> But it just feels ethically wrong to promote your services to people who are "undiagnosed" or "think they have" ADHD.
You don't have to 'actually have' ADHD (whatever that means!) to benefit from advice, habits, or practices typically leveraged by ADHDers. You just have to have a similar enough struggle that works in a similar enough way that those techniques help you somewhat. Whether you have ADHD matters way less than whether those things help you.
That said, idk how to really evaluate for-profit companies orienting themselves around the ADHD label to provide services along those lines as opposed to freely associating online communities or whatever.
But the truth is that just like with an actual therapist (or medication) you actually have to evaluate the efficacy of the treatment for yourself. There actually isn't a formula for treating ADHD, and it's not something you can just hand off to someone else. In that respect, services like this are no different from their more authoritative counterparts in psychiatry or psychology.
> This is exactly what social media is doing today in the sense of trying to convince you have something because you happen to engage in said content.
Not quite, imo. The TikTok phenomenon is decidedly less practical (that is, less about doing anything) and more identitarian. It's about asserting membership in an informal group and differentiating yourself from others. It's 'finding yourself' like teens and young adults have always done laden so heavily with (sloppy use of) medicalizing language and a tendency to essentialize, run a bit amok. It's also innocent stuff, like in-jokes about the catharsis of finding a suitable label, of discovering that your struggles aren't totally idiosyncratic but 'a thing'.
But 'if you think you might have ADHD, check this thing out' isn't at all the same thing as 'if you laughed at this meme, you have ADHD'.
Good points, but when you say it is less practical, how do you figure? More people than ever are using social media and AI to self-diagnose. So much that the surgeon general issued an advisory on mental health and scholars like Jonathan Haidt have been sounding off the alarms in the last few years.
You don't have to 'actually have' ADHD (whatever that means!) to benefit from advice, habits, or practices typically leveraged by ADHDers. You just have to have a similar enough struggle that works in a similar enough way that those techniques help you somewhat. Whether you have ADHD matters way less than whether those things help you.
That said, idk how to really evaluate for-profit companies orienting themselves around the ADHD label to provide services along those lines as opposed to freely associating online communities or whatever.
But the truth is that just like with an actual therapist (or medication) you actually have to evaluate the efficacy of the treatment for yourself. There actually isn't a formula for treating ADHD, and it's not something you can just hand off to someone else. In that respect, services like this are no different from their more authoritative counterparts in psychiatry or psychology.
> This is exactly what social media is doing today in the sense of trying to convince you have something because you happen to engage in said content.
Not quite, imo. The TikTok phenomenon is decidedly less practical (that is, less about doing anything) and more identitarian. It's about asserting membership in an informal group and differentiating yourself from others. It's 'finding yourself' like teens and young adults have always done laden so heavily with (sloppy use of) medicalizing language and a tendency to essentialize, run a bit amok. It's also innocent stuff, like in-jokes about the catharsis of finding a suitable label, of discovering that your struggles aren't totally idiosyncratic but 'a thing'.
But 'if you think you might have ADHD, check this thing out' isn't at all the same thing as 'if you laughed at this meme, you have ADHD'.