The TikTok-ification Of Autism Language

When you spend too much time on TikTok, there are a few tells: the hours that slip by on the couch when you told yourself you’d only take a short break; baldly telling someone you read an article about a topic when, really, you saw a video on the app; and, of course, the viral lexicon that seeps into your brain and starts showing up in your everyday language.

Most of these terms cycle out as quickly as a fresh swipe on your FYP. But recently, a batch of phrases reminded me just how far and fast language can travel on the Internet. You can find influencer after influencer after influencer making videos about their go-to “hyperfixation” meal. Users are throwing around “stimming” and “vocal stims” while discussing and ranking the stuck-in-your-head trending audio clips circulating on the app. Skits and memes about being “overstimulated” are so common now as to have their own subgenres: the overstimulated moms, the overstimulated boyfriends.

What’s striking about the spread of these terms is that, for a long time, they were insulated within the neurodivergent community (though not necessarily exclusive to it). Look them up on TikTok, and you’ll quickly find no shortage of neurodivergent creators shedding light on their experiences in a quasi-educational way — like one man talking about his autism and the ritualistic breakfast he says he cannot break away from, or this woman explaining how her obsessions due to her ADHD can be all-consuming. But these days, you’re likely to encounter them far more casually, from creators both under and outside the neurodivergent umbrella.

This cultural and linguistic shift piqued my personal curiosity because I am part of the [meme_of_Spongebob_sprawling_a_rainbow.gif] neurodivergent community. I have several diagnoses under the ND umbrella, including autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) — I’ve been collecting them like rocks, actually. I’m also a longtime Internet culture reporter, and in my 12 years on the beat, I’ve covered numerous trends that take a similar shape. Like the meme of the two Spider-Mans pointing at each other, they are usually a self-compounding cycle: The more people talk about something, the more it inspires people to join or relate and talk about it. We all contribute, and we are all influenced.

“It’s hard to say, ‘This is a true autistic experience or a true neurodivergent experience.’”

But the trending language we use online typically gets scrutinized fast, especially as it relates to language from marginalized or underrepresented communities; most millennials at this point have lived through more than one discourse cycle in this vein, whether it’s about cultural appropriation and African American Vernacular English (AAVE) from the Black community or drag and ballroom terminology from queer spaces. In thinking about why the language of autism and neurodivergence appears, at least on the surface, more freely up for grabs for anyone on TikTok, I was unsure of how to assess its impact: Does more awareness mean more acceptance and empathy from the neurotypical community? Or does it dilute what being autistic — or having ADHD, Tourette syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and the many other conditions that fall within the ND family — is really like in an effort to allow everyone to self-identify and feel belonging online?

To understand the spread and evolution of this language online, you have to start with the fact that platforms like TikTok have simply made neurodivergent people, especially autistic people, and their experiences a lot more visible and relatable. Annika, a 20-year-old based in Madison, Wisconsin, and who asked to just go by her first name, has amassed 49,000 followers on TikTok since she started posting about her recent autism diagnosis last year. Annika shares everything from what it’s like to travel and date as a young autistic woman to the dismay she feels when people joke about the condition.

“I was so surprised how many people reached out thanking me for bringing light to the diagnosis,” she tells me. “Even though I talk about the struggles, I love talking about the great things that come with being autistic.” In a video from December last year, she visibly chokes up describing the overwhelming sense of joy she’s able to feel by being autistic: “It makes everything worth it.”

Zara Beth, who’s also 20 and based in Manchester, England, started posting about her autism, Tourette syndrome, and life in a wheelchair in 2020 and takes pride in creating “a very large community who truly feel like friends to me,” she says. “My TikTok content has had a really big positive response, especially from people within the community who feel seen by my content.”

Both Annika and Beth say this kind of increased visibility, even if it’s informal, is a net positive for the neurodivergent community — and behavior specialists agree. “There was a time when [autistic and ADHD] behaviors were really viewed so negatively that I would get requests from family to reduce these behaviors,” said Megan Joy, Ph.D., BCBA, a licensed psychologist and the national director of autism services for Devereux, a nonprofit that provides services and research around behavioral health. “We know now from adults who’ve had those interventions that those interventions come with a lot of problems and shame because they were suppressing having their needs met.” (It also wasn’t long ago in pop culture that Sydney Sweeney’s character on The White Lotus — admittedly not a show rolling in moral compasses — was talking about her brother “stimming” with mocking condescension.)

“All people can likely think of a time when they would stim. The one and only thing that separates these experiences, the neurodivergent and the neurotypical, is the intensity and frequency of them.”

Erasing stigma, we can all probably agree, is a good thing. But what about when neurotypical people start claiming those behaviors as their own? Scroll through Beth’s and Annika’s comment sections and you’ll see a barrage of comments that are some variation of “OMG THIS IS SO ME,” and/or “I think I might be autistic.”

