MELBOURNE: A TV documentary and a wave of studies have raised urgent questions about whether social media is fuelling a global ADHD overdiagnosis crisis.
A year ago a close buddy in her mid-70s rang in joyful tears proclaiming that she finally understood her entire life – why she had made certain decisions, her erratic behaviour towards family and friends, her regular self-loathing and her fractured outlook on the world.
Yes, she was a bit of a glass-half-empty sort of person.
But what had changed so dramatically in the eighth decade of her existence? Had something suddenly sparked this epiphany? What was the panacea?
She declared with pride that she had at last been officially diagnosed with a hitherto unknown (to her) medical condition that had exposed the nasty and all-consuming puppet master behind her being – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.
“After all this time I understand why I am who I am,” she said. “Everything makes sense.”
Since the revelatory diagnosis, she has retrofitted all the successes and calamities in her life, the ups and downs, the goods and bads, and sourced them to her new malady. Finally, the jigsaw that is her has been completed.
According to the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, Text Revision (or DSM-5-TR), ADHD is a “persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity-impulsivity that interferes with functioning or development”.
This neurodevelopmental disorder, in its primitive understanding, first popped up in medical accounts from 1775 (see German physician Melchior Adam Weikard), then, in 1902, British pediatrician Sir George Frederic Still delivered a series of lectures that described the attention difficulties, impulsive traits and lack of self-control in some children. The school of ADHD was born.
It is now one of the “most common” neurodevelopmental disorders in the world, particularly among children, with huge spikes in adult diagnosis too.
It also appears to be one of the more consistently debated disorders in medicine. Just last week a British documentary ignited yet another controversy over ADHD. Is it real? Is it overdiagnosed? Why are cases surging to unprecedented levels? And how is social media contributing to a condition seemingly taking over the world?
Channel 4 television documentary The Great ADHD Myth? triggered instant discourse.
The show’s host, UK National Health Service psychiatrist Dr Max Pemberton, concluded that ADHD had become a “social construct”. In addition, schools needed to provide more support for children with the suspected condition rather than kids being medicated.
There were howls of derision. Was the show trivialising a very real ailment? Exactly what was a social construct? Was ADHD the social construct, or the way it was defined and diagnosed? Or had the documentary done the world a favour by trying to wrest back a significant medical condition from the perils of internet misinformation and greedy pharmaceutical companies? (Medical critics said the program had wasted an opportunity to ask some serious questions about ADHD, and was not “science-led”.)
In the documentary, Dr Marios Adamou, founder of the UK Adult ADHD Network, said people were increasingly seeking an ADHD diagnosis without following up with the recommended treatment.
“The ADHD concept has been expanded so much, it’s risking becoming meaningless … it’s socially constructed now, it’s something different than what it actually is,” he said.
“I don’t think there’s another medical condition where the private sector provides as much care … when you have private providers providing the majority of care in a market system with a diagnosis that is commoditised, and attracts stimulants, you may have issues.”
The documentary also emphasised there had been an unexplained “splurge” of ADHD diagnoses in recent times.
Two years ago, according to ADHD Foundation Australia, more than one million people in this country suffered from the condition – prescriptions issued for ADHD between 2018 and 2022 more than doubled.
And it has been estimated by the Journal of Global Health that there are more than 360 million adult ADHD sufferers around the world. That’s without counting children.
The 2025 study “Adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in Australia: how its current commercial model for diagnosis and treatment is encouraging misdiagnosis”, by Bradlow, Armstrong and Ogden, attempted to understand the explosion of ADHD cases.
“The rise, particularly pronounced among adults, is attributed to growing public awareness, amplified by social media platforms such as TikTok where ADHD-related content is reported to have had over 36 billion views,” the study said. “Most adults with ADHD are diagnosed by private psychiatrists. The dearth of public services for ADHD raises serious concerns regarding equity of access and the potential that normal behaviour variability is ‘medicalised’ … there is a risk that complex psychosocial issues may be attributed to ADHD.”
It urged Australia to “move towards a more ethical, evidence-based and equitable system of ADHD care”.
And: “The cost of adult ADHD to the community is related to underperformance and failure in education, difficulties at work, involvement in crime and/or development of substance use disorders. In 2019, ADHD was estimated to cost the Australian community $20bn a year. Excellent treatment of ADHD makes good economic and social sense.”
Experts in recent years have also expressed alarm at the impact of ADHD overdiagnosis, particularly in relation to young people.
The study “Overdiagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Scoping Review”, by Kazda et al, was published by the American Medical Association in 2021.
Its analysis of 334 published studies on ADHD-impacted children and adolescents found “convincing evidence” ADHD was being “overdiagnosed” in that cohort.
Why was this occurring?
“Overdiagnosis of ADHD could happen because of diagnostic inflation by widening the definition to include ambiguous or mild symptoms, by explicitly changing the diagnostic definition, or by implicitly medicalising behavioural patterns that previously would not have been considered abnormal (eg, those behaviours that are typical of children who are relatively young for their school year),” the study said.
It found that individuals “may be harmed by overdiagnosis and the adverse effects of medication during childhood, adolescence and even adulthood”.
Another recent study in the US found that given the precipitous rise in ADHD diagnoses, “this has been accompanied by a corresponding increase in rates of stimulant medication prescripts, resulting in prescription drug shortages”.
And the possible fuel for this rush to be identified with ADHD?
Again, health experts are increasingly pointing the finger at social media.
The study “Misinformation mayhem: the effects of TikTok content on ADHD knowledge, stigma, and treatment-seeking intentions”, by Schiros, Bowman and Antshel, was published last year in the journal European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry.
In short, its extensive survey of college students revealed that misinformation about ADHD gleaned from TikTok led to greater intentions to seek both evidence-based and non-evidence-based treatments for ADHD.
“Low ADHD health literacy may lead to frivolous ADHD treatment-seeking predicated on misconceptions, consequently exacerbating the public health crisis of the ADHD assessment and treatment shortage. Findings from this study provide an essential first step in understanding the harms of TikTok ADHD misinformation on individual and public levels,” the study concluded.
Just last week psychiatrist Suzanne Garfinkle-Crowell, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, said the doctor-patient dynamic was changing.
“I started noticing something new when teenage girls or young women came to my office for their first psychiatric sessions,” she wrote. “Patients used to dread being told that there was something, as they saw it, wrong with them. Now these young women were announcing their diagnoses – Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, anxiety, depression – almost before telling me their names.
“They had researched their symptoms on Instagram; they’d taken TikTok quizzes about them; they had cross-indexed their conditions with those of their friends. It was everyone – gravel-voiced film majors and earnest high school athletes, class presidents and girls who skipped school, girls who spent weekends in the Hamptons and girls who had to work for their spending money. The patients of this new wave were talking in therapy-speak, and their therapy hadn’t even started.”
Dr Garfinkle-Crowell’s observations dovetailed not only with some of the British documentary’s conclusions, but a plethora of recent academic studies. And raised an interesting paradox: What if the condition doesn’t change, but the context swirling around it and our 21st-century perception of it does? Awash with false facts, have we lost sight of ADHD?
In a world spinning with Dr Google and TikTok and Instagram and therapy-speak, how can we know what’s real anymore? What is science and what is social media slop?
My elderly friend, meanwhile, is as happy as a lark.
Her late-life diagnosis has opened portals within her she never knew existed.
She now enjoys macrame after a hobby-free lifetime.
“Think of all the years I wasted,” she says. “But I got there in the end.”
She has become a glass-half-full person now. Thanks to her new disorder.
Go figure.