If you clicked on this video, you might be having
the same experience as me. I never considered the
possibility that I might have ADHD until I started
getting a lot of this kind of content on social
media.
Your six struggles that people with ADHD face on a
daily basis.
No person with ADHD has all five things.
You're such a chill guy. How do you have ADHD?
It seems like I might not be the only one
experiencing this.
A lot of my patients would hold up their phone to the
camera and be like, "Here's this video that I
saw on Tik Tok and this is why I have ADHD."
ADHD diagnoses and prescriptions have been
increasing in adults since before the days of
social media. The number of ADHD diagnoses in 2010
were almost five times what they were in 1999,
and between 2007 and 2016, the number of
diagnoses of ADHD in adults more than doubled.
With that rise comes more treatment.
There's been a 16% increase in prescriptions
for generic Adderall within the past year.
The reason that it's treated with medication is
that it is a true psychiatric disorder.
There are dozens of different medications that
are FDA approved to treat ADHD that go back decades.
And these medications are lucrative for the
companies that manufacture them,
especially as more adults get diagnosed and seek out
treatment.
The first medication I tried was Vyvanse, and
when I went to go pick that up at the pharmacy,
it was $200 because there's not a generic
version of it. So I went back to my doctor like,
Can we try something else?
Vyvanse is also benefiting from the fact that we
shifted more effort into the adult ADHD market,
which is now more than half of the overall
market.
The ADHD drug market in the United States was
valued at $8.7 billion in 2021, up from $7.6 billion
in 2020. But the U.S.
is currently experiencing a shortage of stimulants,
which is causing a lot of issues for patients and
providers.
When there's such a huge mismatch between supply
and demand, what often happens is other things
will go in to kind of fill that vacuum of
demand. Part of that, I think, is people looking
to social media for answers.
And I've had patients who had to go up to 15
different pharmacies to try to get their
medication filled.
So why are more people seeking out ADHD diagnoses
and can the US keep up with the demand?
Adhd has a lot of symptoms that can vary
from person to person, and I identify with many
of them, so I was very confused and I convinced
my boss to let me do a video on this so I reached
out to Dr. Leonard Adler, who runs the adult ADHD
program at the NYU Grossman School of
Medicine in order to try to make sense of all of
this.
Can you explain to someone who's never heard of ADHD
what it is?
So we'll use the term ADHD to encompass all attention
deficit disorders.
You have to have significant symptoms for
at least six months, and those are the inattentive
symptoms and the hyperactive-impulsive
symptoms. You have to have five of nine of the
inattentive and or five of nine of the
hyperactive-impulsive.
The inattentive symptoms are trouble paying
attention, easy distraction, forgetfulness
and the hyperactive -impulsive symptoms
include restlessness, impulsivity, trouble
sitting still.
Not only do people have to have the symptoms, but
they also need to have what we call functional
impairment or kind of evidence of clinical
impairment, which is that the symptoms themselves
are enough to cause a lot of disruption to the
person's life.
The roots of the disorder have to go back to
childhood. You don't have to be diagnosed as a
child, but you have to have significant symptoms
going back before the age of 12.
I realize that I may have had ADHD after my mom was
diagnosed with ADHD in 2016.
Just because I am a lot like her, I figured that
would be the possibility that I would also have it.
But I didn't seek testing or a diagnosis until
last year when I realized that it was affecting my
personal and professional life a lot more than it
was in 2016.
I definitely had ADHD as a child.
I was school safety patrol.
That's I love this picture of me looking back
at my grades and seeing that it's like, Oh, I have
an A, But the feedback is pretty, pretty careless
about making mistakes.
Like not going back and checking my work.
I just really did not have the attention span or
interest to go back and carefully review things
before I would submit it.
The thing about ADHD is that the symptoms are very
relatable and relatability thrives on
social media. People like to watch content that
resonates with them.
If you pick a horoscope at random, chances are you'll
pick a horoscope that will possibly pretty
accurately describe how your day went or how your
day is going. And there's almost a similar effect
sometimes with some of these videos, which is it
can describe something that may very well be on
the spectrum of a normal experience.
A non pathological, non -ADHD experience that even
someone like myself might struggle with.
All of us have some symptoms of trouble paying
attention and being distracted and feeling
restless. But the issue is have you had it more or
less throughout your lifespan and is it causing
significant impairment?
That's what makes it a disorder. But if you just
had symptoms and no trouble from the symptoms,
we wouldn't make a diagnosis.
One media analysis of popular TikTok videos
found that talking about mental illness on social
media can be tricky.
About half of the videos that we had sampled
contained misleading or potential misinformation.
And most of these videos, what we found were that
they were uploaded typically by users of the
platform. Not a lot of health care professionals
around the platform, and typically it was mostly
user generated content.
Dr. Sasha Hamdani is a board certified
psychiatrist and an ADHD clinical specialist who
also has ADHD herself.
There's a lot of bad information out there.
Let me just try to put some counter information
on there. And like I made a couple of videos.
I was diagnosed with ADHD in fourth grade, and I
basically dedicated my entire life to learning
about the brain. The creative process was fun
for me, and so then that just kind of grew.
Do people actually have ADHD after coming in
because they looked at TikTok.
Maybe like 50-50.
So it's important to figure out like, where is
this stemming from?
So a lot of times people present me and they're
like, This is what's going on.
I think it's ADHD and they are deep down the
rabbit hole of social media. And then you start
talking to them and you start digging out other
symptoms and trying to find cause.
And then you're like, Well, does this
explanation make more sense? And they're like,
Oh yeah, that is what that is.
It's not ADHD.
So it's kind of this shifting thing.
I think increased awareness is always what I
would call a double edged sword.
I think we've definitely moved into an area of
talking about mental health that's really
positive. There's much less stigma.
People are really willing to open up about their
mental health diagnoses, and I think that's a
really wonderful thing.
The other side of this kind of double edged
sword, though, is sometimes if we're talking
about mental health symptoms or diagnoses, we
then run the risk of perhaps misconstruing
again things that are on the spectrum of normal as
being pathological.