Welcome to Hacking Your A DHD.

I'm your host, William Kerr, and I have a DHD On this podcast, I dig into the tools, tactics, and best practices to help you work with your A DHD Brain.

And today I'm joined by Sky Waterson for our research recap series.

In this series, we take a look at a single research paper and we dive into what the paper says, how it's conducted, and try and find any practical takeaways.

In this episode, we're gonna be discussing a paper called TikTok and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, a Cross-Sectional Study of Social Media Content Quality.

So this was a paper from 2022 and it got quite a bit of coverage at the time, uh, but was one I wanted to look at again.

Not because tiktoks been in the news.

I just realized that while I was writing up my notes here, that TikTok is having, its us, uh, ownership change.

That's not what we're going over today.

Uh, this is just about this 2022 paper.

Also before we get started, I just wanted to mention that I'd love to hear what you guys think of the research recap series.

So if you have thoughts, head on over to hack your adhd.com/contact and let us know what you think.

Also, if there's a particular paper or topic that you'd love for us to go over, please let us know.

New episodes of Research recap come out every other Friday.

All right, with that, let's get into it.

So Skye, tell me what you know about TikTok.

Yes, I think this is a good start.

So I had TikTok a few years ago, and quite frankly, I didn't love the, like the channels, it took me down.

It was like, Ooh, you must want more of this.

And I was like, I don't actually, I value my mental health.

And um, and.

I ended up just turning it off.

I ended up not using it.

Does that mean I don't use shorts?

No.

I go on Instagram shorts, I go on YouTube shorts.

I just have decided TikTok isn't for me.

You won't actually find us on TikTok at all.

So this was an interesting conversation because I was kind of coming at this from the perspective of somebody who is active on, on social media shorts, but not necessarily TikTok.

Yeah, I TikTok was, I had some channels on there, videos I used to upload.

I have not actively used TikTok in years just because.

Yeah, it was something that I felt actively detrimental to my health because it has a very good algorithm at capturing attention, and it was just hard for me to both be on there and then being like, I don't think I should use this.

Also, let me make videos for other people so they can be on there and I'm like it, and there's some.

Hard to say.

What's the right answer there?

But the right answer for me was just, I'm not gonna do this.

Even though right now TikTok is on my phone.

'cause I wanted to look some of the old videos up.

It hasn't really grabbed me again.

I haven't had any trouble like dealing with the fact that it's there.

I just don't open the app 'cause it's not something that is actively in my head to do.

Which I find is an interesting thing because one of the things I wanted to look at, what, before we go into the study is okay.

How much are people watching TikTok?

Like how many videos are they doing?

Because I think that's really, Relevant to the meth that they use that we'll talk about in a minute.

But average TikTok user watches about 95 minutes of TikTok a day, which is hour and a half.

That's a lot, but it's also not that much for some people.

So average you go, there's yeah.

Power users that are watching away more and then people that are just watching a couple videos a day.

But the average video length is between 20 and 30 seconds.

The, some of them can be as shortest three seconds.

And apparently in some region you can now have 30 minute long videos, which seems not the Yeah that's what, YouTube's for.

But the bottom line here, I think is that the average user is gonna be seeing hundreds of videos a day, especially if you consider things that are just like scrolling by immediately.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

And so in terms of this actual paper.

It's a very interesting paper.

I feel like we are gonna have to start with caveats about various things before we get into it but, essentially what they wanted to look at is they were looking at, okay, if social media platforms are being used to disseminate mental health information online, they actually said that the hashtag A DHD was the seventh most popular health related hashtag on the platform, which is really.

Crazy in some ways because health is such a big space.

They wanted to see if what was going on, what was being posted on TikTok was something that was gonna be considered to be beneficial Correct information about A DHD.

Could you go on TikTok and get the information about A DHD that you actually needed according to this paper?

And we'll get into that as well.

Yeah.

And so what they did is they went, okay, we're gonna look at this hashtag a DH, adhd.

We're going to look at the hundred most popular videos within that hashtag.

And then we are going to assess it on two things.

This patient educational materials assessment tool for audio, visual materials pet or PA av.

And it is that basically that's just, can you understand the videos?

It's really not.

About the quality, it's more about, or like the, how good the information is, really just about, Hey, can you understand what the people are saying?

Is it important?

And in general, they found almost all the videos were very well done that way.

And then there was also the journal of American Medical Association benchmark criteria, the jama, and that is the one that a lot of people had issue with in regards to this study.

Mm I can pull up my, thing on jama, but do you have anything to say about it?

just, it's an interesting one because I think as somebody who started out on the internet posting articles that had a lot of references, I understand that that.

The importance of, doing things.

I probably still didn't do it according to jama 'cause I didn't know about jama and I think that's something that we're going to get into in a minute.

But yeah, tell us about what they, what was their expectations?

So the JAMA things are looking at author authorship, like are they, who are they crediting this for?

Is the attribution clear?

Can they find that easily?

Like then you know, the disclosure of Hey, where.

Are you doing stuff to getting paid to say this?

Any of that kinda stuff that that's incredibly important to have that kinda disclosure, especially with the number of ads that have a DHD information, in them.

