More people are relying on social media – like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Reddit – to learn about mental health conditions and interact with people who have shared experiences.
These are not only long-known disorders such as depression, anxiety and schizophrenia. They also include conditions often placed under the “neurodevian” umbrella, such as autism, ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), Tourette’s syndrome, and dyslexia.
For example, on TikTok the hashtag #adhd had more than 50 billion views.
We wanted to explore how social media platforms shape the way we understand mental health. So we analyzed more than 14 million posts and comments about mental health on Reddit.
We are seeing a shift in conversations towards ADHD and autism, and away from anxiety and depression.
Our findings have important implications for how people understand and seek help for mental health problems.
A complex relationship
Social media coverage of mental health has made it more visible, with some positive effects. He probably has reduce the stigma of mental illness and increased usage of mental health services.
However, it also has disadvantages. It can cause or worsen eating disordersmay contribute to the spread of symptoms (such as tic-like behaviors), and has been attributed to the rise of disputants self-diagnoses.
Misinformation is common in social media conversations about mental health. A study found most of the most popular TikTok videos related to ADHD were misleading. Inaccurate information about many other mental health conditions in social media it is common.
Conversations change and evolve
Mental health content hasn’t just grown in volume. Some conditions are attracting more and more attention, others have fallen out of sight and the relationships between them have changed.
In ours Reddit study published last year, we found that as larger ADHD and autism-related communities (subreddits) became more prominent from 2012 to 2022, their content became progressively more similar and their users increasingly overlapped.
Discussions in both communities increasingly emphasized the experiences of adults, challenges in accessing diagnostic assessments, and struggles with personal relationships.
This growing convergence of these two conditions on Reddit shows how social media can reshape representations of mental health.
Our latest study takes this further
In ours new studywe analyzed more than 14 million posts and comments from many of the largest mental health communities on Reddit.
The 14 communities we studied included those related to mood, anxiety, trauma, personality, dissociation, and psychosis, as well as those focused on conditions often placed under the umbrella of “neurodisorders,” such as autism, ADHD, Tourette’s syndrome, and dyslexia.
We investigated how the people belonging to these communities and the language they used changed from 2015 to 2022.
We explored which communities became more or less tightly connected over time – sharing more or fewer members and containing posts and comments with similar or different linguistic content. We also examined whether these changes reflected changes in the amount of attention received by the 14 conditions.
Although our analysis only covered a seven-year period, it revealed a striking pattern of change. The two charts show how the 14 communities were interconnected at the beginning and end of the period.
The size of the circles represents the relative size of the communities. The width of the links between them shows how closely they were connected.
In 2015, depression and anxiety were prominent mental health communities on Reddit. They were among the most active, and their membership and content overlapped with those of many other communities. In this sense, they were “central” to the network.
However, by 2022, the ADHD and autism communities had become more popular and prominent, replacing depression and anxiety. ADHD, autism, and other neurodeviant conditions were more closely connected to other communities and thus more central to the network.
These analyzes suggest that on Reddit the mental health landscape has been reshaped. Mood and anxiety disorders once dominated discussions. But conversations about mental health have increasingly shifted to discussing the conditions associated with being neurodeviant.
Reddit users are not representative of the general population. tend to be younger, male, more educated and have a higher income. However, our study offers important insights into changes in mental health discussions on a social media platform over time.
Why does it matter?
The increasing prominence and centrality of ADHD and autism make them increasingly popular explanations for mental health problems. This can promote accurate self-diagnosis by people who might not have previously recognized the nature of their difficulties.
However, it could also lead people to misinterpret and wrong tag their experiences as ADHD and autism when there is another explanation.
The increased visibility of these conditions on social media can also lead people to interpret mood or anxiety symptoms as signs of ADHD or autism.
Misinterpretations can lead people to seek inappropriate diagnoses or unhelpful treatment, delaying access to the help they need. This in turn puts increasing pressure on mental health services and can lead to other conditions being overlooked.
