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Matilda Bosley realized she had ADHD after watching videos on TikTok.

If you feel inclined to roll your eyes, she knows how that sounds.

It used to be a story that I was really embarrassed to Tattlet, be like very sheepish about it. What changed? Why are you not embarrassed now? Because that's everyone's

story now. And now it is the story of how a lot of adult women and a lot of adult men as well

find out they have ADHD, which is that I was on TikTok.

This is all in the mind. I'm Sana Khadar. And it's true, the number of people being diagnosed with ADHD is rising. Take, for example, the four-year period between 2018 and 2022.

So in 2018, just over 186,000 patients were treated for the condition. By 2022,

that number had risen to nearly 414,000. And there's been plenty of hand-wringing about this.

Like, is this a troubling trend, an issue of over-diagnosis fueled in part by social media? Or is it a troubling trend? An issue of overdiagnosis fueled in part by social media?

Or is it a promising correction?

A sign of just how underdiagnosed ADHD has been,

especially in people who don't fit the stereotype of a fidgety boy.

That discussion continues in the background,

but for people like Matilda, who get a diagnosis

in adulthood, after a lifetime of feeling deficient, the news is like a revelation.

And I just sort of burst out into tears crying very deeply, and he was sort of saying,

oh yeah, no, no, it can be hard to get this news and I was

sort of like wiping the snot like actively from my nose being like, no, no, no, this is like the

best news I've ever heard. And it's such a relief and I was so terrified that, yeah, I was going to

go in and the answer was going to be like, no, sorry, you are just hopeless. And, you know, I like to believe in sort of retrospect that I would have been able,

regardless of the diagnosis, would have been able to find a way to find self-forgiveness anyway.

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