And then the how currently information is.

But I think the most important parts here is the, like attribution aspect and who are they attributing this to, kinda stuff that is the big issue that.

Up because social, that's hard to do on social media properly.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And so their expectation was that if you met their criteria, you were essentially coming on talking about something to do with A DHD.

That was correct.

That was factually correct.

You were citing your sources, you were providing references for people to find those sources and.

When you looked at the examples that they were using, a large portion of those were also saying, and if you wanna like fully understand if you have a DHD, you have to go and get diagnosed by a professional.

So all of that was being put into a 32nd clip in order for it to meet the criteria.

Which now with that said, there are examples of misleading statements.

I was like, I could, that's That is yes.

the examples of misleading statements.

So they had like videos describing A DHD paralysis, which.

That's its own thing.

It's, I don't want to go into Well, it's a tough one because emotional dysregulation and A DHD up until recently was considered something that was not.

In the academic research, and therefore you couldn't talk about it.

But now it is.

And actually, one of the reasons people started talking about it was because people talked about the personal experiences of it on TikTok or yeah.

And yeah, but then they also had a video state that a DH ADHD is equally common between girls and boys.

Which research doesn't support that, but that often is because women are Mm-hmm.

So it's hard research doesn't say it, but it's, we don't know.

Yeah.

And then also that A DHD symptoms only intensify with the onset of puberty.

I was surprised that they, that was listed as misinformation.

I was felt that was something that was, Yeah, I have.

I have seen that in studies.

I think the one that, 'cause we're not doing a very good job of examples here.

I think the one that really stood out to me as an example was somebody said had a video that was like, if you listen to this, it will tell you if you have a DHD.

It was like an audio, like that kind of stuff that just kind of off the wall wild stuff Yeah.

Um, nothing to back that up.

this one I saw the A DHD lacks object permanence, which is a.

That's, again where the attribution is wrong here, where people are like, I'm calling this object permanence.

That's not what that's called.

That's something babies deal with also.

Apparently that's really bad research as well when I looked into it, but that's not the point of this video.

But yeah, with the out of sight, out of mind is not object permanence that we forget.

Some object permanence is more about the idea that once something leaves your field of view that you don't even know it exists anymore.

Not that.

Yeah.

You don't know where it is and you're not thinking about it because I could be like like you asked me to put some scissors in a drawer and then I put the scissors in the drawer.

that point, I don't know scissors exist anymore, but if you asked me, Hey, where'd you put the things I'd be like in the drawer?

So it is a different Yeah, it's very different.

Yeah.

And so there was some things that were, yeah, very much misleading.

If you'd been on, if you'd been on TikTok and you had said, and some people do, this is gonna be my sole source of information about A DHD and symptoms and all that kind of stuff, then that could be quite misleading and it could potentially lead you down a path of thinking You have it when you don't have it, or thinking you don't have it when you do have it.

'cause you're like, well I don't have object permanence, so, or I do, or something like that.

Yeah.

And yeah, so they classified the videos in three different ways.

They were class, or actually I should say, how they just went about it.

They had two people watch the videos and classify them as either misleading personal experience or as useful.

And if the people disagreed, they had a third person come in and decide on if it, which one it was.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so they had really good criteria.

Like one of the cool things about this paper was they had a criteria, they were using it.

It was more about the to what end, because they did a few things that were quite interesting.

So one was, um, if a personal experience video contained any generalized misleading statements, it was classified as misleading rather than personal experience, which becomes relevant when you find out.

Personal experience is one of the most popular, like it was the most.

Useful, which makes sense.

It's what, a lot of us are interested in.

And then in terms of their examples of useful videos, it was really interesting 'cause they had.

You know, videos describing auditory pro processing disorder could be comorbid with A DHD, but a medical or audiological assessment is required for this to be diagnosed or videos saying that.

Um, A DHD symptoms of daydreaming sleep desu.

NCES and school difficulties could all be symptoms of A DHD.

Again, recommendation to see a professional mental health professional.

If the viewer is wondering about A DHD, and this is some kind, this is the kind of language use that you really only find with healthcare professionals.

You're not gonna necessarily see that a lot in people who are, say, doing a POV of the day in their life, experiencing A DHD symptoms.

Yeah.

And that did seem to be one of the things that they were really looking for.

They wanted to use this as a launchpad to get more healthcare professionals making these kind of videos so that we could have and I've, seen some, and I dunno, there are some people that are really good at doing it and there are some people that you're like, this is okay information, but man, you are.

Yeah.

Not doing this for an A DHD audience.

Yeah.

Yeah, definitely.

And although when you looked at the difference between the healthcare professionals and the non-healthcare professionals, it wasn't a significant difference in terms of views and likes and shared shares.

One of the great things about having the real data is when you look at the real data, you do see, okay, well the mean likes were 6,500 and yeah.

And then the other one was like 402,000.

So it's like, sorry I said that wrong.

653,000 for non-healthcare professionals in terms of mean likes versus 402,000 for healthcare professionals in terms of mean likes.

