos on TikTok (where #ADHD has over 4 million videos and over 11 billion views), and found that fewer than half the claims about symptoms accurately reflected clinical guidelines. The study also found that young adults who spent lots of time watching this content were more likely to have self-diagnosed the condition and overestimate the prevalence of its symptoms.
This is hardly surprising. Content creators, cosplaying as medical experts, constantly pathologise normal behaviours such as “having a messy bedroom” or “struggling to concentrate”. They use anecdotes and experience to reframe ADHD as a quirky personality trait — or, to use the new buzzword, “superpower” — rather than a life-limiting disability. They encourage users to seek out a diagnosis because doing so supposedly “transformed” their own lives. As ADHD is not a clear-cut binary, but instead a spectrum of impairment, it’s incredibly easy to spot similar behaviours in yourself, particularly in an overstimulating world where everyone is distracted by push notifications and digital dopamine hits.
This phenomenon of suggestibility is nothing new, but this desire for a diagnosis is. For decades, parents resisted labels for fear of stigmatising their child; now, they actively seek them.
Teenagers are also particularly vulnerable to these messages because adolescence is a phase of self-discovery and identity-development, and they want validation and reassurance as well as independence. It’s the impossible lure of the promise of a “quick fix”, an explanation for perceived shortcomings, a measure of grace for falling sort of social, school or personal expectations.
Diagnoses can be helpful, yet they can also very quickly engulf our whole sense of self. A social media soundbite lacks the nuance to show young people that having a label can help them navigate their sense of the world, but this safe and comfortable framework can also justify behaviours and take away a desire for change or accountability. It’s incredibly complicated, as all human behaviour is, and cannot be summarised in a 30-second “explainer”.
ADHD is a very real condition: as a teacher I have seen first-hand how difficult it can be for some students to manage their symptoms without targeted support and medication. Yet the sudden explosion of diagnoses, driven by social media, risks undermining the seriousness of the disorder and the likelihood that those who really need help receive it.
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SubscribePerhaps someone somewhere deep in the bureaucracy has secretly seen sense.
Sadly not helpful fopr genuine suffers who don’t get the vital support needed due to ‘Middle class mums’ trying to gain the system.
I think CCP limits Chinese kids to 1hr of TikTok per day. If true that’s telling us something – they are quite happy for it to mess up western kids but not their own.
And who delayed the TikTok ban in the US?
So the POTUS stops aid to starving kids elsewhere but quite happy to enable the on-going mental health assault on US kids. One has no opportunity for a Grift but the other quite possibly does so he holds out for an angle.
We also have middle class mums trying to get their kids an ADHD diagnosis so they have extra time in exams.
ditto neurodivergent.
ADHD is a form of neurodivergence.
Hmm. Shouldn’t we blame the doctors making the actual ADHD diagnoses? The most recent Unherd podcast makes an interesting argument about the over-diagnoses of a variety of ailments. Good listen.
The Machiavellian use of what seems like a stigmatizing label is not new.
I have meaningful dysgraphia, which was diagnosed in the mid-1980s when I was in middle school. I used the diagnosis, like a weapon to get out of foreign language requirements and even a math class (I did not like the teacher) not just for some legitimately warranted flexibility around my abominable handwriting…
Still, the academic system must better recognize and refrain from hindering students endowed with mixed extreme strengths and extreme weaknesses. That is allow students to maximize their strengths and not be brought low by their significant weaknesses… Should I have been held back from AP Computer Science because I had to type my English essays for them to be ledgable (without that diagnosis, I would have been)…
I’m sure there’s a lot of over diagnosis going on, but I certainly have difficulty concentrating these days … more than I used to, I think.
Is this just what it’s like to get older, or is something addling our brains.
Even without social media, there’s so much about our modern environment that’s unnatural. Chemicals, EMF, blue light, artificial noises.
Your dog’s not vegan, your son’s not trans and you don’t have ADHD. You’re just fat and bored.
PS/ and could stand a beating
I don’t wish to downplay any illness but I suspect that if youngsters went to church on Sunday or Synagogue on Saturday or Mosque on their day or did an hour’s yoga or went hiking once a week – something with a spiritual or even a chilling out dimension – we would hear a lot less about mental illness.
Shoot, this isn’t just young people, I see so many adult, like 30 and above, way above, saying they think they have adhd