TikTok told me I have ADHD because I would forget my keys, procrastinate on work and have

I can’t remember exactly when the adverts changed. I only remember the moment I realised they seemed to know more about me than I was comfortable with.

In hindsight, I’d given the algorithms plenty to work with. When something catches my attention, I can easily rack up hundreds of Google searches on the same subject in the space of a few days.

One week it’s pizza dough. The next it’s the Bayeux Tapestry. Then it’s tinned fish.

Once I’ve exhausted everything worth reading, I inevitably end up on YouTube, Instagram or TikTok watching videos on the same subject.

Like most people, I barely noticed the adverts I had to sit through before getting to whatever I actually wanted to watch. Recently, though, they have started to feel unnervingly personal.

One, a couple of months ago, caught my attention. It looked as though it had been filmed in one take on a phone. It felt less like a commercial than someone thinking out loud.

My cursor drifted towards the ‘Skip Ad’ button, then stopped. The man talking to the camera described disappearing into a new fascination while the dirty dishes piled up, half-finished jobs were abandoned and the kitchen remained exactly as he’d left it hours earlier.

The advert turned out to be for specially engineered music designed to improve focus and concentration.

It would prove to be the first of many products and services that seemed uncannily well-targeted towards my own private failings.

Another featured a grey-haired man reflecting on a lifetime of frustration and why he could never follow through on anything.

The advert promised that a 28-day plan designed for ‘high-IQ brains’ held the answer. By week four, he claimed, he had become ‘the man my potential always promised’.

It was an irresistible sales pitch. I began to see my habit of throwing myself into new ideas, only to lose momentum once a new obsession appeared, in a different light.

It wasn’t just that these adverts offered an explanation. It was the possibility that I might not always be like this.

Before long, I was looking back at my life through this new lens.

One memory stood out: In 2022, I left my job at a national newspaper to become a reporter covering the seafood industry for a specialist trade publication.

It seemed the responsible choice: less time in London, a steadier pace and a better fit with a new baby at home.

Instead, less than a year later, I was packing up my desk after being sacked, wondering how I’d managed to get it so badly wrong.

My instinct was to get on with it. I started looking for work, pitching stories and trying to keep moving. Looking back, though, I can see how frightening that period was.

I had an infant to support, the mortgage I’d hoped to qualify for had slipped out of reach, and I had no clear idea what came next.

Perhaps that was why the adverts landed with such force. They recast a lifetime of disconnected frustrations as a single, coherent story.

As it turned out, I wasn’t unusual. Healthwatch England, an independent body which represents patients’ views, says one in five people now use social media for health information and increasing numbers are turning to AI chatbots for advice about their symptoms.

As I found, search online for ‘procrastination’ or ‘difficulty concentrating’ and it doesn’t take long before attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is suggested as the explanation.

In many ways, ADHD now occupies the place that OCD did a decade ago: a clinical diagnosis that has steadily been diluted into a personality trait. Just as people casually describe themselves as ‘a bit OCD’ because they like a tidy kitchen, ADHD has become shorthand for being impulsive or easily distracted.

The popularity of ADHD content is hard to overstate.

It is fuelled by a vast ecosystem of creators posting short-form videos with hooks such as: ‘Five signs you have ADHD’, or ‘Weirdly specific things you didn’t realise were ADHD’. The videos invite viewers to reinterpret ordinary frustrations as symptoms, one short clip at a time.

Creators such as Rich and Rox Pink, better known as @ADHDLove on Instagram, have built audiences of millions of followers by documenting what it’s like to live with ADHD and autism.

The potential audience is vast: NHS England estimates that around 2.5 million people in England may have ADHD, whether diagnosed or not.

By March this year, there were more than 800,000 referrals for ADHD assessments, with more than 230,000 people waiting more than two years. In that vacuum, social media and online businesses are left to supply both the explanation and the solution.

As more people look online for answers before they see a clinician, NHS leaders have become increasingly concerned about the information available.

Earlier this month NHS England’s top doctor, Professor Frankie Swords, warned that misinformation on social media was becoming ‘a real threat to public health’.

She said doctors were increasingly seeing patients who had become convinced they had a particular condition after getting health information from ‘highly unreliable’ online sources, sometimes leading them to reject proven treatments in favour of ‘completely unproven miracle cures’.

So had I stumbled across a genuine neurodevelopmental disorder that had shaped my life for decades? Or was I simply the target of a remarkably effective marketing funnel?

