Dr. TikTok

I'm currently working on a project examining how TikTok is influencing the diagnostic categories and (self-)diagnosis of ADHD and autism.

This research asks the question How do the affordances, constraints, and discursive form of the interactive social media platform TikTok mediate the fashioning of autism and ADHD as diagnostic categories?

I argue that "Dr. TikTok" is a distinct iteration of "Dr. Google" (Jutel 2017), or sufferers' use of internet-enabled tools to either bring information to their diagnosing medical professionals or make a self-diagnosis.

TikTok is unique in its foregrounding of its content recommendation algorithm in the user experience- users are aware of (and often attached to) "their" algorithms (see Siles González and Meléndez Moran 2021). TikTok video creators also use their knowledge of the algorithm to make their content appealing (for example, by referring to the user in the second person; "you were meant to see this video because...").

The TikTok algorithm is thus helping to refashion both the discourse around and the diagnostic boundaries of the categories of ADHD and autism.

I presented my preliminary findings from this research at the ASA Annual Meeting in Montreal in August 2024 (though some phases of this research are still in progress).