Laughing Through the Struggles: Understanding ADHD Experience and Community Engagement Through Memes and Comments on Instagram

Paper Title

Laughing Through the Struggles: Understanding ADHD Experience and Community Engagement Through Memes and Comments on Instagram

Publication Info

• Topic area: ADHD experiences and community engagement through digital media
• Keywords: ADHD, memes, Instagram, neurodivergence, digital mental health, community engagement, humor, self-expression, stigma, participatory media

Background and Problem

• Problem / challenge: ADHD is often reduced to stereotypes and stigmatized in public discourse, with limited representation of lived experiences. Existing HCI research frequently adopts deficit-based or medicalized perspectives, overlooking the voices and needs of ADHD individuals.
• Significance: Understanding ADHD through self-expressive practices like memes can provide insights into lived experiences, foster community support, and inform inclusive platform design.
• Motivation and related work: Prior research has explored neurodivergence in HCI and the role of social media in mental health, but ADHD-specific needs and expressive practices like memes remain underexplored. This study addresses the gap by analyzing ADHD memes and comments to understand their role in storytelling, identity formation, and community engagement.

Solution

• Proposed approach: A qualitative and computational analysis of ADHD-related memes and comments on Instagram to explore lived experiences, narrative forms, and community engagement.
• Novelty:
  1. Multimodal analysis combining meme content, user comments, and expert consultation.
  2. Identification of narrative and rhetorical forms used in ADHD memes.
  3. Examination of emotional and thematic patterns in user comments.
  4. Design implications for participatory media systems and social platforms.
• Procedure and key techniques:
  • Collected 350 ADHD-related memes and 28,118 associated comments from Instagram.
  • Conducted qualitative content analysis of memes, focusing on content, form, and emotion.
  • Analyzed comments using emotion classification (DistilRoBERTa) and BERTopic modeling.
  • Consulted a neurodevelopmental science and clinical researcher for contextual insights.

Results

• Concrete findings:
  • Memes depicted ADHD experiences such as behavioral inconsistencies, internal conflicts, and societal pressures using humor, irony, and self-deprecation.
  • Comments revealed strong emotional engagement, with users expressing resonance, sharing personal stories, and reflecting on ADHD traits.
  • Emotion classification showed 62.8% neutral comments, with negative emotions (e.g., anger 6.72%, sadness 6.15%) and positive emotions (e.g., surprise 10.77%, joy 5.65%) also prevalent.
  • Topic modeling identified five themes: emotional reactions, resonance, personal experiences, self-diagnosis, and overlap with other neurodivergent conditions.
• Advantage over baselines: The study uniquely combines meme analysis, computational techniques, and expert consultation to provide a nuanced understanding of ADHD lived experiences and community dynamics.
• Experiments / evaluation:
  • Qualitative coding of memes with inter-rater reliability (Krippendorff’s Alpha: content 0.841, form 0.800, emotion 0.618).
  • Emotion classification and topic modeling of comments to identify patterns of engagement and thematic clusters.
  • Expert consultation to validate findings and provide clinical context.
• Limitations and future work:
  • Positionality of researchers (non-ADHD, culturally specific perspectives) may shape interpretations.
  • Focus on Instagram limits generalizability to other platforms like TikTok or Reddit.
  • Lack of contextual information about meme creators and user identities.
  • Future work should involve participatory approaches with ADHD individuals and explore cross-platform dynamics.

Summary

This study analyzed 350 ADHD-related memes and 28,118 comments on Instagram to explore how ADHD individuals express their lived experiences and engage with community support. Memes conveyed themes of behavioral inconsistencies, internal conflicts, and societal pressures through humor and self-deprecation, while comments revealed strong emotional resonance and community connection. The findings highlight the dual role of memes as tools for validation and identity formation but also as potential sources of oversimplification and misinformation. The study provides design implications for social platforms, such as meme-inspired tools for low-barrier self-expression and contextual features to mitigate misinterpretation. This research contributes to digital mental health by centering ADHD voices and fostering inclusive online spaces.