China’s TikTok Is Pushing Adderall on Teens

TikTok is promoting “sketchy” new telehealth startups offering prescription drugs such as Adderall to teenage and young adult users. Prescriptions for Adderall increased by 25 percent for the 24-44 age group during the pandemic, which some experts have attributed to “the emergence of digital mental health platforms.”

Recode tells the story of a TikTok user referred to as Nick C., a 25-year-old food service worker from western Iowa who began to watch the content of TikTok influencer Connor DeWolfe. Most of DeWolfe’s content relates to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and his experience with his diagnosis.

Nick began to identify with many of the symptoms that DeWolfe described. “All of his content hit very close, and I binge-watched almost all of it,” Nick told Recode, adding: “Then more ADHD content started appearing.” Through constant exposure, despite never being formally diagnosed with ADHD, Nick became convinced he had the disorder and that stimulants would help his mental condition.

Soon, TikTok began serving ads to Nick for Done, a telehealth startup company that said its providers could diagnose patients with ADHD and write prescriptions for “treatment” — usually stimulants like Adderall. Within days, Nick had performed a 15-minute long evaluation with one of Done’s nurse practitioners, been prescribed Adderall, and was walking out of his local pharmacy with the pills.

“Scary easy. Sketchy as hell. But it worked for me,” he said in a Reddit post. “God bless TikTok for starting me on this journey.” Between the beginning of 2020 and end of 2021, prescriptions for Adderall and its generic equivalents increased by nearly 25 percent during the pandemic for the 22-44 age group, a trend that the healthcare analytics company Trilliant Health attributed to “the emergence of digital mental health platforms.”

Now, some digital health platforms are facing trouble following investigations by publications such as Bloomberg and the Wall Street Journal earlier this year that alleged that some telehealth companies are far too quick to diagnose paying patients with ADHD and prescribe medication. Major pharmacy chains have even stopped filling prescriptions from some of the most prominent ADHD telehealth services due to doubts over the legitimacy of the organizations.

Cerebral, one of the biggest telehealth providers, have even stopped prescribing ADHD meds to new patients following federal probes into its practices and will stop prescribing them entirely in October.

TikTok has reportedly led to a major increase in the number of people claiming to have ADHD or other disorders. Ari Tuckman, a psychologist who specializes in ADHD, said: “There’s a lot of inaccurate information on TikTok. Most of the people who are doing it are not clinicians. They might be speaking about their experience, but that doesn’t make it relevant, necessarily, to everybody else’s experience. ADHD doesn’t look the same for every person who has it.”

A recent study published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry analyzed 100 TikTok videos about ADHD and found that more than half of them were misleading and only a fifth were “useful.”

Read more at Recode here.

Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan