Short Wave - What Experts Say About ADHD-Tok

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Ever diagnosed yourself with a mental health disorder based on a TikTok video? If so, you're not alone. "I personally don't think that there's anything more human than wanting to understand yourself and wanting to understand your own experiences," says Vasileia Karasavva. Vasileia is the lead author of a paper published Wednesday in the journal PLOS One that gets into why this kind of self-diagnosis can be such a double-edged sword.Listen to every episode of Short Wave sponsor-free and support our work at NPR by signing up for Short Wave+ at plus.npr.org/shortwave.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, ShoreWaver is Regina Barbara here. And Burley McCoy. With our biweekly Science News Roundup featuring the Mary Louise Kelly of all things considered. Hi, I hear we are going to talk about, among other things, the accuracy of TikTok videos about ADHD. And how life may have come from little bits of lightning. And why parakeets might be a good model. for studying human speech.

I feel like there's some kind of joke about bird brains in there, but here we go. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, let's tackle them in order, which means we're starting with ADHD, so attention, deficit, hyperactivity disorder. I mean, I'll start by asking, is that actually a common topic of discussion on TikTok? Yeah, it's super common. So here's just a little sampling of what you might hear. For those of you who have ADHD, who is your favorite?

Five less well-known ADHD behaviors with doodles. Let's go. Number one. ADHD behaviors, you didn't know about part two. Yeah, and researchers wanted to take a closer look at some of these videos to see how accurate they were. And how did they go about doing that? So they had clinical psychologists rate the 100 most popular ADHD videos at the time on accuracy. And they found less than half of the claims made in these videos aligned with the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disqualification. orders or the DSM. This is a tool that mental health experts use to help diagnose and treat

their patients. Yeah, and none of the videos got a perfect score from clinicians. Many lack nuance, like, just because you listen to a song on repeat or you forget to text your friend back does not necessarily mean you have ADHD. It could be a lot of things like stress or sleep issues or a learning disability. Sure. So what is the concern here? Is it that people are going to these videos, going to TikTok, trying to get real information about their mental health and finding stuff that is not necessarily actual real information. Yeah, well, the researchers also looked at how accurate young adults with and without ADHD perceived these videos to be.

And even though they gave the less accurate videos correspondingly lower ratings, they still believed the content in the video was more accurate than the clinicians said it was. So the researchers published the details this week in the journal Plus One, and the lead author Vasilia Karasava, she's from the University of British Columbia, said this can be problematic. They can create tension between the healthcare professionals and the people who come in for help. She says that if people are adamant, they have ADHD based on these videos, it could prevent them from getting the help they need, since these symptoms could be rooted in, say, depression or anxiety. What is the guidance then for people who have been going to TikTok for mental health advice? Well, first she says, see a therapist, if you can. A lot of times people are going to TikTok because it's easy, free, and it builds community.

She also cautions against watching too much TikTok because her team also found that people who consumed more TikTok are more likely to feel worse about their own symptoms. And she says, check the credentials of the TikTokers who are sharing medical advice. Check the credentials. Excellent advice for all kinds of things. Okay. Yes. Next topic, let's talk about lightning, creating life.

Yeah. So a recent study in the journal Science advances gives new life to like an old hypothesis on how life was created on Earth with a spark of lightning. It's based on the Miller-Yuri experiment from the 1950s. In this experiment, Stanley Miller and Harold Yuri tried to recreate like a mini version of our atmosphere in a glass bulb. And this had hydrogen, methane, and ammonia and water vapor. And then they shot sparks into that mixture. And over time, chemical reactions created some of the building blocks of life, like amino acids. But there are problems with this hypothesis. Hmm, Q, moody, music. Okay, what are the problems?

with the hypothesis? Well, lightning is intermittent and unpredictable, and the atmosphere is really, really big. So all of those new amino acids created could have just dissipated. Okay, so let's bring in the new study, which weighs in here, I'm guessing. Yeah, totally. So scientists at Stanford noticed that when water breaks into droplets, like the spray of a hose or a crashing wave, those droplets become charged. You get bigger droplets that are positively charged and smaller ones that are negatively charged.

And this difference in charge can result in a spark that lead researcher Richard Zaire coined as micro-lightening. And you might think, well, everything about water is known. Well, no. It's never been seen before. So micro-lightening is a spin on that old Miller-Uri experiment that demonstrates a kind of lightning could be partially responsible for the beginnings of life. I hear the emphasis on could be partially responsible. Sounds like we still got a ways to go before we get a definitive and, answer about how life first came to be here on Earth? Yeah, we do want to stress that there are other

hypotheses that could have contributed to the origins of life on Earth, maybe more than microlightening. Some scientists think asteroid strikes or hydrothermal vents played a role. Plus, nobody knows the exact combo of gases in the early atmosphere. So how life began on Earth is still a very highly debated question. Third item, and I'm not going to lie, I have been looking forward to this one. And the final story, why are neuroscientists studying parakeets? So researchers have been trying to find an animal model they can use to study human speech because millions of Americans have some kind of communication disorder, be it difficulty producing words or planning out sentences in the brain.

And a new study in the journal Nature says parakeets, that's type of parrot, could help highlight what happens when these systems break down. I am already learning because I will confess I did not know parakeets were a type of parrot. Are we talking, I don't know, like polywana cracker type stuff? Okay, not quite. The parakeets roamed around these little arenas doing their usual squawks and chirps like this. And as the parakeets squawked, the scientist recorded the bird's brain activity. One of the study authors at NYU Langone Health, neuroscientist Michael Long, said one of the big questions was whether a parakeet's brain had any similarities to humans when it is.

came to the production of sound. And the answer resoundingly was, it looked more like the kinds of circuits that we use in order to produce flexible speech. More like the kinds of brain circuits we use. What are the similarities between my brain and a parrot brain? So for the parakeets, there seem to be brain cells that represent different vowel sounds and brain cells that represent different consonant sounds. Michael compared it to a keyboard.

So these keys, or neurons, allow the bird to produce specific vocal sounds. And they were looking at this activity in a cluster of neurons in the parrot brain that connects to motor neurons. And in humans, Michael says, we have a similar structure where different sounds correspond with different parts of these quote-unquote keys. And they found that the activity in the parrot's brains while they were making sounds was more similar to what happens when humans make sounds than it was to the other bird they looked at, zebra finches. Hmm. So how useful a model might this be for studying human speech? We talked to a neurogeneticist in the field who wasn't involved in the work, Eric Jarvis. He was excited about the paper and says it helps move us closer to finding the

most useful model for human speech. He did say spoken language exists on a spectrum, though. Spoken language is a continuum. The parrot species they looked at is further along that continuum them closer to humans than zebra finches are, but it's not like these principles are absence in the zebra finch. Which means future research may find another bird with a brain even more similar to humans. But again, this is a great step toward better understanding human speech. Mary Louise, thank you so much for having fun with us today. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Always fun.

You can hear more of Mary Louise Kelly on Consider This NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson and Elena Burnett. It was edited by our showrunner Rebecca Ramirez and Christopher and Taliyata. Tyler Jones, check the facts. Jimmy Keeley and Hannah Glovena were the audio engineers. I'm Burley McCoy. And I'm Regina Barber. Thanks for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.