Popular TikTok videos on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are viewed differently by medical experts compared to young adults, according to a new study that highlights the role social media plays in shaping our perception of health.

Researchers had two clinical psychologists specialising in ADHD review 100 popular TikTok videos about the condition, which affects people’s behaviour and is characterised by difficulty concentrating and hyperactivity or impulsiveness.

The two psychologists found that fewer than half (48.7 per cent) of the claims in the videos accurately reflected ADHD symptoms in line with a diagnostic manual.

The researchers then had more than 800 undergraduate students watch 10 of the TikTok videos; the ones the experts rated as their most and least reliable picks.

The study, which was published in the journal PLOS One on Wednesday, revealed a discrepancy in how the experts and students perceived the videos.

For the psychologists’ top five rated videos, young people gave them a comparatively lower rating of 2.8 compared to the experts’ 3.6 out of 5 average.

Young people rated the least reliable videos 2.3 out of 5, much higher than the 1.1 out of 5 the experts gave them.

“Overall, this paper has some important implications and offers a balanced view of the impact on social media,” Dr Blandine French, a senior research fellow at the University of Nottingham in the UK who was not involved in the study, said in a statement.

“But it also raises concern about viewers relying on this content as educational and support sources. The lack of nuance, evidence base, and reliability of these video[s] is very high. Now this doesn’t mean that it is always bad, but it is to be taken with extreme caution,” she added.

Popular videos, few creators with credentials

The study authors found that the top #ADHD videos were very popular, with nearly half a billion views.

Most of the videos did not refer to a source, and just one in five content creators shared their credentials in the video. A little over one-third listed them in their TikTok profile.

For those who reported credentials, 83.6 per cent cited their lived experience, while 13.1 per cent reported being life coaches.

Just 1.6 per cent reported being a therapist or counsellor without providing license information, and 1.6 per cent said they were a licensed mental health worker. None of the users reported having a PhD, PsyD, or MD, the researchers said.

Around half of the creators promoted products or sought some form of financial compensation.

Research is a ‘starting point’

People who had a self-diagnosis or an official diagnosis of ADHD tended to watch the videos more, and those who were self-diagnosed viewed the psychologists’ lowest-rated videos more favourably than those who had a clinical diagnosis.

French said this was “interesting but potentially worrying”.

“The diagnosed group seemed better able to tell the difference between quality of information, while self-diagnosed were not as able to do so,” she said.

The study’s limits include that the undergraduate students were taking a psychology course and were mostly women, with outside experts cautioning against generalising the findings.

The study authors say the research “provides a starting point for understanding depictions of ADHD on TikTok”.

“TikTok can be an incredible tool for raising awareness and reducing stigma, but it also has a downside,” Vasileia Karasavva, a PhD student in clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

“Anecdotes and personal experiences are powerful, but when they lack context, they can lead to misunderstandings about ADHD and mental health in general”.