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.
