The Medicalization of Everyday Experiences as Symptoms: A Digital Ethnography of ADHD-related Social Media Content
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Date
2024-03
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Abstract
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is increasingly prevalent in American society (Smith, 2012), evident not only in rising diagnoses, but also in the recent increase of ADHD-related social media content. Much of this content presents the personal experiences of living with the disorder as an adult. While previous research into ADHD-related social media posts has explored levels of misinformation within the content (Yeung et al. 2022), it is still unknown exactly how content creators are presenting their experiences of having ADHD and their symptoms. This paper aims to explore just that, by adopting a digital ethnographic approach to examine ADHD-related Facebook, Instagram and TikTok posts and comments to discover how ADHD is presented and understood on social media.
Throughout my 18-month-long digital ethnographic inquiry across these three social media platforms, I analyzed the discursive, memetic, and visual aspects of this ADHD-related content, paying close attention to the symptoms that are listed in these posts, and the general sentiment attached to the experiences that content creators share. I find that many of the ‘symptoms’ presented in this content (such as zoning out, being forgetful, fidgeting, etc.) are actually best understood as quotidian lived experiences of our neoliberal socio-cultural context, that are being reframed by content creators as medicalized diagnostic criteria – despite not being recognized as official symptoms or diagnostic criteria by medical professionals. This, I claim, helps create an environment in which almost anyone can understand themselves to have ADHD and self-identify as having the disorder. I also discover that much of this social media content rejects the notion of ADHD as a debilitating disorder and reframes it as a neurological ‘superpower’ and modern-day ‘life-hack’. As such, my research shows that ADHD-related social media content both medicalizes and glorifies everyday struggles, thus reducing ADHD to an online trend and personality trait that contributes to the delegitimization of the disorder.
This paper therefore argues that, contrary to previous research on online health discourse, ADHD social media content is not simply a source of advocacy, awareness, and activism; rather, this vernacular discourse of embodied ADHD knowledge on social media is 1) actively changing widespread conceptions of what ADHD is, 2) challenges medical definitions of what it means to have ADHD in the 21st century, and 3) impacts who is considered an authoritative source of knowledge on mental health and the body. With this in mind, this paper makes several significant contributions to the fields of medical humanities, science and technology studies, and qualitative social media studies. Firstly, it highlights how the socio-political context of neoliberalism impacts what behavior becomes medicalized and what can be considered normative and disordered behavior. Secondly, the paper illuminates how digital and media technologies shape understandings of mental health and symptoms of disorders.
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Humanities: 1st Place (The Ohio State University Edward F. Hayes Advanced Research
Forum)
Keywords
ADHD, social media, digital ethnography