This article first appeared on 29 May 2026 as the opening piece of #NDChat, my newsletter on LinkedIn.

Somewhere between a 3-year+ NHS waiting list and a 60-second social media reel, something is going wrong.

More people than ever are exploring whether they have ADHD, and that is genuinely good. Awareness matters. Reducing stigma matters. Helping people understand their minds matters.

But the journey from I wonder if I have ADHD to I definitely have ADHD is increasingly being shaped not by clinicians, but by influencers with something to sell.

The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that the less we know about something, the more confident we tend to feel about it. The Barnum effect tells us we are wired to see ourselves in vague, general descriptions. Put those two things together, add a content algorithm that rewards emotional resonance over clinical accuracy, and you have a recipe for real harm, not just for the people being misled, but for those with severe, longstanding impairment who are waiting years for support that is being crowded out.

Not everyone on this journey is in the same place. And what helps someone at one stage can seriously harm someone at another.

There is a particular kind of moment that many people describe: scrolling through social media, encountering a post about ADHD, and feeling, with sudden and overwhelming clarity, that’s me. The relief is real. The recognition is real. The sense of finally having a name for something carried throughout life is, for many people, genuinely transformative.

But recognition is not diagnosis. And the road between them, long, underfunded and increasingly colonised by commercial interests, is where many people are getting lost.

This article sits at the intersection of three things: the cognitive biases that shape how we interpret information about ourselves, the very different needs of people at different stages of their neurodivergent journey, and the specific mechanisms by which a significant part of the online influencer economy exploits both. The goal is not to discourage self-reflection or dismiss community support. It is to be honest about the evidence, to be clear about the harm, and to make the case for something better.

A journey with multiple starting points

Before examining the psychology, it is worth acknowledging that the ADHD community is not a single group with uniform needs. It contains at least three distinct populations, each at a fundamentally different stage, and each requiring something different from the information environment around them.

Those who suspect they may have ADHD. They may have read a list of symptoms, seen themselves in a video, or had a friend suggest it. They are at the earliest stage of a hypothesis. What they need is quality information, space to reflect, and genuine access to professional assessment.

For those awaiting assessment in England, the picture is stark. As of December 2025, up to 2.76 million people have been waiting for an ADHD assessment, with 61.6 percent of adults on the list having already waited over a year. The independent ADHD Taskforce, commissioned by NHS England, published its findings in 2025 and was unequivocal:

“ADHD is under-recognised, under-diagnosed and under-treated, with inadequate service capacity for all ages.”

In some areas, waiting times have reached 10 to 15 years. The cost to the UK economy of untreated ADHD is estimated at £17 billion annually. During this limbo, people are left without formal support, turning to online communities to fill the gap. What they need is accurate, calibrated information and peer support that holds uncertainty well.

For those who have recently been diagnosed, a new diagnosis can bring relief, clarity and, importantly, a flood of new information that can quickly outpace understanding. What this group needs is clinical guidance, time to integrate the diagnosis, and space to understand what it means specifically for their life, rather than through someone else’s template.

Each of these groups is vulnerable in different ways. And much of the content that reaches them is indiscriminate.

The Dunning-Kruger effect: why early knowledge feels like certainty

In 1999, psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger published a landmark paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, finding that the less competent someone is in a given domain, the more confident they tend to be about their competence. Crucially, this is not arrogance. It is a genuine metacognitive deficit. The same skills required to perform well in a domain are the skills required to evaluate your own performance in it. Without them, there is no reliable internal meter.

Applied to ADHD self-identification, the implications are significant. A person who has just discovered that ADHD might explain their experience has, by definition, limited knowledge of ADHD. They have not yet encountered the diagnostic complexity: the DSM-5 requirement that symptoms are present in multiple settings and before age 12, that they cause clinically significant impairment, and that they are not better explained by another condition.

