“Dr. TikTok”: How Algorithms Suggest ADHD and Autism Diagnoses (Petronis 2026)

I just published a paper about my project examining how TikTok is influencing the diagnostic categories and (self-)diagnosis of ADHD and autism in Social Science & Medicine! Check it out here: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2026.119891 

The internet has long been conceptualized as allowing patients to take a more active role in the diagnostic process, as the interactivity of “Dr. Google” and other online symptom-checkers demonstrates. Social media has emerged as a locus where (self-)diagnoses can be made through social interaction with others who identify as holding diagnostic identities. This paper, “Dr. TikTok”: How Algorithms Suggest ADHD and Autism Diagnoses (2026), builds on a foundation of research analyzing TikToks about ADHD and autism and the platform’s content recommendation algorithm to examine how users are served content that implies that they occupy a given diagnosis, representing a distinct iteration of Dr. Google. The algorithm, not the user, could trigger the diagnostic process by labeling the user with a diagnosis or other pathologizing characteristics. I analyze how the TikTok algorithm encourages content themes and forms that may alter public perception of the boundaries, characteristics, and prevalence of ADHD and autism, as well as their entanglement with each other and the label of neurodivergence. I engage with the TikTok algorithm using digital ethnographic and discourse analysis approaches to understand “Dr. TikTok” as an example of how diagnostic pathways may be becoming increasingly mediated by AI systems. I find that the TikTok algorithm shapes TikToks about ADHD and autism by encouraging creators to engage in practices like speaking in second-person to the viewer and positioning relatable experiences as a form of subjective diagnostic expertise, situating these videos as paradoxically hyperpersonalized, yet inclusive. This study contributes to the sociology of medicine by showing how AI systems could intervene in and reorder the traditional diagnostic process.

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.