When ADHD Becomes Too Relatable
Social media has helped more people recognise ADHD than ever before. But what can get lost when recognition becomes our understanding of the disorder?
There was something incredibly comforting about the ADHD content I found after I was diagnosed.
I’d watch someone talk about walking into a room and forgetting why they were there, see another person laughing about the number of unfinished projects in their house, or come across someone who had apparently also bought a small stationery shop’s worth of notebooks in the belief that the right one might finally organise their life.
And I’d think, Oh my gosh. Other people do this too.
That kind of recognition can matter enormously when you’ve spent years coming up with much harsher explanations for the same experiences. Maybe you thought you were disorganised, unreliable, too sensitive or simply not trying hard enough. Then suddenly someone describes something you know intimately, and they’re talking about ADHD.
Social media has made those moments possible on an extraordinary scale. For some people, recognition has prompted them to learn more or seek an assessment. For others, it has given them new language for experiences they’re trying to understand after diagnosis.
I think that visibility has done something genuinely valuable.
But there’s a question I’ve found myself coming back to more recently.
What happens when the parts of ADHD that are easiest to relate to become the way we understand ADHD itself?
Why ADHD can feel so relatable
Many of the experiences we talk about in relation to ADHD are surprisingly ordinary when we look at them one at a time.
People forget appointments. They procrastinate. They lose their keys, become distracted halfway through a task, underestimate how long something will take or become intensely interested in something before moving on.
You don’t need to have ADHD to experience any of those things.
That can seem confusing when the same experiences appear again and again in ADHD content, but ADHD has never been defined by whether someone occasionally does something that other people also do. What matters clinically is the broader and persistent pattern of symptoms, whether they occur across different areas of life, and whether they interfere with functioning or development. Functional impairment is an important part of understanding adult ADHD, rather than something separate from the symptoms themselves.
So losing your keys tells us very little by itself.
What becomes more useful is understanding what surrounds that moment. How often are difficulties occurring? Where else do they show up? How persistent have they been? How much effort is someone putting into compensating for them? And what impact are they having on that person’s life?
The individual experience may be highly relatable.
The pattern surrounding it may be very different.
The ADHD that travels well online
Social media is extraordinarily good at giving us small moments we can recognise quickly.
The messy kitchen. The forgotten appointment. The impulse purchase. The thirty browser tabs. The hobby that became an all-consuming passion for three weeks before quietly disappearing into a cupboard.
They work because they don’t require much explanation. You can see something familiar, laugh, send it to a friend and say THIS IS ME before you’ve even reached the end of the reel.
And those absolutely can be real experiences of people with ADHD.
The problem comes when we start mistaking the examples for the condition itself.
Research examining popular ADHD content on TikTok gives us some reason to be careful here. In one study of 100 highly popular ADHD videos, researchers classified 52% as misleading, 27% as personal experience and only 21% as useful. The videos tended to be highly understandable, which is part of what makes short-form content so accessible, but understandability and accuracy aren’t necessarily the same thing.
More recent research has found a similar tension. In a 2025 study of popular #ADHD TikToks, fewer than half of the claims about ADHD symptoms were judged by clinical psychologists to align with DSM diagnostic criteria.
That doesn’t mean TikTok is bad, relatable content is misinformation, or every ADHD creator needs to turn a thirty-second reel into a diagnostic manual.
It does mean there’s a lot of room for context to disappear.
The parts of ADHD that don’t travel quite so well
ADHD doesn’t stay in the kitchen with the keys you can’t find.
It comes to work with you. It can follow you through education, friendships and intimate relationships. It can affect finances, family life, health and the ordinary responsibilities involved in keeping a life moving.
Sometimes those effects are relatively small. Sometimes they aren’t.
Someone might repeatedly struggle at work despite being capable and desperately wanting to do well. A friendship might slowly disappear under months of unanswered messages and cancelled plans. A couple might find themselves having the same arguments about forgotten responsibilities, emotional reactions or impulsive decisions, even though both people are exhausted by the pattern.
A substantial review of adult ADHD research describes functional impairments as widespread and cumulative, including effects on social, educational and occupational functioning and quality of life.
There are more serious risks within the wider picture too. ADHD and substance use disorders frequently co-occur, and the relationship between the two is an established area of clinical research.
None of this means every person with ADHD will lose jobs, experience serious relationship problems, struggle financially or develop an addiction. Those outcomes aren’t the “real ADHD” while forgotten keys are the frivolous version.
They’re part of a much wider spectrum of impact.
And I think we should be able to talk about that without making ADHD sound tragic or asking anyone to feel sorry for us.
Sometimes ADHD is funny. Sometimes the memes are painfully accurate. Sometimes sharing one with someone who gets it provides exactly the kind of connection we need.
But there are also parts of living with ADHD that are difficult, disruptive and occasionally devastating.
They belong in the picture too.
Why “everyone does that” misses something important
If you’ve ever tried to explain an ADHD difficulty and heard everyone does that, you probably know how dismissive those words can feel.
But there’s an uncomfortable reason the argument can sound convincing.
Everyone does do many of these things.
Most people get distracted. Most people procrastinate sometimes. Most people forget things or struggle to organise themselves when they’re tired, stressed or overwhelmed.
