This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Twitter usage may provide insight into ADHD

Recent findings showed differences in how individuals with ADHD used social media, compared with peers without ADHD.

“On social media, where you can post your mental state freely, you get a lot of insight into what these people are going through, which might be rare in a clinical setting,” Sharath Chandra Guntuku, PhD, of Penn Medicine Center for Digital Health, said in a press release. “In brief 30- or 60-minute sessions with patients, clinicians might not get all manifestations of the condition, but on social media you have the full spectrum.”

To assess associations between language of social media and characteristics of individuals with ADHD, researchers computationally analyzed 1.3 million tweets written by 1,399 Twitter users who self-reported they were diagnosed with ADHD.

Users with ADHD were less agreeable, more open and posted more often.

Further, those with ADHD were more likely to use negations, hedging and swear words.

Posts suggested themes of emotional dysregulation, self-criticism, substance abuse and exhaustion.

A machine learning model predicted which users had ADHD with an out-of-sample area-under-the-curve of 0.836.

“These results have provided preliminary insights into the thoughts and beliefs and emotional experiences of adults living with ADHD based on the language-based analysis of content they chose to post on a public forum,” the researchers wrote. “These results were considered in light of their correspondence with existing extant research on adult ADHD, including that of common thoughts and beliefs endorsed by ADHD adults in light of the linguistic categories and themes from online posts in this study.” – by Amanda Oldt

Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.