4 ms·
As a roughly neurotypical person who watches a lot of YouTube, I find that ADHD-adjacent content is one of those recommendation spirals where if you click one v
by DavidPiper 2y ago
As a roughly neurotypical person who watches a lot of YouTube, I find that ADHD-adjacent content is one of those recommendation spirals where if you click one video that even mentions ADHD in its content (e.g. "How to tidy your home with the Marie Kondo method") the algorithm will recommend you content explicitly addressing ADHD (e.g. "The best way to take notes with ADHD") for weeks.
After clicking through a few of them that seemed interesting, I discovered the same thing you did: most of them take a very typical day-to-day problem (need to organise my wardrobe, need to organise my notes better) and frame it as an explicitly ADHD problem.
I'm glad we live in a time of greater awareness, and I'm glad people are receiving useful diagnoses that lead to management that improves peoples' quality of life. I'm very happy for people who eventually find ADHD can be their superpower rather than a detriment.
But I do wonder if there's a quiet grift going on (maybe just on YouTube? Not sure) taking advantage of this. There are a lot of people saying "You have ADHD therefore you have this specific problem that neurotypical people don't" - where the first half might be true, but the second half is not.
Which seems to me to be framing the identity / otherness-from-neurotypical-ness in an unhealthy way in order to push more content. And possibly leading to the over-attribution of everything to ADHD rather than just... life.
Again, I don't want to minimise the impact of ADHD or the problems it can create for people, but this is definitely a pattern I've seen pop up on the Internet only in the last 5 or 6 years.