“I’ve Become More Myself”: Challenges and Benefits of Engaging with ADHD Short-Form Video Content and Communities
Nathalie Alexandra Tcherdakoff, Anna L. Cox, Jon Bird, Paul Marshall · 2026 · ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction · doi:10.1145/3778352
Summary
This qualitative interview study explores how 32 adult ADHDers relate to ADHD-focused Short-Form Video Content (SFVC) on TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts. The lead author — herself an ADHDer and SFVC user — uses reflexive thematic analysis grounded in feminist standpoint theory and the disability justice slogan 'Nothing About Us Without Us' to center participants' perspectives rather than treating them as passive subjects. Participants were recruited directly through the platforms under study and could choose video-call or direct-message interviews (including voice notes, text, and images) to accommodate diverse neurodivergent communication preferences. Ages ranged from 19 to 47 (median 25), and the sample deliberately included formally diagnosed, partially diagnosed, and self-identified ADHDers to reflect the uneven access to diagnosis, particularly for women, minority genders, and people of colour — the so-called 'Lost Generation'. The paper pushes back against dominant HCI narratives that frame ADHD SFVC users as 'ultimate victims' of the attention economy or focus exclusively on misinformation and overdiagnosis. Instead, it argues that ADHDers exercise meaningful agency through information seeking, self-regulation, misinformation management, and algorithm curation. Findings are organized into three themes: (1) how cultural stigma and perceptions of ADHD shape engagement, (2) how scrolling, sharing, and boundary-setting on these platforms affect emotions and behavior, and (3) how online engagement reshapes offline relationships, self-perception, and stigma. The study characterizes these ADHD SFVC spaces as 'unbounded' Online Health Community 'backstages' built on mainstream platforms rather than on dedicated forums.
Key findings
Participants worked actively to maintain agency in the attention economy: curating algorithms with 'Not Interested' buttons, deleting TikTok while retaining Instagram, avoiding comment sections, and using features like saved-content folders to manage ADHD time agnosia and impulsivity. SFVC gave many ADHDers shared vocabulary — Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria, body doubling, time agnosia, executive dysfunction, masking — that their clinicians and families had never provided. Eighteen participants reached formal diagnosis (or confirmed self-diagnosis) through paths that started on SFVC, contradicting the common framing of these platforms as drivers of overdiagnosis. Costs were significant: doom scrolling, 'revenge bedtime procrastination,' overstimulation, imposter syndrome triggered by 'bandwagon-jumping' creators, and distrust of the content's reliability. Benefits ran equally deep: community validation, reduced internalized ableism, challenged medical gaslighting by providing a 'spokesperson' to send to skeptical family, deepened relationships with other ADHDers (often using content as 'pebbling'), and novel functional uses of the platforms themselves — as fidget, background media during cleaning, sleep aid via ASMR content, or dopamine-regulating reward.
Relevance
For accessibility practitioners, this paper is a corrective to paternalistic HCI research that treats neurodivergent users as powerless against algorithmic platforms. Marginalized ADHDers are already doing sophisticated accessibility work — curating feeds, building community backstages, developing shared vocabulary, and creating coping systems — on platforms never designed for them, precisely because formal medical and information systems have failed to provide alternatives. The methodology models standpoint-informed, co-designed research where the lead researcher's lived experience is a stated methodological strength. Limitations include a UK-based, overwhelmingly female, predominantly Caucasian participant base and English-only analysis. Anyone building self-regulation tools, neurodivergent community features, or information-curation systems should read this before assuming ADHDers need to be protected from their own platform choices.
Tags: ADHD · neurodivergence · neurodiversity · social media · online communities · qualitative research · cognitive accessibility · disability studies · stigma · mental health · HCI