They have not yet learned about the substantial overlap between ADHD and anxiety, depression, trauma responses and autism spectrum conditions, an overlap so significant that accurate differential diagnosis is genuinely challenging even for experienced clinicians.

What they have is recognition. And in the absence of deeper knowledge, recognition can feel like proof.

As someone gains more knowledge, reading peer-reviewed research, consulting clinicians, sitting with the complexity, confidence often decreases before it stabilises. This is not a failure. It is the natural shape of genuine understanding. The Dunning-Kruger curve, applied here, tells us that the person most confidently declaring their ADHD on social media may simply be the person who has engaged with the topic least deeply.

The Barnum effect: why the symptoms feel like they were written about you

The Barnum effect, named after showman P.T. Barnum and documented empirically by psychologist Bertram Forer in 1949, describes our tendency to accept vague, general statements as uniquely and personally descriptive. It is the reason horoscopes feel accurate. It is also, in a specific and measurable way, a structural problem with how ADHD is typically discussed online.

Consider the most commonly shared symptom descriptors: difficulty sustaining attention, frequent loss of objects, tendency to interrupt, emotional dysregulation under stress, difficulty completing tasks, hyperfocus on preferred activities. These are real features of ADHD. They are also features of anxiety, depression, sleep deprivation, chronic stress and ordinary human experience during a difficult period.

The clinical threshold for ADHD is not “do you sometimes experience this?” It is “do these symptoms cause significant functional impairment across multiple life domains, and have they done so persistently since childhood?” NICE guidance estimates that approximately 5 percent of children and young people and 3 to 4 percent of adults meet clinical criteria. That distinction, between recognition and persistent, impairing dysfunction, is almost never present in social media ADHD content, because it significantly narrows the audience and therefore the engagement.

The result is content that, by design, reads as though it was written about almost everyone, and is processed by our pattern-matching brains as though it was written specifically about us.

The medical model and the social model: why we need both

The debate between the medical model and the social model of disability and neurodivergence is not just academic. It shapes what support looks like, who carries the burden of change, and what we mean when we use words like disorder, difference and need.

The medical model locates the difficulty within the individual: ADHD as a neurodevelopmental condition with measurable neurobiological correlates, responsive to clinical intervention, including medication that the ADHD Taskforce found benefits 70 to 90 percent of people with the condition. This model provides a framework for diagnosis, treatment and legal protection. It is the basis on which people access medication, educational support and occupational adjustments.

The social model argues that much of the disability experienced by neurodivergent people is created not by their neurology but by environments designed around a narrow band of neurotypical norms. Schools that reward sustained seated attention, workplaces that penalise time-blindness, social systems that misread emotional intensity: these are not neutral contexts. They are choices. And changing them would reduce harm without requiring individuals to be fixed.

The neurodiversity framework, as articulated by researchers including Judy Singer and Patrick Dwyer, is sometimes described as the space between a strong medical and a strong social model. It accepts neurobiological difference as real while arguing that difference is not inherently deficit, and that the appropriate response depends on context, individual preference and the interaction between person and environment.

My position is straightforward: neither model is sufficient on its own. A person who needs medication to function safely in daily life needs the medical model. A person whose primary barrier is an inflexible workplace needs the social model. Most people need both, in varying proportions, at different times. An evidence-informed approach does not choose between them. It uses whichever framework best serves the person.

Lived experience: irreplaceable, and not infallible

Lived experience of ADHD and other neurodivergent conditions is a crucial and often undervalued form of knowledge. It reveals what professional training cannot: the texture of daily life with the condition, the exhaustion of masking, the specific ways that systems and environments create difficulty, and what genuinely helps versus what merely looks good in a brochure.

The underdiagnosis of ADHD, particularly in women, girls and people from ethnic minority communities, has been well documented. The ADHD Taskforce found significant inequities in access, with females and those from lower income, care-experienced, minority and marginalised groups among those facing the most delayed or absent support. Much of the energy that has shifted clinical and educational practice has come from people sharing their lived experience, insisting that their reality be taken seriously, that the diagnostic criteria be re-examined for gender bias, and that masking be understood as a clinical feature rather than evidence of absence.

