Healthcare (Commonwealth Union) – The neurodevelopment condition attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) generally shows symptoms such as inattention, hyperactivity and impulsivity.
Rising public attention around ADHD might be causing some young adults to incorrectly believe they have the condition, according to researchers at the University of Toronto (U of T).
In findings published in Psychological Medicine, the team reports that mental health awareness campaigns—while intended to help people spot symptoms and access support—can unintentionally lead to incorrect self-diagnosis.
The study also found that giving people a brief lesson on the “nocebo” effect—where simply expecting to have a condition can make ordinary experiences feel like symptoms—helps reduce the chances of misidentifying themselves as having ADHD.
The lead author Dasha Sandra, a PhD candidate in the psychology department at U of T Scarborough indicated that their goal was to see whether awareness initiatives carry any drawbacks and to find a more balanced approach, one that informs people about a condition without causing unintended problems.
Sandra’s research team carried out a randomized controlled study involving 215 young adults aged 18 to 25 who showed no clinical indicators of ADHD and had never been diagnosed with it. Participants were placed into one of three workshop groups: an ADHD-focused session, an ADHD session that included a brief 10-minute explanation of the nocebo effect, and a control session that focused on sleep.
Individuals who were given only the ADHD awareness workshop became more convinced that they had ADHD both immediately afterward and again one week later, despite no real change in their symptoms. In this group, the proportion of participants who gave themselves a high self-diagnosis rating jumped from 30% to 60% right after the session, and still sat at 50% a week later.
Among those who also received the nocebo explanation, the rate of inaccurate self-diagnosis dropped by half right away and fell to zero after one week.
Sandra notes that the results illustrate how mental-health awareness campaigns can cause ordinary experiences to be misinterpreted as subtle signs of a condition, prompting people to mistakenly believe they have a disorder. She adds that this may occur because having a label or diagnosis can feel like a reassuring way to make sense of unpredictable or confusing difficulties.
“Believing you have a disorder can help make sense of confusing or messy experiences that are actually completely normal,” explained Sandra, whose prior studies has evaluated the placebo effect. “This could be especially true for young adults.”
The research is the first to explore how ADHD awareness efforts can unintentionally lead to mistaken self-diagnosis—and how those beliefs can linger. It also provides the first evidence that adding explanations of the nocebo effect to mental health education can help counter this issue.
The nocebo effect is well known in medical settings. For instance, people in clinical trials often report side effects from inactive pills simply because they expect to feel them. Educating participants about this phenomenon has been shown to lessen these imagined reactions.
Researchers for Sandra’s team made adjustments for this idea for mental health by forming a brief, 10-minute module that teaches strategies for bringing down nocebo-related thinking. The lesson highlights, for example, that feeling tired, irritable, or unfocused is common among university students and doesn’t automatically point to a mental health condition.
As indicated by Sandra, this kind of guidance has the possibility of assisting young adults learn these experiences as typical parts of student life instead of signs of ADHD, and could be easily incorporated into awareness campaigns or online materials.
She stresses that the goal isn’t to deter people from seeking support, but to help them interpret their symptoms more accurately as part of a balanced approach to mental health education.
