“While online tests and TikTok videos may seem like quick and easy tools for self-diagnosis, they often lack the depth and accuracy needed to properly understand complex conditions.” Instead, Pickering recommends using any online tests as a “a first step in understanding whether you may need a full, professional assessment or as a basis for a discussion with your GP.” But with an ADHD diagnosis backlog of eight years, and the autism waitlist reaching record numbers in 2023, this may not be as easy as it sounds.
How the internet diagnosed the entire world with autism and ADHD There hasn’t been a single week in the past few years where I haven’t wondered whether I have ADHD or autism.
The incidence of ADHD amongst adults under 30 has increased twentyfold in recent years (from 2000 to 2018), according to a study by UCL researchers, and a 2021 study found a 787 per cent rise in the number of autism diagnoses across all age groups between 1998 and 2018 in the UK.
An article in the Australian Psychological Society similarly posited whether ADHD could be having its time in the sun, saying: “In a growing reversal of its historically negative associations as the ‘naughty boy syndrome’, there’s now an increasingly positive identification of it as a ‘superpower’ of creativity and originality.” Autism’s connections to the powerful tech bros that now occupy the world’s ruling class may have given it a similarly glossy makeover.
“One of the main concerns with increasing awareness of mental health is misdiagnosis,” says Dr Andrea Pickering, a consultant clinical psychiatrist with expertise in autism diagnoses and ADHD treatment.