This matters. And it needs to be said clearly.

But lived experience also has limits that honest advocacy requires us to acknowledge. Personal experience, however vivid and real, is not a controlled study. Community consensus is not a substitute for clinical assessment. The fact that a large online community shares a particular framework for understanding their difficulties does not make that framework accurate for any given individual. And the emotional solidarity of recognition, the feeling of finally being seen, can sometimes make it harder rather than easier to consider alternative explanations.

The most rigorous advocates for neurodivergent communities are not those who treat lived experience as beyond question. They are those who hold it alongside, not above, the evidence.

The social media pipeline: how algorithms amplify the problem

Research has begun to quantify what many clinicians have observed anecdotally. A 2022 study published in The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry by Yeung, Ng and Abi-Jaoude analysed the 100 most-viewed TikTok videos using the hashtag #ADHD. Almost half were classified as misleading, and fewer than a fifth mentioned the need for professional assessment. The videos with the highest engagement were, on average, the least clinically accurate.

This is not random. It is structural. Algorithms reward engagement, views, shares and emotional reaction. Nuance, clinical accuracy and uncertainty do not generate engagement. Relatability does. Personal revelation does. The confident claim that this is probably you does. The result is a systematic bias in the information environment toward content that overstates clarity, underplays complexity and disproportionately reaches people at their most vulnerable, precisely at the stage where the Dunning-Kruger and Barnum effects are operating most powerfully.

It is also worth noting what the ADHD Taskforce itself acknowledged: there is currently no good evidence on what percentage of those waiting for clinical assessment have self-diagnosed using social media and would ultimately meet or not meet diagnostic criteria following a thorough evaluation. This gap in our knowledge should make us cautious about overclaiming in either direction. What we do know is that recognised rates of ADHD in England remain lower than expected prevalence, and that the system is failing people who genuinely need support.

The influencer economy: when awareness becomes a funnel

Not all ADHD content creators are acting in bad faith. Many are people whose own diagnosis was transformative, and who want others to access the same understanding. The problem is structural: the incentive architecture of social media does not distinguish between good-faith sharing and commercial exploitation, and the two often look identical from the outside.

The pattern most worthy of concern follows a recognisable sequence.

Step 1: Identification content. “Signs you might have ADHD that nobody talks about.” Broad, relatable, emotionally resonant. Designed to reach the widest possible audience at the pre-assessment stage.

Step 2: Community building. “If this sounds like you, you are not alone.” Establishing trust and parasocial connection. Positioning the creator as someone who understands in a way that clinicians, GPs and sceptical family members do not.

Step 3: Credentialising. “I have done the research,” or “I have spoken to specialists,” or simply the authority that a million followers implies. The implicit message: this person knows more about your neurology than your doctor does.

Step 4: The offer. Supplements. Productivity courses. Coaching programmes. Membership communities. Affiliate links. The diagnostic narrative, you probably have ADHD, is the funnel. The product is the destination.

This causes harm in several specific and measurable ways

It distorts demand for services. Up to 2.76 million people may currently be waiting for an ADHD assessment in England. Referrals have surged significantly, placing pressure on services that were already inadequate. The consequence is that people with severe, longstanding impairment wait longer. The Taskforce found that untreated ADHD costs the UK £17 billion annually. That cost is borne disproportionately by those who needed assessment and did not get it.

It pathologises ordinary variation. Presenting universal human experiences, distraction, emotional sensitivity, difficulty with tedious tasks, as diagnostic indicators does not simply over-identify ADHD. It medicalises a range of human experience that may be better addressed through environment, workload, relationships or sleep.

It displaces accurate diagnoses. Anxiety disorders, depression, PTSD and autism spectrum conditions all share significant symptomatic overlap with ADHD, and each requires different support. People who arrive at assessment having built an identity around a premature conclusion may resist or be devastated by a different outcome, not because the assessment is wrong, but because the narrative has become load-bearing.

