After receiving a diagnosis of both ADHD and autism as an adult, Grimes has come to view the widespread pop psychology shared across social media as increasingly sinister. In a recent post on X (formerly Twitter), the musician suggested that accounts sharing generalizations about symptoms that could signify certain mental health conditions has led to an uptick in potentially harmful self-diagnoses.
“There’s this subculture of I guess ‘mental health’ accounts that I actually think are like, extreme infohazards,” Grimes wrote. After being diagnosed earlier this year, she said, she realized dyslexia might be the reason she’s unable to spell anything without using spell-check. “I feel like had we known this when I was a child I would have worked so much less hard, been on drugs, and so many of the weird obsessions and motivations I had would have been seen as pathological,” she continued. “I could have written off certain things that were very hard for me but I’m glad I over came them.”
Grimes shared her lengthy rumination in response to a post from an account called ADHD Memes, which read: “I saw a TikTok about how excessive reading in childhood is a sign of dissociation and I can’t stop thinking about it.” In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, a number of combinations of present symptoms can be used to reach a diagnosis for any particular disorder. What’s relevant for some might not be for others. Grimes noted that in her own experience, being an avid reader actually helped her manage her ADHD symptoms.
“An adhd account trying to pathologize one of the best things a child can do to help with adhd (and also become an auto didact and knowledgeable person etc etc) is so dark…. I can’t even begin,” she continued. “I think the nature of this uninformed social media mental health subculture is rly a big concern. Some are great ofc but a lot of these seem like explicitly anti civilizational and geared towards making people worse.”
Some users who engaged with the post took issue with Grimes suggesting that mental illnesses can be “contagious.” She cited learning about mental health in school and noticing that herself and other classmates would “start getting symptoms of them during those units” that would later go away. She later clarified: “I meant symptoms – I’ve def seen people get into lifestyle changes and adhd symptoms stop cuz they didn’t have it, they had dopaminergic burn out, which essentially mimics the disorder.”
Generally, Grimes said, “I just think unsupervised medical advice and proliferation of info about symptoms is a very tricky thing.” In defense of her stance, she later added that she went to school for neuroscience. In 2016, she told NPR she “was in a program at McGill [University in Montreal] called Electroacoustics, where we studied a lot of how the brain interacts with music,” which isn’t quite the same thing. Like the pop psychology accounts, it all should be taken with a grain of salt.
From Rolling Stone US
