What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok

Ever diagnosed yourself with a mental health disorder based on a TikTok video? If so, you're not alone. "I personally don't think that there's anything more human than wanting to understand yourself and wanting to understand your own experiences," says Vasileia Karasavva https://psych.ubc.ca/profile/vasileia-karasavva/. Vasileia is the lead author of a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0319335that gets into why this kind of self-diagnosis can be such a double-edged sword. Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave http://plus.npr.org/shortwave. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:22Regina Barber?

  Hey, Short Wavers. Regina Barber here.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  And Burleigh McCoy.

• 0:25Regina Barber?

  With our biweekly science news roundup, featuring the Mary Louise Kelly of all things considered.

• 0:32Speaker 03

  Hi. I hear we are going to talk about, among other things, the accuracy of TikTok videos about ADHD.

• 0:41Regina Barber?

  And how life may have come from little bits of lightning.

• 0:44Speaker 02

  And why parakeets might be a good model for studying human speech.

• 0:48Speaker 03

  I feel like there's some kind of joke about bird brains in there, but here we go.

• 0:53Regina Barber?

  All that on this episode of Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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• 2:30Speaker 03

  Okay, let's tackle them in order, which means we're starting with ADHD, so Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. I mean, I'll start by asking, is that actually a common topic of discussion on TikTok?

• 2:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's super common. So here's just a little sampling of what you might hear.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  For those of you who have ADHD, who is your favorite?

• 2:50Regina Barber?

  Five less well-known ADHD behaviors with doodles. Let's go. Number one.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  ADHD behaviors you didn't know about part two.

• 2:56Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and researchers wanted to take a closer look at some of these videos to see how accurate they were.

• 3:01Speaker 03

  And how did they go about doing that?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  So they had clinical psychologists rate the 100 most popular ADHD videos at the time on accuracy, and they found less than half of the claims made in these videos aligned with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or the DSM. This is a tool that mental health experts use to help diagnose and treat their patients.

• 3:23Regina Barber?

  Yeah, and none of the videos got a perfect score from clinicians. Many lacked nuance, like just because you listen to a song on repeat or you forget to text your friend back does not necessarily mean you have ADHD. It could be a lot of things like stress or sleep issues or a learning disability.

• 3:38Speaker 03

  Sure. So what is the concern here? Is it that people are going to these videos, going to TikTok, trying to get real information about their mental health and finding stuff that is not necessarily actual real information?

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the researchers also looked at how accurate young adults with and without ADHD perceived these videos to be. And even though they gave the less accurate videos correspondingly lower ratings, they still believed the content in the video was more accurate than the clinicians said it was. So the researchers published the details this week in the journal PLOS One, and the lead author, Vasilia Karasava, she's from the University of British Columbia, said this can be problematic. They can create tension between the healthcare professionals and the people who come in for help.

• 4:25Regina Barber?

  She says that if people are adamant they have ADHD based on these videos, it could prevent them from getting the help they need, since these symptoms could be rooted in, say, depression or anxiety.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  What is the guidance then for people who have been going to TikTok for mental health advice?

• 4:40Regina Barber?

  Well, first she says, see a therapist if you can. A lot of times, people are going to TikTok because it's easy, free, and it builds community. She also cautions against watching too much TikTok, because her team also found that people who consumed more TikTok are more likely to feel worse about their own symptoms. And she says, check the credentials of the TikTokers who are sharing medical advice.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Check the credentials. Excellent advice for all kinds of things. Okay.

• 5:05Regina Barber?

  Yes.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Next topic, let's talk about lightning creating life.

• 5:10Regina Barber?

  Yeah, so a recent study in the journal Science Advances gives new life to like an old hypothesis on how life was created on Earth with a spark of lightning. It's based on the Miller-Urey experiment from the 1950s. In this experiment, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey tried to recreate like a mini version of our atmosphere in a glass bulb. And this had hydrogen, methane, and ammonia and water vapor. And then they shot sparks into that mixture. And over time, chemical reactions created some of the building blocks of life, like amino acids.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  But there are problems with this hypothesis.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Hmm, cue Moody music. Okay, what are the problems with the hypothesis?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Well, lightning is intermittent and unpredictable. And the atmosphere is really, really big. So all of those new amino acids created could have just dissipated.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  Okay, so let's bring in the new study, which weighs in here, I'm guessing.

