Anecdotes and direct testimonies can be powerful awareness tools. But also a dangerous source of disinformation, especially if proposed without filters, in the Farwest of social media, to an audience of young people less and less accustomed to separating the real from the virtual. This is what happens looking for information on the attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (better known as ADHD) on Tiktok, where according to a study just published in Plos One, the vast majority of the most popular videos on the subject present incorrectly the symptoms of the disease, with the risk of contributing to incorrect self -diagnosis, and a general incorrect representation of the disorder.
“Tiktok can be a crucial tool to spread awareness and reduce stigma, but also has its negative sides”, Spiga Vasileia Karasavva, among the authors of the new study. “Anecdotes and personal experiences are certainly powerful, but do not offer the context, and can lead to misunderstandings about the ADHD and on mental health problems in general”.
The attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder is classified as a neurosviluppo disorder, characterized by difficulties in concentrating and maintaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsiveness. Normally it arises in childhood, but the symptoms also remain in adulthood. It is one of the most common disorders of the evolutionary age, with an incidence of 3-4 percent among children.
It has been known for decades, but in recent years the diagnoses have been clearly increasing in all developed countries, both in pediatric and adults. In part due to greater sensitivity towards the disorder, but inevitably (in particular in the case of diagnoses in adulthood), also due to an increasing share of overdiagnosis, also linked to an erroneous and fragmentary knowledge of the symptoms and characteristics of the disorder in the general population.
Because more and more children seem “problematic”
Also for this reason, the authors of the new study have decided to investigate the image of the disease that emerges on Tiktok, one of the most used social platforms, especially among young people. To do this they organized two experiments. In the first, two ADHD expert clinical psychologists evaluated the 100 videos on the most popular disorder on Tiktok (with a number of total views that reach almost half a billion), evaluating the affirmations on the disease contained in the light of the diagnostic and statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (or DSM-5), the diagnostic tool most used by psychiatrists from all over the world. On average, less than half of the symptoms presented in the videos were in line with those recognized by the official diagnostic criteria.
The two psychologists then drawn up a ranking of the 100 movies in order of reliability (expressed in votes from 1 to 5), and the first and last five on the list were subjected to 843 university students, who were asked to evaluate their reliability in turn. The researchers therefore compared the assessments of specialists with those of young volunteers, bringing to light rather marked differences: the average votes expressed by the psychologists for the five most accurate videos were in fact equal to 3.6, against an average of just 2.8 in the evaluation of the students; On the other hand, the five less reliable for psychologists had obtained an average vote of 1.1, and instead went up to an average of 2.3 in the students’ votes.
Clearly, the results show a neckline between the assessments of the experts and those of the general population that benefits daily of the contents of Tiktok. By analyzing the knowledge of the students on the disease, the study showed that those of them saw more frequently on the Adhd video on the social medium had also led to exaggerating the real prevalence of the disorder in the population, and to consider it a more debilitating disease in daily life, than it really is in the majority of the people who suffer from it.
Disinformation on Tiktok
In short: it seems that looking for information on the disease on Tiktok, even when viewing videos shot with the best intentions, actually contributes to forming a distorted idea of the disorder, its symptoms, its frequency and gravity. As always when we talk about the internet, it would be necessary to remember to refer to reliable sources – such as the pages of university and research institutes – and to take everything else with pliers. All the more so if we talk about serious problems, but difficult to characterize and diagnose, such as psychiatric ones.
“Some young adults refer to Tiktok because they have difficulty accessing more reliable sources, or because they have previous negative experiences with mental health professionals,” concludes Amori Mikami, professor of psychology of the University of British Columbia who coordinated the research. “It is therefore also our responsibility to fill these gaps in fair access to quality psychological assistance”.