ADHD misinformation on TikTok is shaping young adults’ perceptions. An analysis of the 100 most-viewed TikTok videos related to ADHD revealed that fewer than half the claims about symptoms actually align with clinical guidelines for diagnosing ADHD.

[u/mvea]

https://news.ubc.ca/2025/03/adhd-misinformation-on-tiktok/

[u/Uturuncu]

Also a lot of the things that could be considered 'broadly relatable to the general population' is like. 90% of all mental health symptoms, overall. "Everyone gets a little sad sometimes" can be a true statement even when clinical depression is an entire, significant diagnosis. It matters if 'that thing everyone experiences' is something that outright impacts your day to day life; that's when it's a disorder. Everyone's a little spacy, everyone gets a little distracted, everyone forgets a word here and there, everyone has trouble sitting still sometimes, no one likes to focus on something boring. All entirely true statements, but they're ADHD when those negatively impact your ability to function in work, or school, or relationships.

Also, like. The DSM? Not always 100% right. We're learning more and more over time. In the past, AuDHD wasn't possible. ADHD precluded an autism diagnosis and vice versa. They were believed to be unable to be comorbid, when comorbidity is actually pretty common. The change from autism to being autism spectrum disorder and the removal of Asperger's Syndrome also removed the forced 'can't have both' assessment in the DSM. I got ADHD and Asperger's formally diagnosed a good 25+ years ago, but it makes me wonder if I would have gotten a full big boy autism diagnosis if my psych hadn't been precluded from doing so by his available diagnostic criteria.

A lot of what's on TikTok is lived experience stuff, so it's not necessarily gonna match up to the DSM; some of it may be even be from undiagnosed comorbidities the person speaking is currently unaware of. And it's most likely not gonna come with intensity clarifiers to easily distinguish between 'everyone's a little' and 'actual psych disorder'. Which I expect can be confusing and probably concerning for neurotypicals who identify with it because they physically do not have our lived experience with intensity to realize that what's being described to them is not just what they experience in their day to day lives and we're just being whingy little babies about completely normal things everyone deals with.

[u/llcooldubs → u/Uturuncu]

Yes, exactly. The DSM is not 100% correct. They've taken a high-dimensional continuous distribution of human behavior and attempted to project it on to a discrete or binary scale. This isn't even a realistic goal. If you've ever struggled with mental health, you know you can walk into three different therapists office and walk out with three different diagnoses. If a label helps you improve your quality of life, then great. But if it is anchoring you down, then just focusing on strategies for individual symptoms that may not perfectly align with a single diagnosis may be the more beneficial approach.

[u/UnPotat → u/Uturuncu]

Last I heard they were reaching levels of 70-80%? Comorbidity between the two.

Every time I check it has been researched and revised higher