It undermines clinical relationships. The framing that doctors don’t understand ADHD the way we do creates a dynamic in which professional expertise is treated with suspicion. For people navigating a system with genuine gaps, this scepticism is sometimes warranted. As a general principle, it is dangerous. The NHS ADHD Taskforce, for all its criticisms of the current service landscape, explicitly grounded its recommendations in clinical evidence rather than community consensus.

What people at each stage actually need

The antidote here is not to dismiss community support, which can be genuinely valuable, but to match information to where someone actually is.

If you are in the suspecting stage: Hold the hypothesis loosely. Read widely from varied sources, including clinically-informed ones. Resist the pull toward certainty. Consider the full range of explanations for your experience. Seek formal assessment, but approach it as genuine inquiry rather than confirmation.

If you are awaiting assessment: Online communities can offer real support, but seek out those that hold uncertainty well, those that welcome “I am still figuring this out” rather than insisting on a particular outcome. Explore strategies that are broadly useful regardless of diagnosis. Remain aware of the Barnum effect in the content you consume.

If you have recently been diagnosed: A diagnosis is a beginning, not a final answer. ADHD presents differently across individuals, life stages and contexts. Engage with clinical support where possible. Give yourself time to understand what the diagnosis means specifically for you, rather than mapping your experience entirely onto community narratives or influencer templates.

A note on those doing real harm

It is worth being direct. There are creators who understand exactly what they are doing, who know that “you probably have ADHD” is a more effective commercial funnel than “you might want to explore this with a professional”, and who have built significant commercial operations on the back of a neurodevelopmental condition that affects real people’s lives in serious ways.

This is not a grey area. Exploiting vulnerability for commercial gain, particularly the vulnerability of people who are genuinely struggling and seeking understanding, is harmful regardless of how it is dressed. The language of awareness and community does not change the function. And the people harmed most are often those who needed the system most: those with severe impairment who waited longer, those misled away from the right support, and those whose identity became so invested in one label that they could not receive accurate clinical information when it arrived.

Final thought

ADHD is real. Its underdiagnosis, particularly in women, girls, people from ethnic minority communities and those whose difficulties did not conform to the hyperactive stereotype, is also real, and has caused genuine suffering. The increased public conversation about neurodivergence has, without question, helped many people access understanding and support they needed and deserved.

The ADHD Taskforce is unambiguous: ADHD is under-recognised and under-treated in England. The system is not serving people well. Awareness is not the enemy.

But awareness without rigour is not neutral. It nudges people toward certainty before they have the tools to evaluate it. It prioritises engagement over accuracy. And in the hands of a content economy built on converting confusion into commerce, it actively harms.

What we need is something different. To hold the evidence and the experience together. To honour the medical model and the social model, and to know when each applies. To be unflinching about harm, including harm that comes wrapped in the language of community. And to understand that different people, at different stages of their journey, need different things from us.

That is the standard I hold my own work to. And it is the invitation to everyone reading this: to demand more than relatability, to stay curious rather than certain, and to be honest about what we do not yet know.

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed.). APA Publishing.

Dwyer, P. (2022). The neurodiversity approach(es): What are they and what do they mean for researchers and practitioners? Human Development.

Forer, B.R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology.

House of Commons Library. (2025). FAQ: ADHD statistics (England). Research Briefing CBP-10551.

Kruger, J. and Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

NHS England Independent ADHD Taskforce. (2025). Report of the independent ADHD Taskforce: Part 1 (June 2025) and Part 2 (November 2025).

Polanczyk, G., de Lima, M.S., Horta, B.L., Biederman, J. and Rohde, L.A. (2007). The worldwide prevalence of ADHD: A systematic review and metaregression analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry.

Yeung, A., Ng, E. and Abi-Jaoude, E. (2022). TikTok and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A cross-sectional study of social media content quality. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.