So there was a stark difference in, you saw that across the views, across the shares.

People just didn't resonate much with healthcare professional information, which makes sense because the way it was being described was very clinical and not necessarily something that was gonna be scroll stopping.

If you wanna talk about that Yeah.

Yeah.

So I do think that's a, one of the big issues is presentation matters a lot in this kind of thing, and.

I'll admit in the last few years I have seen more healthcare professionals that are switching from primarily being healthcare to going to more to the influencer model because they think they can help more people that way.

Mm-hmm.

some of them are very good, Mm-hmm.

are not good.

In fact, they like even here, like they had so of, yeah, they had 20% of the healthcare professional videos.

Were misleading.

Admittedly that is a very small, so we have a hundred videos and then only, I think 11 of them 11.

Yeah.

So numerically we're talking very small sample.

then three of them were misleading, so that Yeah.

oh my God, it's 27%.

It's just three people who forgot to cite their source.

But I, I think the conversation of citing your sources is an interesting one because, you know, look, I'll be totally real.

We do this right.

We come on, you know, and we do this podcast.

Part of the reason is because we are very passionate about helping people find the real research and, and as much as possible sharing that information with as much knowledge as possible.

I don't claim to be an expert on everything, but when it comes to posting that on social media I have had a bit of a conflict of interest around do I cite the source?

Do I say this is, you know, I always say this is based on research, but do I then put the source in the link or not?

Because.

Do people need that or can they go to the podcast for that information?

This is kind of making me wanna put my sources back in and be like, Hey, I'll take the hit in terms of interest.

Yeah, because I don't want.

To land on the wrong side of things, but yeah, at the same time I'm going is Yeah.

'cause I guess to go at what their findings were, they found that 50 per 2% of videos were misleading.

27% were per personal experience.

And then only 21% were seen as useful A DHD information.

I, did not when I like looked at those numbers, I was like, man, I don't know if I feel great about the fact that we're separating useful and personal experience here.

Yeah, I think honestly that was maybe the biggest thing for me because a lot of what we talk about is our personal experience.

The personal experience of, in my case, I work with clients so clients experiences and um, it's an interesting one because.

There's lots of things, like some people struggle to get diagnosis, you know, you can't just say, if you wanna know this, you should get diagnosed.

It's like it's thousands of dollars and it doesn't even happen in my country for the next nine months.

You know, these things can be problematic.

And then when you're talking about, um, the, what makes it useful.

Yeah, personal experiences, like that's where the conversation about rejection sensitivity comes in and some of that still isn't in the, in the research, but in some ways the research needs to catch up with what people are saying.

So it's a bit of a chicken and egg there as well.

Yeah.

And.

I don't want people to come away from this podcast with them thinking that we're saying there's no misinformation about No.

a DHD and social media.

series.

Yeah, are literally looking at academic research.

We clearly yeah, this stuff.

yeah.

And 'cause there is tons of misinformation about a DHD in there, especially from popular creators who maybe don't understand the nuance of what's going on.

And that's often what a lot of misinformation comes from is that lack of nuance where they're like, oh, A DHD is just a dopamine deficit idea.

Or A DHD is just being over, or understimulated and it's, Yep.

that might have aspects of it, but it, you can't, Nuance is such an important part of the Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think maybe if you were to take away a practical thing from this, it would be that everybody on social media.

Might be misleading you because even the people who were doing it in an academic context like, hello, I'm a doctor, this is what I'm saying.

You know, this is the references.

They still had some misleading information, so I think it's worth doing your own research, maybe using these spaces like TikTok as a jumping off point to go, oh, that's really interesting.

I wonder if that's true.

Rather than going, I heard that and therefore that is true.

Yeah.

Yeah, especially I've seen stuff from someone.

It's oh, they got a PhD and I'm looking at their stuff and I'm like, oh.

They have a PhD in education or something, and they're just using that as a way to build their credibility.

I'm not saying that you, phD in grad education is bad, it's just that if you're looking at something psychological, you probably want that kind of degree.

Not that.

And then I also have to acknowledge that oh yeah, I I don't have any of those fancy numbers or letters behind my name.

So it's, It's, I think the sighting of sources is really important because we wanna know where people are getting their information so that people can check for themselves.

'cause I know I'm gonna get things wrong Mm-hmm.

I don't want that to make people think, oh, he's doing everything wrong.

I'm like Yeah.

is why this Yeah.

to do my best.

And that's why I really hope for most people online.

Yeah, I think that's probably the takeaway.

If you're, if you are, do posting things online, try and cite your sources.

I have seen some very prominent, um, magazines and journals in.

A DHD space that do not cite their sources.

And I have to say, sometimes you go, well, why?

You know, like, I have this and I have this and this is known.

And, you know, to, to somebody maybe in the academic space, this is so well known, it feels silly to kind of cite the source again.

But maybe that's the thing we can all take away from this.

It's like, Hey, go back to citing your sources.

You can put it in the comments.

It's not gonna kill your, your reach.

But in terms of, yeah, and then in terms of people who are viewing it, it's going okay.

This is a jumping off point for knowledge.

It's not the source of knowledge