Dr. Laura Knauss

Are you seeing an increase in people who have ADHD?

Like, is that something that's happening?

And if it is, why is that?

That's such a great question.

And I think...

To answer it, you have to draw a distinction between an increase in the people getting diagnosed with ADHD versus is it a true increase in what an epidemiologist would call the prevalence of ADHD in the population.

So there's a clear increase.

In fact, I was reviewing some papers right before I came on here for people getting diagnosed with ADHD more commonly.

But they really still can't find solid evidence that the prevalence of this like well-defined kind of neurobiologically related trait of ADHD is increasing.

However, the thing I get concerned about as a clinician is there's clear evidence that for certain populations, ADHD is still vastly underdiagnosed and undertreated.

And these are the people that probably also have the least access to care.

So it can be simultaneously maybe over and underdiagnosed depending on who you're talking about.

I think we've seen a real rise in people talking about ADHD on social media and there are even ADHD influencers.

How accurate is what we're seeing online?

So I had a lot of fun looking up the very recent research studies on this that are like fascinating.

OK, so a couple of studies have taken the top videos, the top hashtag ADHD videos on TikTok and then had experts kind of rate the quality of the information that is in these videos.

And there's only a couple of studies, but they all kind of land around that, like basically like 50 percent of what's on hashtag ADHD TikTok videos is.

is not accurate.

So there's a lot of what I would call like maybe misinformation, you know, not that people are necessarily trying to spread misinformation, but I think a lot of the content tends to communicate personal experiences.

And there's nothing inherently wrong with that.