The uncomfortable truth was that the videos had started working on me. I’m usually sceptical of this sort of thing but now I downloaded an app that promised ‘sonic support tuned for ADHD brains’ and subscribed for £11.99. For about two days I became an enthusiastic evangelist for it. A week later, I’d forgotten it existed.

The joke was on me. The more serious question was whether there was anything real beneath all this.

Officially, ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterised by persistent patterns of inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity that interfere with everyday life.

The symptoms must have been present since childhood, occur in more than one setting and cause significant impairment. Forgetting your keys, putting off the washing up or getting distracted by your phone, on their own, don’t qualify.

No single video had convinced me I had ADHD. It was the relentless accumulation of them.

Each clip seemed innocent enough in isolation, but together they began to construct a narrative in which ordinary experiences started to look like clinical evidence.

Henry Shelford, chief executive of ADHD UK, argues it would be a mistake to blame social media alone. The deeper problem, he told me, is an NHS that has struggled to keep pace with demand for ADHD assessments.

In just 12 months, the number of people awaiting ADHD diagnosis without any contact from NHS services has risen from around 79,000 to almost 148,000.

‘Being angry at misleading information on social media is a bit like being an old man angry at clouds,’ Henry Shelford told me. ‘In every realm online there’s stuff [about ADHD] that’s useful, and there’s stuff that’s absolute nonsense.’

He believes the surge in referrals reflects decades of underdiagnosis finally colliding with greater public awareness, rather than a social media fad.

Whatever the precise cause, the pressure on services is undeniable.

Into that gap step TikTok, Google and ChatGPT.

When I described my case – the steady accumulation of videos, the feeling that unrelated experiences were suddenly snapping into a single explanatory narrative – to Dr Chetna Kang, a consultant psychiatrist at the Nightingale Hospital in London, she immediately recognises the pattern.

She argues that ADHD is increasingly glamorised and marketed as an identity – even a ‘superpower’ – rather than as a disorder that causes genuine impairment.

Online, she says, the emphasis often falls on creativity and entrepreneurial success, while the disabling aspects of the condition receive far less attention. Yet by definition, she argues, ADHD is a disorder severe enough to disrupt education, work and relationships.

Meanwhile, problems with concentration, procrastination, planning and time management are not unique to ADHD, she adds.

Stress, anxiety, depression and other mental health conditions can all produce similar symptoms, which is why a specialist assessment would look at severity, persistence, childhood history and whether the difficulties occur across different settings.

But that isn’t what concerns Dr Kang most.

The bigger change, she says, is what happens before patients ever reach her consulting room.

Increasingly, they don’t arrive asking what might be wrong. They arrive convinced they already know.

Worse, she worries that the problem does not end with self-diagnosis.

‘With self-diagnosis comes the illusion that you also have the expertise to know how to treat it,’ she says.

She has seen patients who have taken friends’ ADHD medication, bought stimulants online or experimented with drugs before ever receiving a formal assessment.

‘I have observed people who turn up already fluent in the language of ADHD itself: “I’m struggling to focus. I procrastinate. I have poor time-management.”’ 

It sounds ‘well rehearsed – almost copied and pasted from the diagnostic criteria’.

So rather than beginning with a diagnosis, Dr Kang’s approach starts with the person’s difficulties and works backwards, before deciding whether they reflect ADHD or something else entirely.

She says: ‘Let’s put aside your diagnosis. Tell me about the top three things you’re struggling with – especially the things that would significantly improve your quality of life if I were to help you with them.’

That kind of careful, open-ended assessment is precisely what many people struggle to access through the NHS and budget private providers.

Yet a consultant psychiatrist spends around 15 years training before practising independently. The task is not simply to recognise ADHD, but to distinguish it from dozens of other conditions that can look remarkably similar or overlap.

A social media video or ChatGPT can compare symptoms against a checklist, but they cannot replace years of clinical experience.

And on reflection there are things about myself that don’t seem to fit with such a neat diagnosis.

My conversation with Dr Kang reminded me that my life wasn’t simply a story of things I hadn’t managed.

I’d learnt Japanese well enough to earn a degree in it, completed a master’s in film studies – and made a living as a journalist for more than a decade.

Whatever my difficulties, they sat alongside achievements that had required years of sustained effort.

Was that masking ADHD? Or was it evidence that I had been searching for an explanation that wasn’t there?

I still don’t know whether I have ADHD. But I have decided to begin the assessment process, even though the waiting list may mean I don’t get an answer for years.

The algorithm was remarkably good at persuading me to ask the question. Now, I’d rather hear the answer from someone whose job is to test the hypothesis than from people whose business depends on me believing it.