Disclaimer: I am not a clinician, and this is not medical advice. I do not represent the American Psychiatric Association or the DSM-5. Consult a doctor and/or therapist!
With the rise of TikTok and YouTube Shorts and Facebook/IG Reels over the past few years, there is a large amount of self-diagnosing going on. While self-diagnosing in general is a topic for another day, let’s talk about the fixation on ADHD. Because, if you guessed based on the reels, you might think that anyone and everyone has ADHD.
ADHD is an initialism for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and it’s a very real diagnosis. However, are we forgetting one key word: “disorder“?
I could easily piggyback off the discussion of “What makes someone disabled?”. Often it’s a lack of accessibility. Yet another discussion for another day. So, what makes a disorder a disorder?1 Even scientists debate this. For now, we’ll use the definition of a mental disorder as defined by the DSM-5-TR (my emphasis added):
“A mental disorder is a syndrome characterized by clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s cognition, emotion regulation, or behavior that reflects a dysfunction in the psychological, biological, or developmental processes underlying mental functioning. Mental disorders are usually associated with significant distress or disability in social, occupational, or other important activities. An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss, such as the death of a loved one, is not a mental disorder. Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders unless the deviance or conflict results from a dysfunction in the individual, as described above.”
They do mention right beforehand that, “… no definition can capture all aspects of the range of disorders contained in DSM-5…”, so naturally there are limitations in attempting to define and put into boxes our multi-faceted and ever-changing existence. However, this at least gives us a direction for this discussion.
And real quick, if you’re not familiar with the DSM-5, “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-5-TR), is the most comprehensive, current, and critical resource for clinical practice available to today’s mental health clinicians and researchers.”2 Basically, it is the ultimate reference book for psychotherapeutic clinicians and is used nationwide. The DSM-5 was published in 2013 with the Text Revision (TR) published in 2022. The colloquial name is DSM-5.
Let’s discuss a few things.
A Mental Disorder, to Some Level, is Disabling
The above definition mentions “clinically significant disturbance”, “dysfunction”, and “significant distress or disability”. People seek help for disorders because they are struggling to live their life the way they want due to their disorder. Most of the reels I have seen (which are curated by social media algorithms) discussing ADHD make the disorder sound fun or cute. They say that ADHD makes you really good at multi-tasking (Spoiler: It can either have no effect or actually make you worse at multi-tasking!3). Maybe you just get easily distracted in a fun or cute way. Or, maybe you just get annoyed sometimes.
It’s worth noting that these reels generally do not paint a picture of someone experiencing disordered thinking or a disabled way of life. We don’t know if these people really have a disorder. However, it seems even mental health on social media has succumbed to the temptation of making everything look pretty, only showing the “best angles” of your life.
While it’s true that we can sometimes use our disorders to our advantage — or at least make the best of them — at the end of the day, they are still stopping us from something. No matter how it all turns out, the disorder starts as a disadvantage that we have to learn to use for a better purpose.
The Social Media Culture of ADHD
It’s safe to say that mental illness is becoming a culture and a community. As with most things, this has pros and cons. I have found great community in my struggles. In fact, the support groups I have joined and been a part of have been invaluable in making me feel less isolated and, frankly, less weird. But, there is always an underlying tone of, “I wish I didn’t have to be here.” We appreciate the community, but we’d rather not have the disorder that got us there in the first place.
Social media, on the contrary, gives the opposite feeling. We want to shout our mental illness from the rooftop, wear it as a badge of honor. While I am only speaking from my own experience, I’ve not met someone who has experienced significant distress or impairment from their mental illness and thinks it’s a happy, cute, and fun experience. It’s also worth considering whether other disorders or illnesses, mental or physical, make us proud to have them.
The Risk of Misrepresentation
Let me pull back the curtain a bit. I have OCD. I’ve had it as long as I can remember. I didn’t even know it was a disorder until I was 13. The thing is, I thought the anxiety and distress were just normal life. To this day, it’s still hard to comprehend that other people’s brains don’t think the way an OCD brain does. I never classified myself as “different”. It’s an odd state to be in: understanding that something is “off”, but also not realizing that something is wrong with you.