Nobody is being diagnosed with ADHD because they lost their keys.
The distinction isn’t that people with ADHD experience a completely separate set of human behaviours. It’s what happens when those difficulties form a persistent pattern and begin interfering with someone’s ability to function.
That distinction is much harder to see in a five-second clip of somebody looking for their phone.
So if someone’s main exposure to ADHD is a stream of videos about messy kitchens, forgotten emails and unfinished hobbies, it isn’t particularly surprising that they might wonder how any of those experiences amount to a disorder.
The examples aren’t necessarily inaccurate.
They’re incomplete.
When visibility and understanding aren’t the same thing
This is where I think things get particularly interesting.
ADHD is enormously visible online. People are talking openly about experiences that were once rarely discussed, and social media has given people opportunities to find one another, share language and recognise things they may previously have carried alone.
But greater visibility doesn’t automatically create greater understanding.
In a 2025 experiment involving 490 college students, participants who were shown inaccurate ADHD TikTok content subsequently demonstrated less accurate knowledge about ADHD. What’s particularly striking is that their confidence in their ADHD knowledge increased. Participants shown accurate ADHD content, by contrast, increased both their knowledge and their confidence in it.
I think that distinction matters.
We can feel increasingly familiar with ADHD without necessarily understanding it more accurately.
And that creates a strange contradiction.
The online conversation that has helped many people recognise ADHD can also strip away some of the context needed to understand what ADHD actually is.
I don’t think it would be fair to jump from that to saying relatable content is responsible for people dismissing ADHD. The research doesn’t establish that, and public attitudes towards ADHD are shaped by far more than social media.
But I do think it’s worth asking what happens when the most visible version of a complex disorder is the version that can be understood in a few seconds.
A Moment to Wonder
As you’ve learned more about ADHD, you may have come across experiences that felt uncannily familiar, and others that didn’t sound like you at all.
You might wonder what you’ve learned about your own ADHD through recognising yourself in other people, and what has become clearer only as you’ve begun to understand what might sit underneath those experiences.
No need to decide what any of it means. Just notice what comes to mind.
Recognition can still be a valuable beginning
None of this makes me want relatable ADHD content to disappear.
I still have those moments of seeing something and thinking, Yep. That’s painfully familiar.
Sometimes recognition gives us language for an experience we’ve struggled to describe. Sometimes it loosens some of the shame around something we’ve spent years judging ourselves for. Sometimes it’s simply nice to know another person understands.
The difficulty comes when recognition is expected to tell us more than it can.
Seeing someone forget an appointment and thinking I do that too tells you that you share an experience. It doesn’t tell you why either of you forgot the appointment, whether ADHD was responsible, or what else might be happening around it.
The reverse matters too.
If you don’t relate to somebody else’s ADHD experience, that doesn’t tell you very much about your own diagnosis.
One person might regularly forget appointments, while another checks their calendar six times because they know how easily they forget things and have built their life around preventing it. One person might visibly fidget throughout a meeting, while another has spent years learning to sit completely still.
Adults can develop compensatory strategies to reduce or conceal the disruptive effects of ADHD, which is another reason outward behaviour doesn’t necessarily tell us the whole story.
Understanding ADHD gives us a framework for becoming curious about those differences instead of searching for a single version we’re supposed to match.
And I think that’s much more interesting than collecting enough relatable moments to prove we belong.
What comes after “that’s me”?
Maybe that’s where social media is most useful.
It can give us that first moment of recognition: Wait. That’s me.
We don’t need to stop having it. We just need somewhere to go afterwards.
We can learn what ADHD actually is rather than trying to piece together a definition from whichever experiences happen to appear most often in our feeds. We can begin understanding the processes that may sit underneath the behaviours we recognise, and why similar difficulties can look remarkably different from one person to another.
Then we can bring that understanding back to our own lives without needing every experience to fit neatly into an ADHD-shaped box.
Eventually, the question becomes less about whether other people with ADHD do the same things we do and more about what might actually be happening for us.
Because someone else’s story can help us recognise something.
Understanding gives us more room to make sense of our own.
Keep exploring
If you’re interested in moving beyond individual traits and learning more about how ADHD can show up differently from one person to another, continue exploring the Making Sense of ADHD collection in the Through the Disconnect article library.
And if you’re still near the beginning of all this, A Place to Begin is a free interactive learning experience designed to give you somewhere to start without turning understanding your ADHD into another thing you need to get right.
References
Karasavva, V., et al. (2025). A double-edged hashtag: Evaluation of #ADHD-related TikTok content and its associations with perceptions of ADHD.
Kosheleff, A. R., Mason, O., Jain, R., Koch, J., & Rubin, J. (2023). Functional impairments associated with ADHD in adulthood and the impact of pharmacological treatment. Journal of Attention Disorders, 27(7), 669–697.
Schiros, A., Bowman, N., & Antshel, K. (2025). Misinformation mayhem: The effects of TikTok content on ADHD knowledge, stigma, and treatment-seeking intentions. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 34(11), 3521–3533.
Yeung, A., Ng, E., & Abi-Jaoude, E. (2022). TikTok and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder: A cross-sectional study of social media content quality. The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry.
Young, S., et al. (2020). Assessment and treatment of substance use in adults with ADHD: A psychological approach.
