> 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.
There is a lot of people claiming to have ADHD simply to avoid taking responsibility for their actions or inaction.
I've had this strong feeling for a while, culminating in seeing someone close to me consume a ton of content on that matter and starting to self-diagnose ADHD and other issues.
I'm also skeptical on ADHD diagnoses: I've seen with my own eyes somebody "deciding" they have ADHD, consuming a ton of content on the subject and effectively learning what to say during the examination (which is essentially an interview, so you learn what to say and what not to say) and then getting an ADHD diagnosis... And then proceeding to use that to reject any blame: "oh i'm sorry, it's my adhd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
It doesn't make sense, and it hurts people actually struggling with real ADHD.
Also: in my opinion not only "young adults" are being affected.
And besides, people with ADHD are often perfectly capable to adapt and take responsibility, it's just they might need very non-standard strategies to do so.
You’re 100% right and this is what bothers me: a lot of self-diagnosed people using adhd to avoid responsibility and accountability rather using that insight (maybe they actually do have adhd) to understand what non standard strategies to adopt in order to function in the society.
Steve Jobs would say that when they built the personal computer, they built a bicycle for your mind. I think this goes both ways. A computer helps me do my work as a computational scientist in amazing ways. However, It also helps people deliver ideas into other people's minds and gain their acceptance with much less friction.
I think there is a building mountain of evidence that social media, news and content aggregators like reddit, etc. can effectively control people's minds. This is the old data science story of changing the border color to increase sales idea taken to it's limit. Except people don't just change the border color, they can feed a series of interactions to users to guide them from start to finish. And this is happening both in an organized fashion (e.g., radicalizing people towards the right wing by russian agents) and in an unorganized fashion, algorithms delivering content and delivering more and more of that content.
And this is happening at all levels and at all ages. I was offered a job at a large educational technology company that has data for millions of american children currently enrolled in public schools across america. I initially accepted because there were lots of multimodal data problems that I found interesting. I wanted to build a system to make early warning systems for mid to high functioning autism so that interventions could be put in place since that is the number one impact on the quality of adult life of the individual with autism. Once I started, they canceled this project and started a new one that would predict children who would have "behavior problems" so that the students could be "intervened" with prior to the problems occur. Essentially, a Phillip K. Dick style minority report police state for children. No one at the company seemed to see how this was a problem so I quit. But I am sure someone made that software. I am sure this software is being made everywhere because controlling people's behavior prints money.
> 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.
There is a lot of people claiming to have ADHD simply to avoid taking responsibility for their actions or inaction.
I've had this strong feeling for a while, culminating in seeing someone close to me consume a ton of content on that matter and starting to self-diagnose ADHD and other issues.
I'm also skeptical on ADHD diagnoses: I've seen with my own eyes somebody "deciding" they have ADHD, consuming a ton of content on the subject and effectively learning what to say during the examination (which is essentially an interview, so you learn what to say and what not to say) and then getting an ADHD diagnosis... And then proceeding to use that to reject any blame: "oh i'm sorry, it's my adhd ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
It doesn't make sense, and it hurts people actually struggling with real ADHD.
Also: in my opinion not only "young adults" are being affected.