It was also never fun or cute. I hid my actions, as I realized to at least some extent that other people didn’t behave the way I did. I was full of fear, and even afraid to admit that I was afraid.
I struggle not to grimace when people say, “I wish I had OCD! My house would be SO clean!” Oh, dear. They don’t know what they don’t know. This will be yet another post for another day, but I feel confident in saying that OCD has to be one of the most misunderstood well-known mental disorders (thanks a lot, Monk).
My point in this is simply that we need to stop for a moment before we label any disorder as a good time had by all. We should never covet a disorder. If you think a disorder is fun…well, you probably don’t have it. The amount of people who think ADHD is some kind of superpower leads me to believe that most people do not actually have it.
(I think this is a good spot to again mention that I am not a clinician, and this is not medical advice. Consult a doctor and/or therapist, and don’t believe everything you read on the internet, including my posts! ;))
In fact, I think it may be as the second half of the mental illness definition states, that ADHD has become, “An expectable or culturally approved response to a common stressor or loss…”, which they note “is not a mental disorder”. Which leads me to ask…
Do We Really Have ADHD?
Again, I believe ADHD is a real disorder. But do most Americans have it? Or do most Americans have…technology and social media?
I swear, this post is just turning into a post about all the other posts I could make. But I would argue that social media and having our phones constantly on our person is perhaps greatly lending to the chaotic thinking and behaviors that we often attribute to ADHD.
Lack of discipline and lack of commitment are also becoming cutesy and culturally acceptable. And many, many of us have sedentary lifestyles, particularly with jobs that require us to be in front of a screen all day. Pair that with our go, go, go societal mindset, this can cause an urgency and even an anxiety that might develop a chaos in our brains.
Being “different” is always in fashion as well. As the above definition states, “Socially deviant behavior (e.g., political, religious, or sexual) and conflicts that are primarily between the individual and society are not mental disorders”, and much of what I see about ADHD is people trying to prove to society that they definitely have ADHD, or even “educating” society about all these different “traits” of ADHD that we’ve never heard about before.
While I may go more in-depth on this someday, here are several articles/studies that discuss the relationship between technology and ADHD behaviors:
- What You Need to Know About the Relationship Between Screen Time and ADHD
- Does Heightened Screen Time Cause Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADHD) In Children?
- Can cell phone use cause ADHD? – “…having symptoms of ADHD doesn’t mean one has ADHD.”
- The screens culture: impact on ADHD
- Study reveals connection between ADHD behaviours and technology addictions in adults – I found the conclusion to be poignant: “Crucially none of our participants have ever had a diagnosis of ADHD or received any psychological treatment in the past. So people need to be aware that just because you do not have ADHD, it does not mean that you cannot have symptoms of the condition, and you could still be vulnerable to technology addiction at some point in the future…”
I am going to end Part One here with the links. Part Two will talk about the symptoms of ADHD as defined by the DSM-5-TR, as well as a conclusion of my thoughts. Thanks for following along!
Footnotes:
- • What is a mental disorder? An exemplar-focused approach –
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8161428/
• What is a mental disorder? Evaluating the lay concept of Mental Ill Health in the United States –
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10069095/
• What is the DSM-5 Definition of a Mental Disorder? – https://www.saybrook.edu/unbound/defining-mental-disorders-dsm-5-style/
• What is Mental Illness? – https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/what-is-mental-illness – The American Psychiatric Association develops the DSM-5.
• DSM-5-TR – definition is on page (138 of 1924)
https://archive.org/details/dsm-5-tr/page/n137/mode/2up ↩︎ - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5-TR ↩︎
- • Why Multitasking May Be More Challenging for People with ADHD –
https://www.healthline.com/health/adhd/adhd-multitasking
• Are You a Multitasker? – https://chadd.org/adhd-weekly/are-you-a-multitasker/
• Are People With ADHD Worse at Multitasking? – https://psychcentral.com/blog/adhd-millennial/2017/06/are-people-with-adhd-worse-at-multitasking.
• Fact: Multitasking Is Counterproductive. – https://www.additudemag.com/multitasking-with-adhd-productivity-fixes-at-work-and-home/
• Multitasking in adults with ADHD – https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21461781/ ↩︎
Chronic in the Midwest 