This is partly because some of the behaviors creators describe or show in their videos are, in fact, ones neurotypical people can experience too. “All people can likely think of a time when they would stim,” says Kaelynn Partlow, a well-known advocate for autism and who appeared on the Netflix show Love on the Spectrum. (Stimming is any repetitive self-stimulating or self-regulating body movement. It can take shape in rocking back and forth, rubbing fingers or hands together, or playing with your hair. And really, who among us hasn’t indulged in a little “cricket feet” before bed?) “The one and only thing that separates these experiences, the neurodivergent and the neurotypical, is the intensity and frequency of them.”

It’s a similar situation with hyperfixations and obsessive interests. “For example, a neurotypical person may deeply enjoy knitting or watching The Office,” she explains. “For an autistic person, perhaps with those same interests, they may panic if someone were to suggest watching something besides The Office, or if someone insisted they put away their knitting to try drawing.” (Stimming and self-soothing, too, can even become injurious for an autistic person.)

The Internet’s general tendency toward hyperbole is probably at play here as well. The impulse to announce your new “hyperfixation” might not be that different from the impulse to declare you’re obsessed with something you merely like. Still, “it’s important not to trivialize challenges that so many autistic people face in certain environments,” says Stephen Shore, Ed.D., a clinical associate professor of special education at Adelphi University in New York. Sure, an offhand reference to stimming or hyperfixations won’t summon a crowd armed with pitchforks. But understanding how stressful managing some of these behaviors can be — a POV you may not be getting in your own feed — might prompt you to reconsider. Timari Harvey, a 22-year-old autistic creator based in Texas who’s also Black, lives with a lot of social anxiety about her autism because she’s worried she’ll come off like the “angry Black woman” trope in public.

“I still have a hard time stimming around certain people or stimming in public. You don’t want people to think you’re on drugs, especially if you’re Black. You don’t want to make yourself a target,” she says. “Masking” — a camouflaging or suppression of neurodivergent traits — “is a form of survival. If I didn’t mask, I wouldn’t know how to get into spaces that will give me opportunities.”

Complicating all of this, however, is the often knotty process of getting formally diagnosed in the first place — something the flurry of “OMG this is so me” comments also speaks to. Stumbling upon a video about being neurodivergent can be a lightbulb moment for many people. I know this firsthand: My own journey started online several years ago, when I came across videos that conspicuously described how I behaved and processed information — and confirmed a hunch, informed by 30+ years of being alive, that this was vastly different from my peers.

“I did have a convo about having a responsibility to make sure that I am not influencing people into thinking they are autistic when they are not — and not making neurodivergency a trend.”

Autism, specifically, presents so differently from one person to the next. The spectrum is vast and very complex. Perhaps the only defining “truth” of the condition is that there is still so much we are learning and researching. And receiving a formal diagnosis late in life — which often comes with its own grief, trauma, and profundity — can be incredibly difficult to access and quite expensive without insurance. (My assessment took almost two months, with sessions lasting several hours at a time, and not counting the time it took to find a reputable clinic that would accept my employer-provided health insurance — for others, it can take many more months.)

While there are more people seeking formal diagnoses and getting them, more and more people are also self-diagnosing — whether because of that inaccessibility or because of the very online tendency to reach for labels to make sense of our lives. What results is a set of hazy boundaries where anyone online is able to relate or self-identify with neurodivergent tendencies, and the language itself feels less “policed.”

“It’s hard to say, ‘This is a true autistic experience or a true neurodivergent experience,’” Joy, the psychologist, notes. “It’s important to value everyone’s experience or else we risk running into oversimplification and overidentification: having similar experiences that then equals autism or ADHD.” (It can also be hard to tell which creators using these terms have formal diagnoses or what their relationship to these identity labels are from their internet presence alone.)

Self-identifying creators, for the most part, acknowledge this and do caveat or couch their posts in their own personal experiences. “I did have a convo with someone about having a sense of responsibility to make sure that I am not influencing people into thinking they are autistic when they are not — and not making autism or neurodivergency a trend,” says Annika. (That ship may have already sailed: “At this time it’s cool to be autistic,” Shore, the professor, says. “That’s the in crowd.”)

The language of neurodivergence may be beyond containment online, but being neurodivergent is still a fully embodied experience; it’s not something you can slip on and off, even if others can’t tell. “The idea that everyone’s a little autistic, it’s not true,” says Keara Graves, a 26-year-old content creator based in Toronto. “Just because you have one autistic trait doesn’t mean you’re autistic. There’s a whole list of criteria and many different categories and traits you have to meet in order to be diagnosed. It diminishes the validity of autism and our struggles.” There’s a difference between lightly acknowledging a shared quirk and claiming an entire identity. But if you’re looking for an answer to what’s “OK” to say, you won’t find it without engaging in some critical thinking — and to do that, you just might have to give scrolling a break.