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increasing awareness and Education nearby adhd can lead to lies Self-diagnosis in young peopleThis has been claimed in a new study.
researchers of University of Toronto says that although education is important, it can also create misconceptions that young adults face common problems like fatigue and irritability. symptoms of adhd,
Dasha Sandra, lead author of the study, said youth should not be discouraged from seeking help, but she believes mental health education needs to be refined to include more context around symptoms.
She said: “Believing you have a disorder can help make sense of confusing or messy experiences that are actually completely normal. This can be especially true for young adults.
“False self-diagnosis can prevent someone from receiving an accurate diagnosis or addressing real challenges in their lives. It also diverts scarce resources from people who need help due to an underlying neurodevelopmental condition that requires proper evaluation.”
The study tested 215 young adults who did not meet diagnostic criteria for ADHD and had no previous ADHD diagnosis.
Some participants were assigned to attend a workshop on ADHD. Others were assigned to a workshop on ADHD that included a lesson about the ‘nocebo effect’, where negative expectations about having the disorder can make one’s symptoms worse.
The lesson on the nocebo effect explained that issues such as irritability, fatigue, and poor concentration are common in young people, and not just symptoms of ADHD.
A control group also attended a workshop to learn about sleep.
Researchers found that people who received awareness-raising information about ADHD were less likely to believe they had ADHD. The number of people who rated themselves high in self-diagnosis increased from 30 to 60 percent immediately after the lesson, and remained at 50 percent a week later.
For participants who also received the nocebo education intervention, the false self-diagnosis rate halved and disappeared completely after one week.
Ms Sandra said: “We are not saying that mental health awareness is uniformly bad. The positive benefits are well documented. The important thing is how much awareness and what kind of awareness people get.
“We wanted to identify whether awareness efforts have negative impacts and find a way to raise awareness in a more balanced way, so people can learn without the risk of unintended harm.”
Currently around 2.6 million people in the UK suffer from ADHD. The NHS said 20,000 people were referred for ADHD assessment in March, an increase of 13.5 per cent on the previous year.
“It is documented that ADHD is currently overdiagnosed. At the same time, awareness is growing because ADHD is still underdiagnosed in some populations, particularly women and adults,” said Ms. Sandra.