How YouTube Diagnosed me with ADHD
I mean it's just all those YouTube shorts squishing my attention span further and further meaning I can't possibly focus on anything anymore so I MUST have ADHD, right? In case my attempt at sarcasm wasn't obvious, no that's not how this works.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
When I talk about my ADHD diagnosis, I often talk about it from the perspective of being in leadership coach training and working with two new clients two days running and them both mentioning ADHD to me. This caused the pattern recognition to go off in my brain and I ran stats on my coachees and found out nearly 25% of the people I’d coached so far I knew were neurodivergent - way higher than the general population!
Through exploring whether I wanted to specialise in neurodivergent leadership coaching I began to be asked the question time and time again: “Are you sure you don’t have ADHD too?” Eventually it happened too often to just be a weird coincidence and I put in for my diagnosis.
But actually alongside that process, I was having my own questions and part of the reason for that is a little website that we all know and love: YouTube.
You see, the way the YouTube algorithm works at a high level is by analysing its suggestions in context of people who watch the things that you watch. So for example, I am a guinea-pig owner and have four lovely guinea pigs who I adore. At some point I started watching YouTube videos of guinea pigs, starting with one particular channel.
At that point, YouTube’s algorithm is categorising me, or giving me some kind of score that in some way marks me as “someone who will watch guinea pig content”, so YouTube starts serving up more and more guinea-pig related content to me.
In between me writing this blog post and me posting it, I sadly lost my precious guinea pig, Annie. I’m including her picture here as a memory, and because I want people to see how adorable and just amazing she was. I love you Annie.
Over time YouTube tries various different guinea-pig videos and finds that I like YouTubers who are guinea-pig owners talking about their experiences and educational channels rather than say memes or cartoons about guinea pigs.
Now YouTube has its bank of user watch data to fall back on and has found a pattern that there is a correlation between people who like educational videos about guinea pigs and people who like educational videos about hamsters and so starts suggesting me educational videos about hamsters.
YouTube doesn’t know that I’m ride or die guinea pig yet but I don’t click those and the algorithm updates its data on me to know that guinea pigs and I are exclusive when it comes to the rodent world.
So YouTube is constantly doing this. It’s optimising for a goal: to get people to stay on the website as long as possible so it can serve more ads and make more money. In order to do that, it needs to recommend content that its algorithm thinks that you want to watch.
Now I’ve been on YouTube since fairly early on in its existence and the content I watched as a teenager is very different to the content I watch as an adult, with some channels falling into and out of favour as my interests change and I go through different seasons of life.
It’s funny to think how many creators now have filming set ups like this when back in the day it was just people in their bedrooms with webcams.
When I look back I can see that the latest season of life from my YouTube watch preferences point of view started roughly in the pandemic when like many of us I was stuck at home watching more videos than I would usually to pass some of the larger quantity of free time I had.
I don’t know exactly what it was that tipped the algorithm off, I actually find it interesting that around the time I actually got the diagnosis and since then a number of YouTubers that I follow have announced their own neurodivergent diagnoses, but I do know that there’s a big correlation with neurodivergence and The Sims and it’s a game I still watch a fair bit of content about!
Alright I was half joking about The Sims. While it is true that it’s kind of a calling card of the neurodivergent community I actually think something was happening on a much more basic, more psychological level.
The hours I have put into the Sims ever since I was a kid!!
It’s widely known that we like people who are similar to us in some ways. If I find another guinea-pig lover, then I know we share at least one interest which makes conversing easier, and I know they are probably going to have qualities I like in a person; like that they care for animals or are a little bit quirky in that they love an animal that most people dismiss.
Similarly, when someone who is neurodivergent finds another neurodivergent person, we often feel drawn to them, and usually without realising it. That doesn’t mean to say that every neurodivergent person is going to get on with every other neurodivergent person - I’ve definitely found others with ADHD that I don’t get on with - but for a neurodivergent person with a similar flavour of neurodivergence to us? There’s definitely a similarity that attracts us.
When I think of all of the YouTubers that I watch that have been diagnosed in the past few years, I definitely watch them because I like their personality as well as their content. Some of them are gaming channels, some are educational, some are activists, some are comedians. They span a wide range of my viewing topics and so it would be very hard for me as an individual to spot the connection between all the people I watch.
But I don’t have the data that YouTube has.
You see, I might be the only person in the world who watches the exact set of YouTubers that I watch (although maybe not!) but YouTube has different data. It has data on people who overlap with maybe two or three of my watching habits and it starts to offer up things that they also watch. And the more likely it thinks I am to watch it (ie the more people similar to me watch it) the more it’s going to show these videos to me.