• 6:01Regina Barber?

  Yeah, totally. So scientists at Stanford noticed that when water breaks into droplets, like the spray of a hose or a crashing wave, those droplets become charged. You get bigger droplets that are positively charged and smaller ones that are negatively charged. And this difference in charge can result in a spark that lead researcher Richard Zare coined as microlightning.

• 6:21Speaker 05

  And you might think, well, everything about water is known. Well, no.

• 6:27Speaker 05

  It's never been seen before.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So, micro lightning is a spin on that old Miller-Urey experiment that demonstrates a kind of lightning could be partially responsible for the beginnings of life.

• 6:38Speaker 03

  I hear the emphasis on "could be partially responsible." Sounds like we've still got a ways to go before we get a definitive answer about how life first came to be here on Earth.

• 6:48Regina Barber?

  Yeah, we do want to stress that there are other hypotheses that could have contributed to the origins of life on Earth, maybe more than micro lightning. Some scientists think asteroid strikes or hydrothermal vents played a role. Plus, nobody knows the exact combo of gases in the early atmosphere. So, how life began on Earth is still a very highly debated question.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  Third item, and I'm not going to lie, I have been looking forward to this one. The final story: Why are neuroscientists studying parakeets?

• 7:16Speaker 02

  So, researchers have been trying to find an animal model they can use to study human speech because millions of Americans have some kind of communication disorder, be it difficulty producing words or planning out sentences in the brain. And a new study in the journal Nature says parakeets, that's type of parrot, could help highlight what happens when these systems break down.

• 7:36Speaker 03

  I am already learning because I will confess, I did not know parakeets were a type of parrot.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  I am.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Are we talking, I don't know, like Pollyanna Crocker type stuff?

• 7:46Regina Barber?

  Okay, not quite. The parakeets roamed around these like little arenas, doing their usual squawks and chirps like this.

• 7:56Regina Barber?

  And as the parakeets squawked, the scientists recorded the bird's brain activity.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  One of the study authors at NYU Langone Health, neuroscientist Michael Long, said one of the big questions was whether a parakeet's brain had any similarities to humans when it came to the production of sound.

• 8:12Speaker 06

  And the answer resoundingly was, it looked more like the kinds of circuits that we use in order to produce flexible speech.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  More like the kinds of brain circuits we use. What are the similarities between my brain and a parrot brain?

• 8:27Regina Barber?

  So, for the parakeets, there seem to be brain cells that represent different vowel sounds and brain cells that represent different consonant sounds. Michael compared it to a keyboard.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So, these keys, or neurons, allow the bird to produce specific vocal sounds. And they were looking at this activity in a cluster of neurons in the parrot brain that connects to motor neurons. And in humans, Michael says, we have a similar structure where different sounds correspond with different parts of these quote-unquote "keys."

• 8:54Regina Barber?

  And they found that the activity in the parrot's brains while they were making sounds was more similar to what happens when humans make sounds than it was to the other bird they looked at, zebra finches.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Hmm. So how useful a model might this be for studying human speech?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  We talked to a neurogeneticist in the field who wasn't involved in the work, Eric Jarvis. He was excited about the paper and says it helps move us closer to finding the most useful model for human speech. He did say spoken language exists on a spectrum, though.

• 9:25Speaker 07

  Spoken language is a continuum. The parrot species they looked at is further along that continuum, closer to humans than zebra finches are. But it's not like these principles are absent in the zebra finch.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Which means future research may find another bird with a brain even more similar to humans. But again, this is a great step toward better understanding human speech.

• 9:51Regina Barber?

  Mary Louise, thank you so much for having fun with us today. It was a pleasure.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. Always fun.

• 10:01Regina Barber?

  You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Elena Burnett. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher Antelata.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  Tyler Jones checked the facts. Jimmy Keely and Hannah Glovna were the audio engineers. I'm Burleigh McCoy.

• 10:22Regina Barber?

  And I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Short Wave, the science podcast from NPR.

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