Is It Me or Is It ADHD?

If you ever listen to the same song over and over on repeat, if you’re overwhelmed by laundry and dishes to be washed, if you’re struggling in your relationship, overstimulated by your kids running around, or if you ever find yourself sitting and scrolling on social media when you think you should be productive, then, according to TikTok, you have symptoms of a disorder.

On TikTok, these symptoms are interchangeable with multiple disorders, but often they are linked to ADHD. “TikTok diagnosed me with ADHD” is a phrase you may have heard. It’s become its own meme and a massive industry.

A subscription teletherapy app on social media asks, which breed of ADHD dog are you? Are you affectionate? Do you love deeply and feel rejection deeply? You're an ADHD golden retriever. Emotionally dysregulated? Sensitive to stress with mood swings? ADHD cocker spaniel. Are you food motivated and dopamine seeking? ADHD labrador.

On social media, dog videos are often said to boost viewers’ “feel-good” brain chemicals, serotonin and dopamine. Viewing this diagnostic dog content at all would be diagnosed on social media as dopamine seeking.

ADHD, on TikTok, takes form as a mood disorder and “a whole mood,” as I explain in my book, Mood Disorder: How Social Media and Therapy Tech are Shaping Mental Health. People using social media (as it is designed to be used) are told that scrolling in itself suggests that they are dopamine-depleted and therefore suffering from a disorder.

There is actually no scientifically established biomarker currently that characterizes ADHD, including dopamine-deficiency, but on social media ADHD is commonly discussed as a chemical imbalance.

Platforms then provide ADHD coaching content and sponsored posts from dopamine-hacking apps and telehealth services that promise to deliver dopamine-boosting medications to your door following, they claim, a quick quiz.

As such, TikTok has been blamed for shortages of ADHD medications. Numerous studies have pointed to rampant mental health misinformation on social media, including the dopamine deficiency theory of ADHD.

There is a lot of panic about the misinformation, but what about when social media symptoms do line up with clinical diagnostic ones? Those might actually be misleading people too.

What Are Symptoms and Disorders Anyway? (The Answer Might Surprise You.)

Symptoms aren’t really of a diagnosis in the way people might think. Symptoms are the diagnosis. A DSM diagnosis is a descriptive collection of symptoms that is intended as a reliable (as in consistent) tool to guide clinicians toward treatments and to streamline communication across healthcare and other institutions.

The symptom collections the American Psychiatric Association (APA) uses for its DSM diagnoses (for things like ADHD, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorders etc.), however, do not explain our symptoms, nor do they indicate any specific underlying condition like a chemical imbalance. While researchers are always finding new and interesting things about the brain, our current mental health categories thus far do not lend themselves to biological distinctions (let alone causes).

What Can a Diagnosis Do?

A diagnosis is sometimes an individual’s best or only means of obtaining vital supports within a situation that is creating, exacerbating, or just not compatible with their struggles (whether those supports be medication, therapy, school accommodations, etc.). A diagnosis can be someone’s first validation that their suffering is clinically “real,” shared among others, and not due to some personal or parental flaw. Therapeutic insights can be gained through diagnosis, which can also encourage awareness of mental health, distress, and difference across relationships, school, and work.

However, diagnoses often carry misleading ideas of known medical conditions, which can dampen one’s outlook on getting better. DSM diagnoses are criticized by key leaders in the field for not being valid (in that they do not reference any concrete and generalizable underlying condition). The APA cautions that diagnoses shouldn’t be considered firm and unchangeable categories. The DSM does not officially conform to any specific underlying theory of what it deems disorders—its contributing members generally believe them to come out of some complex interaction between one’s biology, environment, and culture.

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Those same diagnoses that may give us insight into ourselves are often used to explain the behavior of politicians or other public figures when we could be asking more productive questions about the society that produced them.

If we move beyond thinking of our own personality traits, feelings, and behaviors in terms of diagnosis, we might begin asking more productive (even more therapeutic) questions about ourselves, our lives, and our worlds too.

Social media, however, continually pushes us toward narrow diagnostic identities. Why?

Social Media Diagnostic Identities

Social media platforms thrive on classifying people into consumer identity categories. It matters less whether the categories are valid in someone’s life than how reliably they can predict for the platform what a user will do, what they’ll buy, and how to keep them on the platform longer. Diagnostic mental health identities draw people into platform economies, wherein engagement is platform currency.

When a user watches, likes, or comments on an ADHD video, they’ll increasingly be fed simplified symptom-based videos. As they may begin to see more of their experiences through a diagnostic lens, they will be shown sponsored posts from ADHD telehealth medication-prescribing apps or they may buy a viral ADHD workbook. They may sell a viral ADHD workbook after being encouraged to embed a purchase link in their own ADHD content.

Social media helps people find community and understanding through shared mental health experiences in a way they haven’t before, but the most widely circulating content in this commercial space can be misleading too.

Personality or Symptom?

Diagnoses can only tell us so much. Two people with the same symptoms can have quite different things going on in their minds and brains (in social media diagnoses and clinical diagnoses). A diagnosis doesn’t necessarily indicate something you have or that you are forever—it can be a useful tool for you like it is for clinicians. It’s OK to utilize a diagnosis insofar as it is helping and to set it aside when other ways of considering our lives and ourselves make more sense.

It’s common to hear people on social media comment that all those relatable mental health diagnosis videos make them wonder if everything they’ve thought was their unique personality was really just a symptom of a disorder. On social media, it’s the same thing. For you, it doesn’t have to be.