Look, this blog post has given me chance to share pictures of my guinea-pigs and I’m going to take it.
So it’s probably not too much of a stretch to say that my viewing habits overlapped with other neurospicies because I started getting recommended ADHD videos.
Now putting this into the context of my life, I was well aware of what ADHD was. Neurodivergence is present in my family and had many many friends who were ADHD (but I didn’t notice the similarity factor back then). And by the time I had started to notice the ADHD recommendations I was already starting to question whether or not I had ADHD myself.
But I didn’t click them. Not a single one. It may seem counter-intuitive: why wouldn’t I click one if I thought I might have ADHD? But it was exactly because I thought I might have ADHD that I didn’t click one. I was concerned that if I watched videos about ADHD, I’d convince myself I had ADHD and that if, when I went to my diagnosis, I came back as not having ADHD, I would have wrongly taken up space in a community that wasn’t mine to take up, that I would have claimed an identity that I had no right to claim.
I mean come on, past Leigh. Firstly, it was just watching a video, I wasn’t taking up space or claiming something. But also, isn’t it the just most ADHD thing ever to have rejection sensitivity about failing your ADHD diagnosis before you even get to your ADHD diagnosis?!
I think now is a good time to talk a little bit about gatekeeping in the neurodivergent community. I think this is an entirely separate topic that deserves its own deep dive but I wanted to say that I have noticed a rhetoric that people are getting diagnosed with ADHD, autism and other forms of neurodivergence too easily now.
I come up against it personally because I am someone who, yes, does get frustrated by my ADHD, but mostly tries to focus on the strengths of my ADHD because I refuse to wallow in my weaknesses. That doesn’t mean my struggles with ADHD are less valid.
There’s also a pushback against self-diagnosis as if they are taking up resources that “real” neurodivergent people need. This completely ignores the fact that people who self-diagnose are very, very rarely accessing any resources and are usually self-diagnosing because of a lack of resources that mean they can’t get diagnosed.
This gatekeeping stopped me from clicking on videos to find out more about ADHD, something it turns out I do have.
Yet the videos kept coming. YouTube didn’t give up on me and ADHD like it had given up on me and hamsters. Something in the algorithm, in its data, meant that I was scoring high enough on similarity that soon enough I was going to click on something about ADHD.
There was one ADHD video, just one, that I watched before my diagnosis that I couldn’t help myself from clicking on. It was called “The Struggle to Relax: Why ADHD Makes it Tough” by Jessica McCabe on her channel How to ADHD.
Talk about succeeding at the title game! I hesitated at seeing the word ‘ADHD’ but the struggle to relax is one I felt all too well and the burning curiosity overcame my hesitation. I clicked. And I watched the most relatable video I have ever watched in my life.
This was about month before I got diagnosed. I was pretty sure I had ADHD from that video but, you know, rejection sensitivity and all. I went into my diagnosis pretty unsure of whether or not I was going to get diagnosed and after some extra deliberation time, because I don’t present super typically for ADHD, I got the result back: ADHD.
From there I had permission to click the videos and click them I did. I found creator after creator with interesting life experiences, educational stories, funny anecdotes. I read articles, papers, books. I joined communities and talked to my fellow ADHDers. It became my hyperfixation and I absorbed everything I could about it.
Shortly after I gave in to watching ADHD related content on YouTube, another pattern started appearing. Autism videos. Now statistics vary but there’s quite a significant overlap between ADHD and Autism but I took the same response and brushed it off. There’s no way I’m autistic too, I just have ADHD.
But the videos kept coming. More of my favourite Youtubers announced their autism diagnoses. More of my AuDHD friends, some new found, some I’d known for years, kindly suggested I might be autistic as well.
This time, I’m not avoiding it. I absorb as much content as I can on Autism because it’s important for me to understand it for my clients as much as for myself. I also read about Tourette’s Syndrome, Dyslexia and other forms of neurodivergence, not because I think I have them, but because there’s so much overlap between all the different forms of neurodivergence and I want to show up for the neurodivergent leaders that I coach as best I can. And frankly, wouldn’t society be better if we were all just a little more educated about it?
Now I’m not saying that if you’re reading this then you’re ADHD or neurodivergent in general. You might be but you should do your own research and if you can speak to a professional about it to find out. I’m not in the business of diagnosing anyone with anything, just sharing my own personal experience.
But if there’s one thing that my personal experience has taught me about this it’s that there is something special about YouTube and the space it creates for those of us who are neurodivergent. I know for me that YouTube helped me find my tribe and acceptance within a world that is not always built with neurodivergence in mind. And for me, that’s really important.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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